Creating custom music tracks with scores

Scores is Premiere Elements's new built in tool for creating royalty free music tracks for your movie. Royalty free means that these musical tracks are free for you to use in any movie project you want, even in work for hire. The coolest thing about scores, is just how easy it is to use them to create custom movie tracks, to whatever specs you require. Now music is very effective for setting the mood. We have simply a truck arrival here. Which can probably be any kind of movie you want, depending on what kind of music you put behind it.

It can be something kind of fun and innocuous, or it can be something very suspenseful or something building in action. And our movie's going to define the tone then for this scene. Move my CTI back to the beginning of the clip. Scores are under the Audio button here on our action bar and if I click on that it opens up and notice that we have a number of categories for scores. If I select Music Scores here, I have ambient, atmospheric, blues, country, rock, pop, urban, and weddings.

And under each of them, we have a number I'm dragging on the top of the panel here to expand it. We have a number of scores options. Isn't this cool? In fact there are a total of 50 tracks, in seven different categories or genres. So let's apply to this one, we're going to go to the Country category. And, we'll select, Corn Squeezin's. Now, if you want to preview what any of these audio scores will sound like, just hover your mouse over them, until you see a little play button, and we can click it to hear a preview of the music.

Now obviously something like that is going to set a certain tone for our movie. And in this particular case, we'll say okay, that's appropriate. We're going to go with corn squeezin's. Now one thing you want to notice is that all of the scores or virtually all of them have in the upper right hand corner, a little blue flag. And as we've seen when we looked at our graphic arts. And we'll also see it when we look up movie menus. That little blue flag indicates that although these clips are available, they haven't yet been downloaded to your computer. They will be downloaded automatically, when we use the clip.

Or if you watch and right click on it, and select the option to download now. And I do have to warn you, if you do download now, your downloading several gigabytes of additional content. It will save you having to download them invdividually but it's a pretty big download. So I prefer to do it this way. One clip at a time. And I am going to drag corn squeezin's down here to the soundtrack. Notice here it is. Downloading from the Adobe site. It will only take some moment or two. And you notice there were a couple parts to the process. There was a conforming and there was a generating processes.

Because this isn't just downloading stock audio to our timeline. What it's going to do is it's going to create some custom audio for us. So in other words, it's not going to just download for us some stock music clips, but it's going to create a custom clip for us. Now in some of these the intensity is adjustable in them and intensity will affect how many musical instruments you hear. The more intense it is, the more musical instruments you'll hear. We can preview it. We know where that's going and we can lower it down to mellow.

I don't think you'll hear a big difference here in corn sqeezin's. Actually you can hear a difference there. You can hear the difference between having it mellow or having it more intense. We get a rhythm track with it in the more intense. Now we can select the option here to fit entire movie and it's going to automatically trim the audio track so that it's only as long as our movie. In this case, we got like a 23 second movie. So we click that option and then click Done. Now here's where scores really works its magic. Now this audio track or this music track is very cool because it didn't just give us a chunk of a music track. It is the same length as our movie.

What it did, is give us a music track that is 23 seconds long, that also has a natural beginning, middle, and end. Let's watch the truck pull up, and let's listen to the music track it created as a natural beginning, middle, and end. You see that, it had a natural end to it. Now this is the really cool part, I can trim this. So yeah, that was awful long for me, and I don't want my music to be that long for this scene. I'd like, just, maybe about 11 seconds. I'd like it also to start right here at the same time as the truck.

And now we'll let it regenerate the clip. And it should still have a very natural beginning, middle, and end. Let's see. That is cool, huh? It can generate a musical clip at whatever specs you want. Whatever intensity you want, whatever musical style you want, to exactly the length you want. Now you saw the tone that was set when we used corn squeezens here as an experiment. I'd like to try a different one. Let's try Rock Pop. And let's try Uptown. It'll take a second for it of course to download, and then it will conform and generate the audio.

Once again, I'll select the option to fit entire video, we can also, just chop it off here. And, let's see what a different tone and what a different movie this is, now that we've got the uptown sound to it. Click Home to send the CTI to the beginning of the timeline and press the Spacebar to play. Now see. That sets an entirely different set of expectations. That's the beauty of music. That introductory music theory. The clips that we can generate. Can setup your audience expect something kind of light and fun. Or it can set up your audience to expect something kind of exciting or something very, very suspenseful.

And the cool thing, is that not only do you get more than 50 tracks of music in seven categories, or seven genres, but in addition, Adobe has thrown in sound effects. Look at this. In these categories, 13 different categories, over 260 sound effects that it threw in absolutely free with the program. These are fun, everything in here from weather and vehicles to science fiction sounds and explosions. Great, great fun.

So as you can see, Adobe has included a very nice audio package with the program, and not only does Scores offer a great selection of royalty free music. Any one of it's songs could be customized for wherever the specific needs of your scene or project are.