Finding music is just about the biggest drain of my time when I am editing. Wait, let me correct myself there. Finding the RIGHT music is just about the biggest drain of my time when I am editing. Edits just don’t feel right until you have the right music and finding that can take hours if not days. My pie chart above is a slight exaggeration but a lot of people identified with it when I published it, in fact it is my most popular Instagram post by a long way!
I use a number of sites for my music but Musicbed has been my main source for a number of years for both my commercial and personal projects. In fact my 9 and a 1/2 Cinematic Masterclass series is scored entirely with music from Musicbed. They were one of the main sponsors for it which was amazing especially as I ended up using about 100 tracks across it all! For me, the music within the series is one of the things that makes the training series cinematic itself, not something that is common for online training!
To be honest though finding the right music was tough using the old Musicbed site. Whilst you were able to specify a number of things there was quite a lot that I felt was missing from the search tools.
Today they relaunched their website and the improvements are MASSIVE for searching for music. My favourite new features are the following:
BPM
The old site gave you limited ability to determine the speed of the track, now you can be really specific. This is a HUGE benefit.
KEY
If you are musically inclined you will know how the key of a track changes so much. Now you can actually choose major and minor keys. This will help narrow things down a lot.
Vocals
It was either instrumental or vocals before, now we are able to narrow our search so much more. Want just oohs and ahhhs or maybe something choral? Now you can. Another very helpful search tool.
Instruments
Now you can choose which instruments you want in the tracks and also which ones NOT to have in the track! Too many tracks coming up with Banjos? Just block that banjo!!
Build
You can choose the without the track builds up or stays at a current level throughout. Before you had to look at the waveform which would give you some idea but it wasn’t always clear from that.
There are loads of other new improvements which make using Musicbed to find your music a much less painful affair. It still takes time to find THAT track that is perfect for you but hopefully now the time you spend will be massively less! Check out the site to see these and the other new improvements yourself!
