Discover the key skills you’ll learn during a music composition degree, including BA (Hons) Music & Sound for Film & TV at dBs Institute, here!
Love how sound, music and audio combine with visual media in films, TV shows and video games, and want to be a composer who brings life to visual media through music?
At dBs Institute, you can learn all of the necessary skills to become a music composer for films, TV and video games, as well as the crucial industry skills to get noticed and find work.
During studies on our music production courses and our sound & audio engineering courses, including BA (Hons) Music & Sound for Film & TV, you’ll explore technical skills and gain industry knowledge with our expert tutors who have been there and done it themselves, and work towards a career in music composition for film, TV and video games.
Here, we look at the key skills and knowledge you will discover during your music for film degree at dBs Institute, available at our Bristol and Manchester campuses.
Learn more about BA (Hons) Music & Sound for Film & TV
A crucial part of your music composition for film, TV and games degree will be to explore composition and production techniques.
In your first year, you will be introduced to music theory and scoring, non-linear composition and synchronisation, as well as the technology that facilitates these techniques. As your course progresses, you will gain an increasingly advanced understanding of these processes and industry-standard software, like Ableton Live and Logic Pro.
These fundamental skills, taught from the very start of your music for film degree, will help bring your ideas to life and teach you how to get started with scoring and producing music for films, TV and video games.
As well as learning to master scoring theory and the technical production skills to bring your ideas to life, studying your film scoring degree will also help you create professionally recorded and mixed audio products.
In our state-of-the-art studios, you will learn recording, mixing, sound engineering and audio processing techniques to create professional work that can be used directly in a project. In the modern music for film industry, you must understand all elements of the production process to give you a better chance of landing that dream role once you graduate.
Being able to orchestrate is essential for life in the music for film, TV and video game industry. Without it, you won’t be able to arrange your music for a specific ensemble, which is especially common for film scores.
During your music composition degree, you’ll develop an understanding of music theory, the technical processes behind writing melodies and harmonies and how to score with string, woodwind and brass instruments, as well as full orchestras in mind.
Outside of technical music production, scoring and orchestration skills, knowing how the music industry operates is essential for forging a career.
During your music for film degree, you will gain an understanding of the mechanics of the music industry, from how to make money to communications techniques which will get your pitches heard. For example, in BA (Hons) Music & Sound for Film & TV, our module Industry Foundations will develop your understanding of revenue streams, copyright and royalties, contracts, publishing, synch licensing, streaming and digital consumer platforms and formats.
Having the creative spark to think of music that will work well for a film, TV show, or movie is one thing, but understanding the technology that can turn those ideas into a reality is another.
A crucial part of any music composition degree must be to help students master music technology, including software like Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and hardware, including mixing desks, analogue rack gear, synths, instruments and much more.
By understanding film music technology, you’ll learn how to manipulate audio to your will and be able to create amazing work quickly and to tight deadlines, which becomes increasingly important during your career.
As well as recording, re-recording, mixing and mastering, there are a range of other post-production processes which are specific to music and sound for film. Processes like Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR), where sound teams re-record dialogue to improve clarity alongside the score and sound design elements, and ‘final mixing’ are vital post-production processes that it is important to have a firm grip on.
Surround sound and immersive audio have become increasingly important within sound for visual media projects. As platforms like Dolby Atmos become ever-present in cars, at home, in cinemas and even in headphones, the need to understand how to create immersive audio products has become more important for composers trying to break into the industry.
At dBs, we understand that staying at the cutting edge of the industry is important for us and our students, which is why we have a Dolby Atmos studio in every campus and modules where students can learn the power of immersive audio and how to harness it for their film, TV and video game projects.
Whether you are naturally academic or not, sharpening your academic skills is an important part of studying any subject, including music for film. By learning how to pursue independent research, you will be able to become a better practitioner within the creative industries.
Sometimes answers to problems are not always readily available, and sometimes you’ll need to understand the intellectual framing of a project to meet a specific brief, so knowing how to perform academic research will help you improve problem-solving and adaptability.
Seeing a project through from inception to completion is vital for any music composer, sound designer or producer. You need to be able to take an idea, breathe life into it, turn it into something real through iterative creative processes and manage the project through to completion.
This is relevant to music scores and soundtracks, but also more innovative projects where you might be working in unconventional ways, like you do during the Innovation in Sound module at dBs Institute.
So, you’ve learnt technical music production skills, you’ve mastered music technology, you understand theory and academic research, but how are you going to present all of this knowledge and experience to potential clients and collaborators?
During Year Three of dBs Institute’s BA (Hons) Music & Sound for Film & TV degree, the Professional Portfolio Development module will teach students how to create a collection of work that's ready for the professional world and confidently move forward in their career.
Meet Hans Hess, the dBs Institute BA (Hons) Music & Sound for Film & TV Course Leader.
Like what you hear? You’ll learn all these skills and much more when you study the BA (Hons) Music & Sound for Film & TV degree at dBs Institute. Learn more at our next Open Day.