The Sound of [Production] Music

Q+A with Mike Fuller, Creative Director of CSS Music

1. Tell us about your latest products for our production professionals!CSS Music / D.A.W.N. Music first began offering royalty free production music in 1982 and is today the oldest royalty free library of its kind under original management. From a single vinyl disc in '82, the package has grown to a full-service library of 328 CDs and more than 12,000 tracks today. Single track downloads were offered in 1997 and full CD volume downloads in 2005.

   The "products" we sell are state-of-the-art production music tracks for AV, Video, Film, and Television licensed on a lifetime blanket, multiple-use bundle basis. Although we've introduced numerous formats over the years, largely it has been a process of refinement. One such refinement, introduced lately, is an adjunct to our multi-tiered music search system — the D.A.W.N. playlist utility. It sounds innocent enough but D.A.W.N. playlists can actually bring a modicum of order to the "chaos" of searching for music.

   For example, it's not uncommon when searching for music to find dozens of tunes that can work for a given segment or scene. Of course you can simply jot down the titles or catalog numbers of tunes that are viable candidates but in the heat of battle, this step is often skipped. The problem comes when you can't remember where you've been or what you liked or disliked. While a music web site is itself an asset management system of sorts, the D.A.W.N. Playlist Utility is a streamlined way of grouping, organizing and retrieving music by project, scene, client, etc. Each playlist can be titled and re-titled, even e-mailed to associates or clients across the hall or around the world.

   Sometimes projects get shelved only to be resurrected months later. When this happens or when similar projects present themselves, a D.A.W.N. Playlist can quickly refresh your memory and put things in focus. And when decisions are finalized, you can download selected tracks directly from your D.A.W.N. Playlist. A simple but incredibly powerful tool.

2. How do your products set you apart from your competition?There are many good search and music retrieval systems available on competitive production music web sites. We believe the CSS /D.A.W.N. Playlist System is different because it is ergonomic-- just plain easy to use. So often music search and retrieval systems seem to be unnecessarily complex. Instead of saving time and money, they sometimes elongate the production process. And somewhere along the line the primary goal of getting the best music track for the job can be obscured or lost.

3. If you could give three pieces of advice for sound in film or television production, what would it be?Finding the right tunes for projects flat out takes time. Ideally it is best to "know" a library. Know where the good editing posts in tunes are. When that's not possible or practical, you still have to be willing to invest enough time, listening to more than just 5 or 10 seconds of a tune.

   Search systems are unfortunately only as good as the people who enter the search criteria (keywords, etc.) There is no perfect search system. But still the perfect tune may lurk just under the surface. It only needs to be massaged from the search results.

   "Sound design by the numbers" may be theoretically possible but should quality be traded off for perceived speed and efficiency? Over-reliance on search systems, without deeper exploration, can lead to merely adequate choices, not great ones.

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Going tapeless doesn’t just have a load of practical benefits. Media can be transferred quicker with solid state drives which means less energy, and less carbon! Memory sticks are also reusable which means you don’t have to buy barrel-loads of tapes which also keeps your resource use down.
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