If you are looking for stock music you can find thousands of tracks on many stock music pages. But: Which track is the right one for your video? Here we explain why one piece of music works and the other one doesn’t.
If you’re looking for stock music, then you’ve probably found yourself on stock music pages that scream about the enormous number of tracks they have to offer. What should you be looking out for? And how can you separate the wheat from the chaff quicker? Perhaps you should start by asking yourself why one track works and the other one doesn’t. I’ve got something ready here, a track that works really great. There’s a nice guitar in it. A good beat that would blend nicely with the voice.
Then, at a certain point, you get some more guitars joining in. And then you have to start talking pretty loud as a voice-over actor, if you want to be heard. And then you have the rhythm of the music. How fast is it? How many bpm (beats per minute) are being used? And now you can hear me talking a bit fast.
Why? Because the music is compelling me as a voice actor to talk faster. And if you can still follow the message or not, is of course questionable. And of course you could think: Well, who cares? It’s just a piece of good music.
I will just send it to the voice-over actor and let him finish the job. Sure, you can do that. But then you get a slow voice on top of a really fast track. Which can sound a bit sarcastic, as you can here now. And then we have the music that’s, if you are listening to it on its own, and don’t think about the voice-over on top of it, sounds pretty satisfying to the ear. Listen to it!
There’s all sorts of crazy stuff going on here. There’s a synthe. A cool snare drum. Some sort of singing that sounds like an a cappella voice. But then the voice-over still needs to be put on top of it. And it’s a bit too much, as you can hear here. In other words: The music needs to serve the message. In this case it’s the voice-over that has to blend with the music. And so you get a kind of ‘one plus one is three’ situation, where the two together form an explosive mixture.
It’s worth noting that in recent years there were loads of tracks in the hit lists and on the radio, where there was not really much going on. Think of Justin Timberlake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Sean Mendes.
If you just listen to the music, then you can hear, that there’s actually not much going on. And only when the person starts singing, then the song makes sense. Adele is a really good example for that. If Adele starts singing, the rest of the music is held gently in the background.
See more on the topic on another video of ours.
So, you can have the voice-over as the lead. When there’s nothing being said, something else takes the lead.That’s what you should keep in mind when searching for the right stock music. Is there a place for a lead? And the lead is the voice-over in question. Also keep in mind: Minimalism!
An over dominant guitar or brass instrument under a voice-over only gets in the way. Speed is really important! Make sure the tempo of the music and that of the voice doesn’t diverge too much. And be careful with virtuosity, that quickly distracts from the message. So let the violonist do that in the concert hall, but not in your video.
