Some of you might know that my wonderful other half reviews a lot of books on Youtube and that I occasionally make music. So I, naturally, help her on the videos by providing background music for her videos.
After a couple of months of re-recording or remixing existing tracks, I realised the key was that – as a content creator – she wanted to have more control over the music in her videos than just picking one of my existing instrumentals. It occurred to me that not everyone that makes videos, games or podcasts has access to a musician with recording equipment but might want the same kind of control over their music.
There are plenty of royalty-free music sites around but a lot of them suffer from the problem that there are 20,000+ tracks to choose from and you might need to go through a few thousand of them to find the right track.
To solve this, I built my latest project: Harmonious Studio.
A 'set' is a collection of individual tracks built around a single basic loop. To create your individual mix, you pick a set, switch tracks on or off and download a loopable piece of music that can be dragged into whatever you use to create your videos or podcasts. All the tracks in a set work together but different combinations can change a piece from light and happy to dramatic and angry to wistful and relaxed.
Here are a few examples of mixes built from the same set:
For Game Makers
I'm also hoping this is useful for game developers. Fundamentally, it's a way to create lots of variations of music that go well together – some dramatic, some calm, some exciting – these variations can be tied to metrics and areas in a game and smoothly and transparently change with the game's mood and atmosphere.
For musicians
The next phase is to open up the platform to other musicians to enable them to add tracks to an existing set or create an entirely new set.
For now, all tracks are licensed for free under CC-by 4.0 but, if it turns out to be useful, musicians will be able to offer their tracks for sale. Those buying the track will pay a single fee for the mix and the fee will be split between the artists who created the tracks in the mix.
If you're a content creator, know a content creator, have ever thought about being a content creator or even have simply read this far in this post, please check it out and give me some feedback.
