How To Prepare Your Music For Stock Audio

In This AirGigs Video Blog, Grammy Winner and Multi-Platinum Producer Isha “That Mad Scientist” Erskine shares “How To Prepare Your Music For Stock Audio”

If you are interested in selling some of your tracks to stock audio libraries, they are going to want no melody mixes, stingers, loops, and cutdown mixes also known as 60s, 30s, and 15s.

The first time you try this it can be a very slow process, this video will show a lot of methods to speed up the process, so you can prepare you music quicker and easier.

Here is the 5 Step Process:

1) Print out the full mix as usual and then a no melody mix that will work better under dialog. This could be no vocal, no lead guitar, no high melody piano etc.; whatever the topline is, you need a version without it.

2) Then we will import the mixes back in, lined up to our BPM Grid, and our section markers, verse, chorus and so on. This makes doing all the edits so much faster and simpler.

3) Edit Stingers, which are 5 to 10 second snips of your songs used for video transitions, and sometimes sound effects.

4) Edit Loops, 4 to 8 bar sections that can be repeated or looped seamlessly. Group the No Melody and Main Mix, to get two loops out of each section of your song.

5) Edit Cutdown Mixes, also called 60s, 30s, and 15s. These will make your music easily fit popular advertisement lengths for music supervisors and videographers.
5a) 60 second edit should have a Beginning, Middle and End, often Intro, Verse, Chorus
5b) 30 second edit is half as long so often Intro, Half a Verse and Half a Chorus
5c) 15 second edit often just bangs into the last 15 seconds of the song, but as you’ll see in the video this doesn’t always work with the chord progression, so editing on an intro can be helpful.

The song used for the tutorial is called Free Flowing co-written by Isha Erskine and Ian Stinson. Published with Shockwave Sound. You can hear the full track here: