Today's video is all about music, how I choose it,
how I use it, and how I sometimes cut it up
and remix it when I only want to use certain parts.
-[fingers snapping] -[upbeat music thumping]
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone and welcome to flavour town.
So, I'm pretty particular when it comes to music.
I don't often add background music underneath these
talking head sections, and when I do add music
it's usually for comedic effect, and I do that because
I'm very susceptible to fatigue and desensitization
when a particular type of music is overused,
or used ineffectively in YouTube videos.
I prefer to use music sparingly
to create an emotional response at just the right interval,
but this can often be difficult to achieve
when using royalty-free music for two reasons.
One, a lot of the music out there all has that
same sort of travel vlog vibe to it, which goes back
to my fatigue point, and that kind of music
just does nothing for me emotionally.
And two, I try to keep my music-filled segments short
and interesting throughout and that doesn't always work
when you download a four-minute royalty-free track
that contains numerous musical styles.
I'm not trying to fill my videos with protracted b-roll
but, instead, get to the information quickly.
Well, I've got solutions to both of those problems,
but I should warn you that
these are obviously highly subjective.
Music is so personal that my advice
might not mean anything to you, but if you like the b-roll
I include in these videos and the clips
that I post to Instagram and Twitter,
I'm happy to share my process with you.
So, my answer to problem one is Artlist,
who also happens to be the sponsor of this video,
and I'm going to be using that sponsorship
to fund a music challenge that you guys can participate in,
where I'll be giving away cash prizes.
But, I'll get into the challenge details
at the end of this video.
But, I switch to our list a few months ago and long before
they ever offered to sponsor a video.
I switched to them because I was getting bored of the music
from the other platforms, again for those reasons
I mentioned earlier about the same derivative music,
and I found that Artlist had
a lot more music that I was more interested in.
That isn't to say that they don't have
any of that travel vlog vibe sound.
Obviously, they have that too, but I find that
they're quirkier genres are much more filled out
than the other platforms I was using.
Also, as anyone who's ever searched for music knows,
you can spend entirely way too long doing that
and so the interface is quite important,
and I thought Artlist's was excellent.
It's easy to find what you're looking for
and I generally find something I like after only testing
about half a dozen songs, where, on other platforms,
I've spent hours clicking through tracks.
The thing that sealed the deal for me was the pricing.
It's a flat rate for $199 a year, and you get
unlimited songs and access to the entire catalogue.
I've dealt with companies in the past that tiered off
their pricing based on how many subscribers you had,
or which platforms you were using, and also wouldn't
give you access to the entire catalogue unless you bought
a more expensive plan that gave you the premium tracks.
Artlist doesn't do any of that, and once you've licensed
that track, you can post it to YouTube, Instagram, Twitter,
whatever, it's free and clear forever and because Artlist
uses royalty-free music, you don't ever have
to worry about getting hit with a copyright claim.
And, your license is worldwide and you can use it
for pretty much any purpose you want,
even if it's professional, commercial,
TV, podcasts, and so on,
it's all covered and so it was an easy switch for me.
It was less complicated and it had a good selection
of music that didn't rely entirely on that same,
redundant drivel and the pricing was quite fair.
So, if that sounds like something you could use,
I've got a link in the description that'll get you
two extra months when you sign up,
but at the very least go on browse the catalogue.
You don't need a membership to do so, and I think you'll be
quite impressed with the interface and their selection.
But now, let's move on to problem #2.
So, when I put music driven b-roll segments in my videos,
I usually try to keep them under a minute,
and this has two benefits.
First, your audience isn't going to get bored,
and second you can actually upload it
as a standalone piece to Instagram or other platforms
that have a one-minute time limit on video uploads.
And, there's also another reason why I recommend
doing that, and that's a big part of the music contest
that I'm going to be running, but we'll get into that
a minute when we talk about the challenge.
So, the problem comes in when you want to make
that minute-long segment, but the track
that you downloaded is three minutes long,
and you only like certain sections of it.
That happens to me all the time.
I'll be clicking through tracks, looking at the waveform
to try and find the good parts, and I'll find a track
that I like certain sections of it, but other sections
are completely off base for the feeling that I'm going for.
But, there's easy ways to cut that track up
to make it the song that you actually want,
with just using your basic editing software
and you don't really need much music production experience.
So, I'll show you the two methods that I use most often.
So, I've got this track here from Artlist,
that I think is the perfect test case.
It's called "Kingdom Come" by Theevs,
and I like this intro part right here.
[pulsing music]
♪
But, a little bit deeper in the song,
it kind of goes off the rails a bit.
