Royalty Free Music Blog

Business-friendly tracks are abundant in SmartSound’s thousands of royalty-free music offerings. In fact, producers can refine even further, adding filters such as “Narrative/Spoken Word” to locate music that is specifically tailored to the task at hand. This makes it easy to find project music that will not harm a business brand and image.

» Read the entire Narrative Corporate Music article

Southern Blues Music is a staple of many types of video as well as video games. With tremendous variety in beat, tempo, and even instrumentation, this broad category can fill many roles. Ranging from slow and soulful to fast and rockin’, just about any scene can benefit from the pure emotion shown in these tracks.

» Read the entire Southern Blues Music article

If royalty-free music inspired by cultures around the world is needed, one only has to use SmartSound’s music search to find a wealth of tracks to use.

» Read the entire Royalty Free Calm World Music article

These aren’t just good for the Olympics. They fit any video, game, or documentary that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit.

» Read the entire Royalty Free Olympic Orchestral Music article

Intros (which are also exits) are the bookends of a video or video game. They provide a sense of continuity, much like a fiction story in which the first line is the same as the last line. Bumps, on the other hand, serve the same purpose but are used between scenes - a hard edge that quickly reinforces that something new is about to happen. And of course, stingers are essentially 1-3 second sound clips used to emphasize what was just said in the video or game (“Doh!”)

It can be hard to find Suspenseful Intros, Bumps and Stingers, but with SmartSound’s royalty-free music search, much of that work can be done in seconds rather than hours. In seconds you can find great tracks that can be customized by length and mood to suit the needs of any suspenseful scene.

» Read the entire Suspenseful Intros article

Music written and designed for creating extended beds underneath narration and to sustain longer video scenes in general. A supple blend of rhythm section instruments weaving interesting textures and colors but light on melodic content to stay out of the way of any narration your scene may have.

» Read the entire Extended Play - New Album article

Pop it Up

Snap, crackle, pop—that’s the sound of Effervescent Music! Check out the album GFGF—with its fantastic collection of music inspired by great food and great friends. Fun Ride is a powerful, refreshing and triumphant song with bluesy effects driven by electric guitar and a high-energy organ and piano.

» Read the entire Effervescent Music article

Effective immediately SmartSound is making changes to its licensing and pricing of single tracks and Singles Packs. The new structure makes our Extended License the basic license for the company. This means with any purchase of a track you now have a wider range of usage.

» Read the entire Singles and Singles Packs Pricing Change article

Get on the Bright Side with Room to Grow, an easy-going, light country soundtrack. Room to Grow features acoustic guitar and percussion which blend to create a calm, gentle, innocent tune, with a positive, light groove. Folk music with its variety of strings can elicit bluesy, folksy, Southern, Americana, country and even a pop vibe thanks to these versatile instruments. Light country music fits commercials, home or product videos, nature or corporate communications. Relaxed, motivating music casts the spotlight on your scene while adding an easy-going vibe.

» Read the entire Light Country Music article

Epic Action-Drama – you know you love it. Intense orchestral tracks just beg to be released at that pivotal, story-defining moment in video games and movies alike, bringing the audience to the edge of their seats as effectively as any dialog could. With SmartSound’s award-winning technology and thousands of royalty-free music tracks, designers and videographers will have no problem finding just the right epic track for action-drama scenes.

» Read the entire Epic Action Drama Music article

Video games set in a modern, urban environment are all the rage, but it isn’t easy to find royalty-free music for background tracks and for developing scene emotions in the players. SmartSound makes this a snap, however, with its vast library of nearly infinitely-customizable music.

» Read the entire Urban Video Game Music article

There are over 4,000 completely customizable tracks and sound effects in the SmartSound library. While SmartSound technology allows you to tweak any of our tracks to perfectly fit your project’s scenes, finding the right track to start with is still very important. That’s why we created a completely new and streamlined process for finding the best track, now. Here are some invaluable tips for getting the most from our new search process.

» Read the entire Using SmartSound Search article

Heroes require motivation and what better incentive than epic orchestral music that challenges them, pushes their boundaries and strings their heroic action sequences together seamlessly? Heroic action music is big, bold, epic, powerful, intense and necessary to drive action, create drama, suspense and intrigue.

» Read the entire Heroic Action Music article

MotionWorks, an educational resource for motion graphic designers, has a superior video tutorial on how to recreate the chilling look of Saw 4 using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. The video is about an hour long, a capture of a live class MotionWorks did that covers everything from sourcing stock images to the use of Photoshop brushes. The result is fantastic, and horrifying.

» Read the entire Adobe After Effects & Photoshop Techniques (Halloween Edition) article

Horror music with an edge driven by special effects, unusual instrumentation or unique compositions is perfect for instilling an enhanced level of fear in your viewers. Move them to the edge of their seats with edgy horror music that’s bold, competitive and fiercely stylistic.

» Read the entire Royalty Free Edgy Horror Music article