Legal Music For Videos Many musicians choose to release their songs under Creative Commons licenses, which give you the legal right to do things like use their music in your videos. What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons is a system that allows you to legally use “some rights reserved” music, movies, images, and other content — all for free. CC offers free copyright licenses that anyone can use to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. For instance, a musician might use a Creative Commons license to allow people to legally share her songs online, make copies for friends, or even use them in videos or make remixes. Where can I find CC-licensed music? Several sites offer music published under Creative Commons’ flexible copyright licenses. Can I use any song with a CC license on it? Almost — you need to make sure that what you want to do with the music is OK under the terms of the particular Creative Commons license it’s under.
Pro Tools: Achieving Better Vocal Sounds Technique : Pro Tools Notes This month we are going to look at a range of techniques you can try to help you produce a better vocal sound for your project. Mike Thornton In a vocal session you would normally record a number of takes and/or do drop-ins to patch up an otherwise good take. Vocal compositing or 'comping' for short is usually the first stage in producing a good vocal line. The first is to use multiple Pro Tools tracks with the same processing applied to each. The other approach is to use Pro Tools's Playlists feature. If you go for the second approach, it is usually easier to create a new Playlist as you record each new take, but it is possible to create a set of Playlists afterwards by spotting each take from the region list into a new Playlist on a Vox Comp track. Fattening Your Vocal Sound Once you have comped your master vocal track, there are other tricks you can apply to improve the vocal sound further. Use small amounts of doubling via a very tight delay.
Writing Better Songs - Part I Have you ever stopped for a moment to imagine just how many songs, in total, have been written? Consider... many thousands of years of songwriting, countless millions of songwriters during that period... there must literally have been billions of songs penned. What aspiring songwriters need to do is stop and ask themselves this question: "What can I do to make my songs stand out from all the others?" In this multi-segment feature, we'll try to go about answering that question. Types of Songs Most songs written in the last one hundred years can be loosely grouped into one of several categories; songs written around a chord progression, songs written around a melody, or songs written around a riff. Songs Written Around a Chord Progression - A favored method of songwriting by musicians like Stevie Wonder, the concept of writing around a chord progression involves initially creating an interesting series of chords, and then basing the vocal melody on that chord progression.