See the Beat: Video-driven composing

A Review of Abaltat Muse

By Mark Spencer | March 01, 2009

When the composition is complete, you are presented with a dialog that explains what you can do next.

At this point, you move from composing to arranging: an optional process for changing your composition elements, or tracks, over time. If you've ever set keyframes to create animation, you'll be right at home here. And if not, it's quite easy.

The composition consists of two melody lines, a bass, drums, and effects. By setting keyframes, you can decide, for example, when you want each instrument to begin and end playing. You can even change the instrument in the middle of the composition.

Let's say you want to change the Marimba to a Grand Piano at a particular edit point. To set a keyframe, move the playhead to the frame where you want the change to occur, and click the keyframe button.

The Event Inspector window appears, which lets you choose which parameter to change, and what kind of change to make to it.

Changing the instrument.

You can also set the volume and pan of each instrument, and change either over time. You can transpose the pitch of the entire composition, and change the scale (but only between "standard" and "alternate"). Keyframes can be "stacked" so you can change multiple instruments and other parameters at the same frame, and you can move them simply by dragging.

Another type of keyframe is called a "Color Tracker" - this keyframing device lets you create a musical change that is based on a specific color event in your video - perhaps a woman in a red dress enters a room, or blue evening light pours through an opening curtain - or a flower blooms.

By default, all of the music tracks are in Solo mode, so you hear every track. But it can be very useful to solo individual tracks as you adjust them.

Now, this arranging business takes some work - but the payoff is music that is tightly tied to the video - something difficult to achieve "pre-baked" music or loops.

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