[electronic bells tinkling]
♪
I don't know what that's all about,
it doesn't really match the vibe that I thought that
I was liking from the beginning part,
but then later on in the song, it, kind of,
comes back together again and gives you
a bit of an ending to that beginning part.
So, we want to put those two things together,
we have a few different ways that we can do it.
So, in this example here, where the music breaks, as in,
it goes completely quiet, then it's kind of easy.
You just place two cuts and slide the music together,
but you will have to be careful about the tempo.
You want to make sure that whatever the beat was
before the music stops, that when the music comes back in,
that it's on the right beat, that it's anticipated
of when it should start again.
If you have it offbeat, you'll be able to tell.
It'll sound a little weird.
So, here's an example of that fix combining a part
that I like with the other part that I like later on,
with just a break in between.
[beats thumping]
[gap]
[soft beats thumping]
So, pretty easy, as you can see, it came back in
right when you would have expected to do,
based on the beat that we just established before.
This one's easy, but you're not always going to have that.
But you can still do this same solution,
even if there's no break in the music, by just cutting on
one of those beats, and then cutting on another
one of those beats, and then putting the beats together.
Just make sure you don't double them up
like it doesn't go, "Boopbloop,"
you need to make sure that it's "Boom" only once.
♪
So, same idea, we went up and then landed on the same beat,
even though this is much later in the track,
and this one was OK because the beat,
it was a very similar sound of when the beat kicked in
and it was still satisfying,
when all those other instruments were added,
and if you want to make that sound a little bit better,
you can see here that I put a tiny, little,
constant power audio transition over those two things.
It just removes any little hiccup that
would occur from the music transitioning, like--
[breathy fumble] --Quickly and then go into the next track,
it's just going to smooth those out.
It doesn't need to be big though, you can make it
really small because if you make it big,
you're going to start, sort of, cross-fading the music together,
which is what we're going to talk about next.
Sometimes, when you want to do this,
so this is a new track that I have over here now,
this one's called "Run" by Tristan Barton,
and what we've got here, I put two markers here
so you can hear, so this track is too long
and I want to shorten it, and I'll explain why I want
to shorten these things in a minute,
but I'll just give you the two in and out points here.
So, listen to this part.
[ascending beat]
So, hear how that piano chord came in?
But then, it goes on for like another minute,
still slowly building up.
But if we go to the part that I like over here,
[thumping beat crescendo]
So, I like both of those parts,
but if you just wedge them together,
it makes kind of a weird effect,
at least, I find on my brain where it goes,
"Hey, where's all those other instruments coming from?
You didn't establish that string melody!"
I'll give you an example, this is, this is the bad take.
[thumping mix]
You see how it's a little bit weird?
It's, like, that's a new drum and why is there a new,
a new string melody there, just doesn't really add up,
so what you can do in that case,
because just putting a little constant power audio transition
is not going to solve that, is we can do something like this.
So, I've got the finished result over here,
but basically all I did was I took this part,
I made a secondary version of it.
I stretched this one out, and then I got rid of this
and stretched this one out.
And, we're just going to basically fade one track in,
as we fade the other one out,
and you can see the finished result over here.
So, this track section here is normal, this,
this plays out like normal if we mute
this track underneath, it sounds normal.
♪
It just gets really quiet but the track underneath it,
if we mute the top one and then play this one...
[smoother mix]
Right? So, we're just fading that one in
as we fade the other one out.
It's a simple cross-fade, the only difference is rather
than cross-fading between two different tracks,
we're cross-fading in the same song, just later on in time.
But now, if we listen to both of it together,
it sounds like this.
♪
And now, I think that your brain is able to process it
a bit better because you established that string,
kind of, coming in with the fade
as the track kind of faded out
and then that progressive dun-dun-dun came.
It just seems a lot more natural and not just that,
yeah, some dude placed a bunch of cuts in the audio
and just jammed it together.
It seems more like it was, it was mixed with intent.
So, the reason why I think this process is important
is because I like to build a little segment of music
that has a beginning and an end as a complete package,
that I can then edit my footage to.
And, it also prevents you from getting yourself
in that situation where, maybe, you started an edit
to the music, but you didn't have an ending in mind,
you just drop the footage in, and then when you got there,
you were like, "I don't really like where this music ended up,"
or "I don't really like this ending,"
so you have go through and lengthen and shorten
different clips to make it all fit together.
Yeah, we've all done that and it's annoying,
and a waste of time, but my method is more efficient
and more satisfying to assemble the footage to,
in my opinion, and you only have to do it once.
And, like I was saying, having an actual beginning
and an end to your music will make your piece seem
more thought-out, almost like a tiny little film.
And this will also play much better as a standalone piece
if you plan to upload it to the other platforms,
because when things seem more purposeful,
they also seem more professional.
