Choice is a good thing except when there's far too much, and that's the problem often facing sound library users. You have your pictures, and now you need to find the perfect audio to match the images, but where to start? There are scores of libraries out there, each with tens of thousands of tracks to search through, and you have limited time and resources to find exactly what you're looking for. This month, we spoke with five users who share their experiences and tips for finding the right sound for a project.
DRIVE BY MUSIC
Based in Burbank, CA, Edge Creative (www.edgecreative.la) is "doing mainly on air promotion for the broadcast and cable networks, as well as a number of presentations and sometimes long-form TV projects," reports president Jim Barrett. And for nearly all their sound library needs, Barrett turns to New York-based VideoHelper." I first ran across them about 10 years ago, when I was at NBC and promoting shows like ER and Homicide,” he recalls. "I saw some CDs of this company I'd never heard of sitting on some desks, so I went and listened and was immediately very impressed. It didn't sound at all like the usual canned library music. It sounded far more like the sort of interesting arrangements you hear in pop music on the radio. And I really liked the fact that it had more of a grand, epic vibe about it, which I thought would mesh perfectly with those two shows."
Now, a decade later, and running his own successful company, Barrett is still a huge fan of VideoHelper. “Simply put, they're the go-to company for me, and for the very same reasons that first impressed me,” he says. "There are a few other places out there that specialize in certain areas, but I think that across the board for our needs, VideoHelper enables us to do promotion for drama, both light and heavy drama, which is our specialty." Barrett goes on to note that VideoHelper also has "great quirky sensibilities as well, which work really well for dramedies and comedies.”
When Edge Creative recently began working on the launch for the new Fox show Drive, they once again turned to VideoHelper. "The show is basically a parody of a car commercial, and it starts out looking like a real spot, which is the vibe I wanted to create,” says Barrett. "And we found these great tracks -'Feverpitch' and 'Overkill' - that work perfectly with the show, as they sound exactly like the type of music you hear in real car commercials, and they really amped up the adrenaline for the spots.” Edge Creative used CDs for the job, "although we're now starting to use VideoHelper's online downloading system,” notes Barrett. "And that's definitely the future. It's just a matter of working out all the bugs and making it universal for all client needs. And we've had some successful downloads of their more current music, so it's already happening."
