CINEMATIC MUSIC: THE ESSENTIALS is a complete beginner’s walkthrough on how to get started making great sounding cinematic music on your computer.

The course includes everything you need from getting started, building up and learning all the vital parts of the modern home music studio to learning about basic music theory, composing, recording, and producing soundtrack music and the fundamentals of mixing and mastering, as well as recommendations for music programs, sample libraries and plugins.

As a student, you will learn how to compose and record your own music, how to mix using the main processing tools such as EQ, Reverb, Compression and more. The course will take you from knowing absolutely nothing about how to produce music, to cranking out tunes of your own that you can be proud of showing your friends and the world. While the focus of the course is more tied to soundtrack music, film- and game scoring, all the principles taught in this course can be applied on virtually any genre.

This, and much more in the course CINEMATIC MUSIC: THE ESSENTIALS – Everything You Need To Get Started Composing Music On Your Computer.

“THIS WAS AMAZING! If only a class like this existed back when I was 16, it would’ve the learning process for this kind of music a lot easier. Thank you SO much for this course. My workflow has improved dramatically, as well as the quality of my music. This course has been enlightening from beginning to end and I can’t wait to take the others.”

Rasheed Lindsey, Aspiring composer & producer

“This course is thorough and goes into just about everything you need to know to get started with composing on a computer, and then some. Walid explains well and has been very responsive whenever I had a question, easily 10/10 for his efforts on this one! I recommend this course if you are just starting out, and will personally sign up for further courses here at Evenant as I find them to offer great value!”

Kjell Eilertsen, Aspiring composer

Your Journey Through The Course

Module 1: 
Studio Equipment

If you’re attending this course, you probably have a decent computer of your own, one that you use for work, games, media and what not. A computer is the most important of all gear, as it will provide a physical workstation where you can host all your programs. The more powerful the computer, the faster and more complex musical projects you can work with. Simple as that. But what are the lowest requirements if you wish to write music? Well, as you can have quite a weak and relatively old computer and still be able to compose with samples and produce songs, you don’t necessarily need the strongest computer out there.

But I want to give you the reasons behind why you should buy a powerful computer for your music production. So instead, let’s look at what the different components of the computer do and how that relates to us music producers.

 

Module 2:
Software & Samples

Now that you have all of this equipment and a music production software ready to be used, you want to get some sweet sounds going. The sounds that you will be using for creating your music will mainly come from recording audio yourself, dragging and dropping audio files into your sequencer (the main part of your DAW, where all the instrument tracks and compositions will be), using sample libraries and VSTi’s (virtual instruments such as synthesizers).

Module 3:
Setup & Installation

Make sure you connect each of the devices separately and turned off. I suggest you start with connecting the audio interface to the computer, then the rest into the audio interface and into the computer.

Now that we have the hardware connected, make sure that everything is running smoothly by installing the updated drivers of each unit separately. Each piece of gear has its own dedicated driver, so either install them from the disks or built-in programs that come with the gear, or go into their respective websites to download the latest drivers and any relevant software. Make sure you have the latest drivers for everything to stay updated.

Module 4:
DAW Overview

Since I am using Cubase, I will use Cubase as the main DAW in this course.

This section on the DAW overview is however quite universal, so it doesn’t matter if you want to use Cubase or not. A sequencer is a sequencer no matter what DAW. A master bus is a master bus in Cubase, as much as it is in Logic Pro.

So don’t be discouraged when I’m going through the menus and windows of my particular DAW, because the principles are the same for every major DAW out there.

Now, let’s get into the DAW walkthrough.

Module 5:
Basic Music Theory

Here comes the fun part! We now have everything ready to start composing our very own music. The template we set up in Chapter 3 will allow us to quickly get into the music writing – so let’s get started.

Before we get into the actual composing, we need to make sure that we have a good understanding of what composition, orchestration and production really means. And to understand the meaning of these, we need to know some basic music theory.

Module 6:
Composing Music

We now have our studio set up, we know some basic music terms and definitions, and we’re ready to start making some music.

In this chapter, we will be making a little simple cue in a soundtrack fashion. You can go ahead and tweak the steps however you want, as this is one way you can make soundtrack music.

Follow along and in the end of the chapter, we’ll have a little track that we made ourselves.

Let’s get started making some music!

Module 7:
Mixing & Mastering

Mixing is way more art and soul than science. We don’t really know what we’re doing. We’ve all been faking it for 40 years. We do it because we love music. It’s what gets me going every day. It’s the love of music first.
– Eddie Kramer (Music producer, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, and much more)

Now that we know how to play around with the sounds inside our DAW, it’s important to know what different mixing and mastering techniques we can apply to make the music sound better.

When I compose music, I always have the mix in mind and often times mix the track while composing. So in the end of the process, I will have a pretty solid mix to start fine-tuning properly.