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I like it! Great writing. Interesting you said Thomas Bergersen though – I realize he’s done some music like this, but to my ears it’s that classic score sound that just about anyone who writes for modern family adventures adheres to. Newton-Howard, John Powell, Gregson-Williams, Christophe Beck, and a lot of lesser known guys writing for animated TV shows.
Consider where it’s going to be used – almost always reality TV and live sports games.
Watch any of that for more than five minutes and you’ll quickly understand what the most important part of any library track is: the ending.
everything is faster with SSDs, and you can’t kill them as easily 🙂
It’s really hard to compare libraries, at any level. A couple of examples:
– RF Library A was amazing for me for about five years, we’re talking $2000+ a month. Because I had less and less music lying around to give them, AND at the same time the library took on 100x more composers, my sales eventually went sub $100.
– RF library B has been great for many of my friends, so I finally decided to upload about 300 older tracks in a pretty wide range of styles. ONE sale in six months. I know it’s not about the quality because I can see that I’ve literally had FIVE listens. So something’s going on there where I’m either not uploading the right edits or simply that because there are so many composers selling music on the website, only the ones with a long history of sales do well (with repeat customers and showing up at the top of the sales lists).
Venom uses the original track, and the Avengers uses that same track but customized with the Silvestri theme interwoven.
The original as used in Venom:
https://youtu.be/hljiYE3G034The version that is closest to the Avengers without the customization is this edit:
The drums are a mish mash of old and new samples – some well known ones like Decimator, hybrid tools, Atlantica, Dragon and lesser known ones like Barrage.
Haha cheers! Well, if that was a remotely serious question, here’s a big ol’ block of text I have added to over the years, when people have asked me about writing for trailers:
– How do I get into writing for trailers?
High end trailer music is one of the toughest things for a composer to produce. The music is deceptively simple with relatively uncomplicated harmony and melodies. To keep it fresh and modern, a composer needs to find ways to use basic musical building blocks in a way that isn’t cliched or dated. In addition to that challenge, the level of expectation for the ‘sound’ or production value of trailer music is unmatched, you could argue that trailer music has to sound as good or better than blockbuster film music. Very little of the work that goes into producing trailer music is composition, the rest is making the music sound fresh, huge and realistic. It’s an entirely different skill set to purely writing music for live performance, involving arranging, orchestration, keyboard skills, MIDI programming, audio processing and more often that not – mixing and mastering.
Because of these high expectations, it took me about 7 years of composing full time to get to the level where I was ready to start writing music specifically for trailers.
I would suggest to a beginner composer, to set their sights a little lower for a while, as there are plenty of avenues for making money from music that are far less demanding. What’s important is that you:
– write something every day,
– finish what you start,
– and constantly compare your music and production value to similar work by established composers, to learn where you need to improve.Writing for companies that supply music for TV shows and commercials would be a great start. Most libraries will take your music, but won’t pay upfront, while a few still do (your music has to be valuable to them though). Try to sign exclusive deals ONLY if you get some upfront money (although this is getting rare lately).
Building a residual income (royalties) is a great way to fund studio /software upgrades (which you need to do often, especially if you want to write for trailers). Having that income stream also allows you to be more picky with gigs. You’ll need about 400-600 decent tracks in a handful of well connected libraries to make a living from royalties. If you’re regularly writing for indie films where you can keep the rights to all that music, you’ll get there in 4-6 years. If you don’t have film projects, write when you don’t have to. It will pay off in the long run – your future self (and family) will thank you.
Once you think your production skills are ready for trailers, compare your music to the established guys (Two Steps From Hell, Audiomachine, Immediate Music, Colossal Music, Glory Oath & Blood, etc) and if you’re certain your stuff stands up to theirs, go for it!
A COUPLE OF GOLD NUGGETS FOR READING THIS FAR DOWN…
If I can offer two things I wish I’d known when starting out on trailer music, it is:
1) THE HOOK
Trailer music (and most music really) is all about the HOOK, a catchy, evocative idea that makes the track exciting. Learn to identify hooks in tracks that you admire – they can be rhythmic (like in the bass line or drums), a cool chord progression, a melodic idea or simply a weird sonic blast that gives a track a unique identity.I don’t commit to working on a track until I have at least one solid hook and maybe a support one (like a rhythm and interesting ostinato pattern).
2) AUTHENTICITY
(I’m getting long winded here – sorry!) trailer music needs to be AUTHENTIC to have a chance of being used on big budget trailers and promos. What I mean by that is:
the track has to be trailer music in every way – every sound, chord, melody, voicing, tempo, the mix. It can’t be like trailer music, that is a genre some call ‘epic music’ – basically an attempt at sounding like trailer music. It’s tough – you have to make 1000s of little decisions when working on a track and just one of those can take you away from that authentic sound.You get to this point by immersing yourself in the sound of trailer music, watching lots of trailers, and constantly making detailed comparisons of your work to that of the music used in recent trailers. You eventually know instinctively when you’re making a wrong turn and can quickly get back on the path to authentic-land.
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No it’s not 🙂
When I read opinions dressed up as immutable law, I tend to want to play Mr Contrary.
While I agree that it frankly sucks that most lower level libraries now insist on exclusive ownership for zero upfront, it’s simply the market dictating the rules, and no amount of fist pounding will change that reality. We’re getting flooded with more and more young and hungry composers from all around the world. For OK / mediocre tracks, libraries simply don’t have to pay anymore.
The antidote: get amazing at a couple of in demand genres. Figure out how to make the tracks sound expensive, so that lower level libraries will pay, and that bigger ones will accept them.
If anyone here on MLR can say they spent the last 10 years funneling music to one exclusive library and consistently have made a full time living with that approach…I’d love to hear about that!
I know of many composers in that exact situation: the regular writers for companies like Megatrax, Robert Etoll, X Ray Dog, Audionetwork, Killer Tracks – not to mention support composers for huge TV composers like David Vanacore.
ASCAP only collects on BTN with a survey. Last time I checked with them (a few years ago), it was something insanely rare, like an eight hour window of time every six months (I probably have the exact details wrong but it’s not an exaggeration). If you had music show up in those eight hours, then you did really well – but made absolutely nothing if you didn’t.
This is one of the main differences between ASCAP and BMI – BMI rarely does surveys. There are a few good things uniquely about ASCAP that keep me with them (segment themes for example), but I’ve definitely seen much less income than my BMI co-writer on the hours and hours of music we’ve had used on BTN.
There is a way to make a little money from a popular video – put the music up on iTunes / Spotify and make sure the links are in the video description somewhere. I make more from iTunes and to a lesser extent, Spotify, than I do from RF sites now, so there’s definitely some money to be made from it 🙂
Haha great! Well I started off by offering him less – what seemed reasonable at the time to both of us. The library asking for edits needed very specific reductions of the tracks, which made the process painstakingly slow. Had to throw him a bit more when I found out how long it was taking him!
I’m keen to know as well. I asked around a year ago, and found a few people willing and able to do it, but they dropped out and I ended up paying a friend to do it for $2500 (16 tracks, about two weeks’ work).