# How to create a library of re-usable midi sequences for a series of episodes?



## byzantium (Sep 11, 2016)

Hi all,

Thanks to all the amazing contributors here on this forum that help each other other out - it's an amazing resource for vi-musicians (if that's a term!). 

My query is - I'm lucky enough to have just started a project to provide music for 26 x 7 mins episodes for a pre-school / early-school animated TV series - and I'm hoping I'll be able to re-use snippets of music across the episodes for various common situations, e.g. intros, transitions, surprise, questioning, suspense, funny, sad, dances etc, so I won't have to start from scratch each time. 

I've seen Guy Mitchelmore on one of his Thinkspace videos using a 'home-made' library of audio files categorised into folders etc, which could indeed be part of a solution, however it would be more flexible to have starting midi sequences, so that they could be enhanced or shortened, or tempo-changed or key-changed, or instruments changed, to cope with different scenes / situations. 

I'm using Logic X 10.2.4. and mostly Kontakt instruments. My initial thoughts were to create the DAW project for the next episode as a copy of the previous episode, and to keep the midi regions from previous episodes after the 7 min mark / end of the episode, and label them somehow with markers, and keep building up a library of midi snippets like that, so I can audition them and copy-and-paste them back from there into the episode section if I want to re-use / modify them. 

(I've only done one episode so far, and apart from the Title sequence and closing credits, I haven't been using a tempo or quantising, I've just just playing in free-hand to fill in the spaces available). 

After a while, this 'library' section of the DAW project will get quite large if I save everything / potentially re-usable suff, and it could be hard to find stuff. But I can't think of an easier way to do this at the moment. I guess I could export midi files but I imagine this would be very unwieldy and slow to load in, assign instruments, audition etc. 

So I was just wondering if anyone has come across this before, and what they do, am I going down the right route ?

Perhaps there won't be much return out of trying to create a library of re-usable music material at all - maybe I will end up needing to (or being quicker / better off to) play in each line of the music from scratch for each new scene / event. I'm just about to embark on the second episode so I guess I'll know more later. 

I've only seen about 5 episodes in advance but it looks like there will be similarity across the episodes, e.g. a small set of shared characters, similar themes (e.g. a 'tell me why' sort of thing) but each episode will explore a different topic, and will have new locations and new characters now and again. And of course one would want to have a similar musical style across all the episodes. 

Sorry if I'm half-answering my own question, or if it's difficult to say for someone outside looking in, but I'm just wondering if anyone has employed a 'custom midi library' approach within a DAW / Logic, across a set of episodes or across a longer single piece of work, where there is a possibility for re-using the similar music in different places?

Thanks so much for any thoughts you might have!

Cheers, Paul.


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## NoamL (Sep 11, 2016)

Hey Paul,

I assist a composer on a similar enterprise (half hour kids show). It's a big workload and I think your MIDI-moving method will become a trainwreck. Just imagine if you accidentally nudge regions while working on the current episode, etc. I also think not writing on the grid has the potential to cause massive headaches down the road when you re-adapt cues. It's up to you and your style of music though.

The composer I work for generally writes all the new cues in one big Logic session, but then each cue has an individually saved file, its own filename in a logical numbering sequence, and its own audio bounce. 

Sounds pretty fussy I know but we have over 20 hours of music in the pool for the show. We also have a lot of stock cues, you know, like there's always a "What did we learn today" scene. Having all copies of a particular stock cue in audio lets you rapidly audition all of them and hopefully find a version that you can either use as-is or that will fit with some edits. If an edit works in audio then you go back to the Logic file, create the edit in MIDI, save your new session and bounce out a new audio file.

Your show (or season 1 at least) is gonna have about 3 hours of music if it's continuous scoring. There's no way you can handle 3 hours of midi in one Logic project.


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## NoamL (Sep 11, 2016)

Oh, and there's two obvious things I didn't mention but just in case

1) the composer has a show template with everything balanced, mastering presets etc.

