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Reader SurveyEdit Review: VideoHelper and Sony Creative Software Quartet
Jul 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Gary Eskow
New possibilities for production music.
Sony Creative Software Quartet allows you to mix and match audio loops to develop precisely timed music to accompany your spots and videos.
The history of stock music can be divided into several eras. Production tracks were initially recorded at major studios, mastered to vinyl, and delivered to audio post facilities on LPs (do you remember them?), where they were cataloged and lined up on rows of shelving.
The audio post community glommed onto the CD revolution with great gusto in the late 1980s and early '90s. Music producers quickly realized that the appetite for content aimed specifically at the television and radio markets was voracious, particularly because facilities renting space in high-value areas in the major markets would no longer have to devote extensive square footage to storing them. Within several years, the industry had shifted dramatically. Once limited to a few major production companies who hired composers, booked studios, and then mastered and delivered recordings, the number of music-library producers expanded dramatically. Jingle houses understood that the project-studio revolution had significantly raised the quality of demos and that those rejected by ad agencies could find a life in audio post.
Things are changing in this, the third era of production music. Working on the assumption that everyone over the age of three is comfortable sitting at a computer, and with the understanding that audio editing has morphed from its diamond-cutter-like origins — where a single slip could permanently damage a sacred piece of audio — into a set of undoable keystrokes that almost anyone can become reasonably competent handling, we are now seeing the emergence of what might be called the waveform era of stock music.
This month, I review two packages that take different approaches. The VideoHelper catalog has deeper roots in that traditional ad-music model, while Sony Creative Software Quartet relates more closely to today's ubiquitous loop-based audio-composing software.
VideoHelper
Founded in 1995 by composers Joseph Saba and Stewart Winter, stock-music company VideoHelper currently has five networked composing rooms in its Manhattan offices. Its 2,900-title catalog is divided into three collections: VideoHelper, ScoreHelper, and the newly released Modules component.
The VideoHelper and ScoreHelper collections fall into traditional musical forms and arrangements, but the lengths of the tracks themselves are irregular, and multiple versions are offered. The company's founders operate on the premise that their content will be sliced and diced inside a digital audio workstation. Snap points are provided at the :30 point in each track for easy editing into a television commercial or radio spot. Beyond that, it is assumed that editors will apply a variety of techniques — including time compression, if necessary — to tailor cuts to their needs.
“We saw the technology coming,” Saba says, “and we wanted our products to take advantage of the flexibility that computer editing brings. You could call our technique ‘discrete sectionality.’ The first 30 seconds of every track is structured as one cohesive piece. After that, we offer remixes or reinterpretations of the main theme to give the producers additional options.”
VideoHelper employs a small stable of composers, and each of them is given the same set of mandates — which include getting to the point quickly and making sure their work is easy to loop. “We see tracks as a set of working parts,” Winter says. “We ask our composers a series of questions, including where can cuts be made in their work and where the obvious loop points are. We want to make it as easy as possible for an editor to take our tracks apart and put them together again in ways that make the music feel like it was written specifically for their project.”
Modules, the company's newest release category, is intended to function as a hybrid of music and sound effects. Because many of these cuts are atonal — devoid of any defining musical key — they can be mixed and matched easily. Again, the assumption is that almost anyone associated with the audio and video post process will be able to edit waveforms to suit their needs. It's also simple to whip out a keyboard and add your own hits on top of a VideoHelper track to support visuals more specifically.
The cost of mass-producing CDs has dropped so dramatically that companies such as VideoHelper are willing to send you CDs for free. All you have to do is pay fees according to the rate table the company provides when you use its work in a project.
