The Power of Music

Those of you that create slideshows, promotional videos, cinema and short films understand the importance of great music and just how much production value it can add to an artistic piece. It is no exaggeration that the music can literally make or break the story telling power of your slideshow or film.

A solid piece musical score with an emotional chemistry that fits the slideshow or film amplifies the overall emotional reach and creative power of your presentation, whatever it may be.

[Rewind: Click here for a discount on Animoto Slideshows]

Because of this, we photographers and film makers spend hours upon hours searching through royalty free music to find the perfect musical score for our specific project. For us, the process used to be painstakingly long as we had to sort through massive amounts of low quality music, or music that just didn’t fit simply to find that one song that was the diamond in the rough.

For this reason, we are going to start featuring some of our favorite songs and musicians that we use in our slideshows, promo videos and films to hopefully help you all out a little!

Our Favorite Source for Royalty Free Music

the-music-bed
Our lives became much easier when we transitioned over to using The Music Bed this past year. Unlike other royalty free licensing websites, TMB does an incredible job curating and organizing their royalty free music collection into a library of music that can be filtered by mood, instrumentation, tempo, usage, genre, and so forth. In addition, their library is filled with songs that are actually good! No really, their library consists of music that we would actually listen to on a regular basis just purely for enjoyment.

I know many of you are going to ask whether this was a sponsored post, and it absolutely was not. When we find artists and companies that are truly doing things right, we feel like they deserve to be recognized for it. Just like our Artist Profiles, we want to do company profiles on those doing great things and The Music Bed is one of them.

LIGHTS & MOTION

lights-motion-headerThat brings us to one of our favorite musicians that we have found through The Music Bed, LIGHTS & MOTION.

LIGHTS & MOTION’s music is absolutely incredible. Just like their description, the best word that I can use to describe their style is “epic.” Their music is high energy, and features amazing builds, crescendos and hits that are absolutely brilliant when it comes to timing your slideshow elements, or editing a film.

LIGHTS & MOTION has a massive library of incredible songs, so it is kinda tough to narrow down, but we are going to try anyway. Here are 5 of our favorites from LIGHTS & MOTION.

1. Aerials – Instrumental – Length 6:08

You may remember the Aerials – Instrumental track as we used it in the Natural Light Couples Photography DVD Promo Video which you can see below. It has an amazingly serene intro which builds into a fast paced high energy song.

2. Home – Length 3:24

Home is another serene LIGHTS & MOTION track that starts out gentle and soft and slowly builds with added instrumentation until its full hit arrives at around 1 minute 20 seconds. Has a beautiful energy and inspirational feel to the song progression.

3. The March – Length 6:48

As soon as I heard The March, I felt like it was the ultimate song for a short newborn slideshow or film with a soft touch. For the first 2 minutes of the song, it just has these bells that sounds so much like a soft and gentle nursery to me. At 2 minutes it starts to build a little more until around 2 minutes and 30 seconds where it really picks up in its percussive tempo which made it a perfect fit for the Lightroom Preset System v5 promo video which you can see below.

4. Fractured – Length 4:28

Fractured has a very “cinematic” feel to the overall instrumentation. With soft vocals, and an immediate fast paced and percussion fill song, it is a wonderful cinematic score for a high energy film or slideshow.

5. Requiem – Length 2:15

Requiem has a beautiful sort of “ethereal” feel to its intro. I can totally picture a timelapse of a morning sunrise when I hear the intro. Its a shorter track, but it has a great sort of “grand” feel to it that I think would work incredibly well for a landscape slideshow, or timelapse film score.

Conclusion

Hope you all enjoyed this video, and we hope this series helps you all find awesome songs to help you all in your scoring efforts! Let us know what you think in the comments below.