2) we use VEPro to keep all the instruments loaded in RAM while we switch between sessions.

The work would be pretty much impossible without these 2 things.


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## byzantium (Sep 11, 2016)

Ah thanks so much NoamL for getting back.

Yes I could end up with a lot of midi in the same project alright - although midi data is cheap in terms of size/storage data etc, and I wouldn't have to leave the single logic project, (PS I don't have VEpro, but yes I have and will have to retain one master template), but yes if a region is accidentally co-selected and gets moved or deleted along with something else that could indeed be a train wreck if undetected for a while.

However, the music snippets (not mostly long 'cues' / songs as such) are going to be pretty small I think between 0.5 sec to 2 or 3 seconds I would guess, with the very occasional 10 second one. The first episode has about 25 to 30 or these little snippets in one episode. So if each cue / snippet was a logic project, that could be hundreds of very small logic projects...

I am thinking that approach of a separate logic project for each cue would work well if you had relatively large (i.e reasonably long) cues (i.e. songs) and less of them, so that you keep things separate. But if you have lots of really short little musical helper 'snippets'

So just wondering how do you guys establish whether something can be re-used - how would you know from the numbering system alone - do you have a naming system as well e.g. like the 'what did we learn today' sequence or 'here is my "wondering" music' or my 'transport me to a different world' sequence etc - and then confirm it by listening to the audio bounce, and then you load up that logic project, and import into the master, etc

Thanks again for the response and the ideas!

Cheers, Paul.


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## NoamL (Sep 11, 2016)

byzantium said:


> I think between 0.5 sec to 2 or 3 seconds I would guess, with the very occasional 10 second one. The first episode has about 25 to 30 or these little snippets in one episode. So if each cue / snippet was a logic project, that could be hundreds of very small logic projects...



OH! I see, you're actually talking about stingers. Not songs/montages/underscores.

For stingers, just bounce them to audio. If necessary, mute the midi that comes after a stinger, so that when you bounce it out it's definitely ringing out to silence and not bleeding into another cue.

The numbering system is only for finding cue files quickly. It won't help you find reuse cases. For that you either need an encyclopedic memory (  ) or you need scoring kits. On our show, all the audio is sorted in giant Logic sessions. So there's a montage kit, a "What did we learn today" kit, a stinger kit with a variety of stinger types (mystery, shock, collapse, punchline, etc), there's a kit for all instances of main character themes, etc.


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## byzantium (Sep 11, 2016)

Thanks again so much NoamL for the response.

So in your setup, sounds like a 'kit' is a large Logic project with re-usable audio assets for the show.

So how do you actually audition and import the 'kit' / re-suable audio (and in theory this could be midi too right) from the particular 'kit' project into your main episode Logic project ? Is this where VEPro comes in / helps? (I don't have VePro). On a single machine (iMac) opening multiple Logic projects at the same was a grindingly slow business, the last time I tried it.

Do you fire up multiple Logic project instances, e.g. one for the current episode you are working on, and one or more Logic instances for the 'kit' Logic projects, switch context to the 'kit' Logic project, find and confirm the audio you want to re-use, and then import that audio (and in theory this could be midi too right) from the 'kit' project into the episode project using the Logic "Import Logic projects..." function?

As far as I know the "Import Logic Projects.." function only allows you import selected tracks, and not individual regions within a track, so you would have to have each stinger / cue on a separate track in the 'kit' project (plus the import process creates a new track in your episode project)

- OR do you just import the library/'kit' audio simply as audio files into the episode project? In which case, you wouldn't need the Logic kit projects at all (except to create / as the source of the audio files) - you would need a categorised system of audio files and folders to make finding and importing easier. Plus the audio import process wouldn't allow you the possibility of importing midi as a starting point for creating other stingers / short cues...

Sorry for the detail, grateful again if you have any further info / thoughts.
Cheers, Paul.


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