Anyway, here's a dollop of fresh info from the world of production music and FX libraries. Until I win the state lottery and move to the south of France, I can be found at blair@blairjackson.com.

Production Music Library History: The Fab '50s and Beyond
Remember last time we talked about how sometimes TV producers would re-record film music to get around the prohibition of re-using film cues? And remember how some producers circumvented the rules by simply lying about the origin of the music they were using for TV programs? Well, then you need to know the name Alexander Lazlo.

Lazlo was a Hungarian musician who wrote film scores for German silent films and then for various European sound films. He moved to the U.S. in the late 1930s and by the mid-'40s had migrated from the East Coast to Hollywood, where he went into the film scoring business, beginning with a Charlie Chan film called The Chinese Cat. Later he started the Guild-Universal Library of production music based on recycled versions of cues he'd written for European films, and it was used widely in the television industry--the theme from the popular program Racket Squad was Lazlo's (uncredited). Another library he created, called Structural Music, was developed specifically with TV producers in mind. Between 1950 and 1960 he put out 38 volumes of Structural Music, about half of it consisting of cues from more than 50 American films he scored during that period and some TV work he did as well (such as This Is Your Life). It's estimated that some 25 TV series tapped Lazlo's discs for either opening or closing credits, with dozens more employing the library for other cues.
To read the rest of this article, click here.

ADVERTISEMENT


10 Free for 10 Days from Twistedtracks.com

Our production music is a palette of vibrant colors to paint your soundtrack with...enhancing the impact of your visual works. From blue funk to gunmetal grunge, safety orange to gothic black...our thoroughly modern, electronic/alternative/soundscape approach has got your color.

Sample our best with TEN FREE TRACKS: visit www.twistedtracks.com/tenfree

---

Opening Up the MusicBox
The bi-coastal library company MusicBox Music is an outgrowth of the work of its busy co-founders, Joel Goodman and Dan Stein. Friends since they attended the Berklee College of Music together, they had been writing commissioned music for TV and films for many years, and starting a library company seemed to be a natural progression for them. They started MusicBox Music three years ago, putting out several thematic discs of their own music; now it encompasses the work of numerous composers. "We've built a 50-CD, 1,000-track stock musical library," Goodman says. The releases are coming fast and furious--about one each month.

With titles like Stereophonic Martini, Flower Power, Electrolounge, and Twisted Public Domain in their catalog, Goodman and Stein are clearly having fun with their library venture. To read the rest of this article, click here.

Ann Kroeber, FRAPs, and the AFI SFX Library
If you don't know Ann Kroeber's name, you certainly have heard her work. She has supplied sound effects for such diverse films as The Black Stallion, The English Patient, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings films, Hidalgo, The Horse Whisperer, the recent Star Wars trilogy, and many others.

Although she is often called upon to supply sounds from her huge collection of animal noises/vocalizations, she is also renowned for her unusual recordings of sounds from everyday life, many recorded with a FRAP (Frequency Response Audio Pickup) contact microphone custom-made many years ago by an English audio guru named Arnie Lazarus. In fact the Hollywood Edge FX library (www.hollywoodedge.com) even put out a disc of her FRAP recordings--Common Sounds Heard in Uncommon Ways--as part of a three-CD set called Sounds of a Different Realm. The other two of the discs are dominated by the work of her late husband, Oscar-winning FX designer/editor Alan Splett, who did groundbreaking work with Carroll Ballard, David Lynch, and other directors before his untimely passing in 1995. To read the rest of this article, click here.

---

ADVERTISEMENT


When overnight shipping can't get it there in time, choose Q-Disc from CSS Music to download entire royalty-free CD Volumes. From Download to Your CD-R in 30 minutes. No expensive overnight shipping or sales tax. Single track downloads also available. For more information call 800-468-6874 or visit www.cssmusic.com

---

Skill Building: Reviews and Tutorials
SmartSound Sonicfire Pro 3.2 and Quicktracks for Premiere Pro
By Frank McMahon

SmartSound's Sonicfire Pro is probably the leader in soundtrack creation because it doesn't really have much competition, at least not at the level that Sonicfire Pro operates. Although you can buy a number of loop-based soundtrack creation programs these days, none really works the way this program does, intelligently scaling the length up and down to exactly fit a section of video. SmartSound recently added a new program to its stable, Quicktracks for Premiere Pro, a very pared-down version of Sonicfire Pro that we will also look at.

The Sonicfire Pro interface is not very sexy (I'd love to see an overhaul in that department), but it gets the job done. The first step is to figure out what kind of music style you want. The company ships many styles with the program, and it also offers 60-plus CDs of royalty-free music (that number is ever-growing) and sound effects for just about every type and style of production. Additionally, you can order new CDs of music and single tracks directly through the program (via an Internet hookup). In fact, you can even preview the company's entire suite of music right inside Sonicfire. It's very convenient, and yes, it can be a little dangerous with such an easy click-to-buy option.

There are two ways to create a track in Sonicfire: one is through the Assistant and one is via the Maestro. With the Assistant you just click the genre (jazz, dance, rock, world, period, etc.), the type (energetic, lively, relaxed, etc.), and the length. That's it. Once the length is set, you can stretch and shrink it by grabbing either end and dragging. You can also load your video clip so you can see how the score works with it. Afterwards, you can export only the music or the music with the video. To read the rest of this article, click here.