My typed notes from today's Taxi TV with Biagio Messina

[douglasricketts]

Hope this is useful for folks!
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TAXI TV Jan 20 2025
Topic: How TV Producers Choose the Music They Use with Biagio Messina

Is your queue a toolkit? Calling it a "toolkit" involves the intelligent creation of stems. To producers a stem is any element of a cue that can be isolated. Producers/editors can create a "temp" score using stems. Producers without a deadline weighing them down will use pieces of a melody instead of the whole cue, which is where the stems become valuable for theme. ​​A cue with minimal stems will probably be dumped in favor of one with more so the producer/editor can make it more malleable for the scene being edited. Piano right and left hand separation is very helpful for editors if they can be provided. Stems also allow a cue to be used in different sections of a production instead of just one scene because of editor remixing.

Drone fade-ins are NOT great attention getters.

Think about using unique instruments like a pot of beans or playing percussion on a china cup to make a cue "yours." Get it played at the outset or within the first ten seconds to grab the editor's attention.

Advice to folks who are brand new to composing for sync: Forget cool, think useful. That's IT. It gets you out of trying to be super-artistic and instead into a way of thinking of how to make the song/stems useful for an editor to rearrange. Your usefulness to libraries (and editors) will go through the roof. Save the fancy compositions for your albums or tours.

Editor Process when picking a cue: Does it get my attention? Does it have edit points? Are there as many stems as possible to work with?

[GaryShaffer]

Thanks very much for this.

[WSAO]

Thanks!

[macomposer]

Thanks for this! The timing of Taxi TV is right at the dinner hour for me, so I usually can't attend. But this is great! I wish we could set something like this up regularly... of course, not with the same person taking notes all the time.

Thanks again,
Mark

[douglasricketts]

I wish we could set something like this up regularly... of course, not with the same person taking notes all the time.

Hmmm... I don't always take notes depending on the topic but I promise from here on out to post the ones I do.

[macomposer]

That is super kind of you. Thank you. I do occasionally watch the episodes after they have uh... aired... and I sometimes take notes. If I do that, I'll post those here too!

[cosmicdolphin]

That is super kind of you. Thank you. I do occasionally watch the episodes after they have uh... aired... and I sometimes take notes. If I do that, I'll post those here too!

Here's a tip for you guys to quickly get notes from most YouTube videos.

Where it tells you the number of views, click more

Scroll down and near the botton you should see a button that says " Show transcript "...click it

Highlight all the text in the transcript and then right click-copy

Paste the text into the AI LLM ( large language model ) of your choice and ask it to summarize it for you however you prefer ( I prefer bullet points )

On long videos like this one, if you're on a free account you might have to divide it up into sections to paste it into the AI context window. It might be easier to paste it into Notepad first and then do it in 3 or 4 chunks