Derivative Works

[Four26Studios]

Hi Everyone - we are venturing into the world of instrumental cues (two have already been picked up by a library - yay!) and we have an organizational question that I hope some of you seasoned pro's will weigh in on. We have a series of cues that have lots of different things going on - bells, sax, guitar, drums (you get the idea). We always create stems for all of our mixes - but - should we create derivative works, with their own name, based on the original cue? For example a cue with everything in is called "A Country Christmas" - if we take the drums out it has a different feel, though the structure and melody don't change, and it's still a Christmas Cue. Is the cue without drums technically its own cue? Do you find success creating multiple cues off of one cue or do music libraries just want the original cue and if they want to remove instrumentation that's when they ask for the stems. Hope this is making sense..... Thanks for sharing any experience you have with this!

[MBantle]

Hi Everyone - we are venturing into the world of instrumental cues (two have already been picked up by a library - yay!) and we have an organizational question that I hope some of you seasoned pro's will weigh in on. We have a series of cues that have lots of different things going on - bells, sax, guitar, drums (you get the idea). We always create stems for all of our mixes - but - should we create derivative works, with their own name, based on the original cue? For example a cue with everything in is called "A Country Christmas" - if we take the drums out it has a different feel, though the structure and melody don't change, and it's still a Christmas Cue. Is the cue without drums technically its own cue? Do you find success creating multiple cues off of one cue or do music libraries just want the original cue and if they want to remove instrumentation that's when they ask for the stems. Hope this is making sense..... Thanks for sharing any experience you have with this!

It is very common that libraries ask for all sorts of Alt-Mixes and Stems but they would be called e.g. '[SONG TITLE] NoDrums.AIF' etc. So they would have the same title but the corresponding extension (e.g. 'NoDrums') to explain what the Alt-Mix is all about.
Hope that makes sense.
Cheers,
Matt

[Four26Studios]

Thank you Matt!! Very helpful - and makes sense. Appreciate you taking the time to reply.