Music, a song can change a whole video. A powerful soundtrack can make a visual shine, as well as a poor-quality track, can totally ruin a film. That’s why you should give particular attention to the choice of the music you use for your creation. How to pick the perfect track for my video? That’s what we’ll try to know through this article.
Analyze your video
Unless your Quentin Tarantino and you choose your opening titles soundtrack before even shooting your movie, you probably proceed in the inverse order. You’ll shoot your video first, then try to look for a soundtrack to add. To begin, you should thus precisely analyze your footage. Put your video on your editing software, begin to edit roughly the film (before you dive into a real editing). With those first images, you’ll get the general visual idea that emerges. With the general mood of your video in mind, you’ll be able to look for the music that suits the best.
Analyze the sound of your video
The tricky thing about adding music on your video footage is not to completely cover up the sound of your video. Depending on the sound of the video itself, you’ll choose a different music that will naturally fit. If there’s a lot of talking in the video, or dialogue, you’ll try to avoid music with lyrics. The risk is in need to distract the viewers’ attention from what the video is telling you, with lyrics that takes over.
On the contrary, if there’s no text involved in your video, it’s the music you add that tells the story. The soundtrack will play the role of the text. That’s why you’ll have to find the music that really conveys the message you want.
In any cases, the music you choose has to match the video content, its message, the emotion it aims to share.
Where to find it?
And precisely, where do you find that music that will tell or support the story? The go-to place is online music libraries. Such platforms will help you find the best soundtrack for your creation, by adding filters, tags, curated playlist and album designed expressly for content-makers. By browsing their catalog by genre, mood and specific keywords, you’ll quickly find the music that suits your work. On top of that, online libraries offer license systems that allow you to use the sound legally on YouTube or any video platforms, so that you don’t get copyright claims or any hosting problems.
See what works
A good way to get a clearer mind about which music to put on your video is to see what the others do, what works on viewers. The key element is to analyze and identify what your audience likes. As a film/content maker, you’ll sometimes have to compromise. In some cases, adding the music that comes from your personal taste will not be the most relevant answer. If you really want to grow an audience, you’ll have to adapt, to reach beyond your comfort zone.
A song that match the video for the editing
One difficult aspect in finding the right audio for your video, is to find the good editing material. The music has to match the rhythm you want to give to your work, the pace of your creation. Whether it is slow or fast, rhythm will definitely add a tone to your video. So be aware of that while editing. To concretely understand the importance of getting the right sound for the right editing, you can watch that commercial which expresses well that idea:
What’s your budget?
There are very few ways, to say the least, to find good music to use freely on your video. As we previously said, music license companies are an interesting place to find the perfect track that suits your need. You can learn more about the types of license and the license companies that are available online right now in those previous articles. Basically, the pricing starts at around 15$-25$ depending on the website for a monthly subscription. And don’t forget that the pricing can evolve following several factors, you have to take that into account. To that effect, BAM Music is an online library that offers a vast catalog of more than 30 000 tracks from various genre. The license system is pretty easy to use, and you can start browsing and downloading the songs right now!
With those tips in mind, how to pick the perfect track for your video won’t be an issue for you! It’s time to make your work shine!
