How many cues do you write ?

[MichaelL]

Well the guys at a well known library that I wont mention, all I can say is that they are getting a sallary and they produce 7 cues per day. Pretty good, pretty pretty good as our friend larry david says.

I was on “retainer” with an exclusive back in the 90’s, which meant I was doing outside projects too. The pace was a CD per month…15 to 20 cues, with edits. Another guy did twice that. I think there was one 2 month period where I did 100 short (15 second) cues.
Efficiency is the name of the game.

My goal, once we get settled, is one-a-day.

[ChuckMott]

I do about one a week now. I work full time and play in a cover band as well. If I was composing full time I think 3 a week would be the goal. If I was not playing in a band, 2 a week is a pretty full schedule for someone with a day job. Can I add a wrinkle to this thread and ask, if people care to comment, how many cues they wrote before getting their first sale?

[Desire_Inspires]

I am trying to get up to 200 cues a year.

[Wildman]

Very interesting topic…..

I can also write 200 tracks a year and I did that already before. I also had/have daw project files open with 50 tracks and more, and I can write a couple of good production music cues a day, maybe not 7 but 3 or 4 🙂
“But” I don`t do that anymore because of the “overkill” 🙂

I changed a bit from quantity to quality. But it doesn`t mean that my cues are now super perfect and/or that the 5 cues per day writers are worse.
Everything is relative and lies in the eye of the beholder.

[More advice]

To all the “200 hundred a year” Or “1 a day” folks out there, I’d be curious to know what percentage of these cues actually place?

I am definitely in the “quality” camp and not in the “quantity” camp.
I do have around 800 tracks in total on the market. I’d say about 550 to 600 have actually been used in some way shape or form. Most of the others have not been on the market long enough to know yet, and some probably will never place at all.

1 or two “full length” cues a week is about all I can handle, plus I don’t write at all 8 weeks out of the year as I am out of town 8 weeks a year. I like the one per week pace. 2 max. Although I do find random creative bursts where 4 or 5 in a week will get done, but then I have no inspiration at all for an entire week.

[Desire_Inspires]

To all the “200 hundred a year” Or “1 a day” folks out there, I’d be curious to know what percentage of these cues actually place?

Not enough. 🙁

I just write fast. I don’t know any other way to do things.

[More advice]

Yo…DI….I don’t want to see that sad face….Seriously, try taking your time and really demand (of yourself) not to put out a cue unless YOU are buying into it. Really, this is not a game of quantity. We all can slap together some drum and percussion loops and a bass line in 30 minutes..and maybe add a couple of other sparkles to the track in the next 30 minutes then render it and move on…but I don’t think this does a composer or the industry any good.

DI, I am not saying you do this. I have no idea how you work, but…I can say from experience that unless you are a guy with intense Mozart like conservatory training and just a bad ass producer with tons of chops (with software and samplers) and experience scoring for film with very tight deadlines…and you are a fantastic player (of whatever your instrument may be), I’d say take your time and craft something good, sleep on it for a day, listen again, ask yourself if you can make it better, then render the final mix.

[Desire_Inspires]

Thanks for the advice. It will take time and education for me to change my approach.

[mscottweber]

Most cues take me between 3-6 hours to complete. More if its a style I’m not too comfortable with, and less if its something more stripped down (my best-selling track so far took me less than an hour).

Were I doing this full-time, I could probably knock out 4 or 5 cues a week and still have time for edits, uploading, tagging, etc. THATS the stuff that eats up most of my time, all of the administrative stuff that goes along with the composing …

[MichaelL]

I can say from experience that unless you are a guy with intense Mozart like conservatory training and just a bad ass producer with tons of chops (with software and samplers) and experience scoring for film with very tight deadlines…and you are a fantastic player (of whatever your instrument may be), I’d say take your time and craft something good, sleep on it for a day, listen again, ask yourself if you can make it better, then render the final mix.

Sounds like the way song writers go about producing an “album” a year, not the way TV composers score a series.

Efficiency is your friend.

[Mark_Petrie]

I used to ‘write’ (and I use that term loosely) very quickly when I was working for TV music companies full time. Sometimes we’d be writing 5 or more tracks a day. It was fun to crank out a lot, but it’s unsustainable, and after a while very unsatisfying creatively.

Those early years were my real start in the TV world, and I’m grateful for them because I learned a lot from the process of assembly line style composing. However, it was really important for me to get out of that mould and and move towards a model that valued quality over quantity. I found just that in higher end library work, where I would be commissioned a decent amount of money to produce a limited number of tracks. There was a higher expectation of quality – the music has a longer shelf life (TV cues often never see the light of day again after the show has aired).

About 7 years ago I started getting involved in the trailer side of things, where quality is vastly more important than quantity. These days I can easily spend 3 – 4 days on a trailer track, then have several more days of revisions, then producing dozens of files for the orchestrator, recording session, and mix engineer.

On the whole, I find this slower process far more rewarding – both creatively and financially.

[Wildman]

Someone wanted to know here how many songs, that are on the market, are already used. Well, I think that depends on time and how good the library really works.
I have around 450 tracks in the exclusive market and around 60% of this tracks were used already one time at least. I have around 5% of tracks that are getting used constantly, so to say daily or weekly. The more cues you`ll have in the market the bigger the chance will be to have tracks that are getting used daily or weekly.
In the RF market I have around 100 tracks. 70% of the tracks were downloaded at least one time and another 5% are more popular and sell better.

I write and produce a quality production music track (with edits) in around 3-6 hours. Mostly Ill write a cue on a particular day and Ill mix and master the cue another day, maybe some days before the CD release or a couple of days before the end of the deadline.
For a trailer music cue I need around 4-12 hours to write plus days of mixing, tweaking, changing, mastering.

[Edouardo]

I started to investigate this biz only 6 weeks ago. Before that I had a day job which I decide to quit (taking too much time and energy away from music). When reading this thread I am amazed by the speed that some complete a track. 3-6 hours? For me, science fiction.

While I was working, I was at 10-12 full blown tracks a year (I mean chart-like quality and learning the production process along the way). I understand that I need to speed up my process. My goal is actually to arrive to Art’s productivity: About 50-60 tracks a year. Top notch tracks, of equivalent quality to the best of the best. For now, in 5 weeks, I came up with 4 tracks.

I need to love the track to be able to work on it effectively. So I can’t imagine and would not even know how to lower quality for quantity. I understood perfectionism is kind of the enemy of the library composer, but I can’t help it. What I do needs to be better than just good!

My process is for a full blown track (4 minutes):
Composition/idea generation: 4 hours
Arranging: 6 hours (in 2 sessions)
Preliminary mix: 1 hour + rough mastering (30 minutes)
Quarantine: from 3 days to 1 month (I don’t work on it – just listen to it from time to time)
Fine tuning + Mixing + Mastering: 4-6 hours (in 2 sessions)
Edits (about 8-10) + eventually remixing them a little + mastering : 3-4 hours

The reward is that I have 100% acceptance out of 20 submissions in good non-excl libraries. There is something in me that resists changing that process to become a production machine making a track a day… Maybe I should approach the high-end exclusive libraries… Maybe I will learn along the way how to optimize…

[Art Munson]

My process is for a full blown track (4 minutes)

Generally 2 minutes is plenty for production music. Shorter tracks might speed up your process.

[Art Munson]

It was fun to crank out a lot, but it’s unsustainable, and after a while very unsatisfying creatively.

Yep, I agree. I think it’s just part of the maturation process as a writer.

[Author]

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