Now, if your music has a bit of a fade in and out,
that makes it take longer than one minute,
that's OK because when you insert it into your main video,
you can actually just have that tail go underneath your a-roll,
and it'll just, kind of, tie it in together,
and the same thing when it fades out.
And this still isn't even a problem for that one-minute
restriction that we were talking about
if you plan to export it as a standalone piece,
because you can always just taper off those fades.
Let's say that our one-minute end point is actually
only here, so we have to get rid of this
little chunk in the beginning.
So, rather than just put a hard cut, we can basically
just make a new fade by choosing the volume here
and then rocking the volume down to infinity below,
right at the beginning of the end point.
And then, when we actually go to export and upload this
as a standalone piece, the actual sound will start here.
♪
[soft vocalizing]
I know that fading in and out is a little bit of cheating,
but it basically makes it so you don't have to worry
if you wanted to have, you know, tails that fade into
your a-roll nicely, you can just trim those tails off
when you go to make the one-minute export
because your body of the music that you edited,
would still be around that one minute time limit.
And you can obviously do that to the end of the clip as well,
and that's basically the gist of my process for how I make
those little music-filled segments that I include
in my videos, but now based on that,
I've got a challenge for you.
I want you to shoot and edit a one-minute sequence
using Artlist music.
Now, you don't have to use the methods that I showed here,
but I will definitely be giving bonus points to an edit
that has music that seems like the in and out points
of that music were well-chosen and planned.
But to make the challenge harder and keep everyone
on an even playing field, I'm going to be choosing the songs.
So, I've got three songs here chosen from Artlist catalogue
and they're all very different.
And this is another thing that I like about Artlist as well,
there's these collections where you can build
these little playlists based on whatever category you want,
so this is my Contest Collection.
So, the first track here is "Mayhem" by Ian Post,
which has, kind of, like an 80's dark, retro,
Knight Rider, Blade Runner, kind of, vibe to it
sounds like this. It's pretty cool.
[electronic warp beats]
♪
It's a lot of dark and interesting stuff in that one,
and then we've got
"Belonging" by Muted, which is a lot softer.
[soft piano]
♪
Just, kind of, a nice, little piano thing.
It too has a sort of different emotional range
that I think that you could use in a lot of different ways
depending on what you pair it with,
and then lastly, we have "July" by Manos Mars.
[techno funk music]
♪
Which is a lot funkier and has, possibly, a comedic side to it.
You can go two ways, you can obviously go
with something, you know, that might be bad-ass,
and you can also go, kind of, funny.
I love tracks like this.
This is one of the reasons why I like Artlist is they have
a lot of this kind of funkier stuff and I think
funky stuff is awesome for montages and YouTube videos,
especially stuff to do with tech.
I love this kind of stuff, but you'll also notice that
all these tracks are longer than one minute.
So, you'll have plenty of opportunities to chop it up
differently based on what sections appeal to you,
and I think that's going to be one of the most interesting
things about this contest is how your submissions
will showcase the various aspects of a track
and how they speak to us differently.
So, there's no requirements for what you shoot or the mood
that you create, as long as you follow
the community guidelines, so no violence or hate speech
or anything graphic or gratuitous.
No politics, just keep it pg-13.
But, in the description, you'll find a link
to the Google Drive which will let you download the songs,
but keep in mind, only one song per submission.
Only one submission per person,
and you can only use these songs for this contest.
You don't have permission or a license to use them
outside of this contest.
Then just make an edit that's less than one minute.
I'd say keep it to about 58 seconds max, because sometimes,
with some platforms, when you export exactly one minute,
depending on your frame rate and timecode it might consider
to be a minute and one second, and then you won't be able
to upload it to Instagram or something like that.
So, try and keep it under one minute,
then upload your submission to YouTube, Instagram or Twitter
and tag me in it and use the hashtag #MusicUndone,
and if you upload the YouTube, use the hashtag, but you can
also comment on this video with the link to your YouTube video,
because I don't think that you can tag me on YouTube.
I'm @GeraldUndone everywhere, and while you're tagging me,
make sure that you follow me
on Twitter and Instagram, if you haven't already.
I'll be picking my three favourite submissions
and giving away cash prizes.
Third place is going to get a $100,
second place will get $200, and first place will get $300,
and there's three ways to get your money.
You can either just provide a PayPal email address
and I'll PayPal it to you, but if PayPal is not an option,
you can get an Amazon or B&H gift card for the same amount.
I'll be picking the winners at the beginning of June
and I'll be making a follow-up video then,
discussing your submissions,
so make sure you get your videos in by May 31st.
But that's going to be it for me, I hope you found
this video helpful or at least entertaining, and if you did
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But, if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.