How to Choose the Perfect Music Track for Your Film’s Mood

When it comes to storytelling, music is one of the most powerful tools we as filmmakers have at our disposal. Why? Because it has the power to capture and communicate the emotional energy of a moment, from a charming meet-cute to a tragic death scene, in a way nothing else can. But, how do you choose music that fits the mood you’re going for?

Here are some methods you can use to select the perfect music for your project, including pinpointing a scene’s emotional core, understanding pacing, and using platforms like PremiumBeat to make the whole process easier.

PremiumBeat is a highly recommended resource due to the quality of the songs, streamlined integration with YouTube, and price point, so definitely check out its library and see if it’s right for you. If you want to give PremiumBeat a try, you can use the exclusive code NFSPB to get a 15% discount on individual tracks and Unlimited Subscriptions.

Find Your Scene’s Emotional Core

What makes a movie great? That’s a loaded question, of course, but, at its heart, a movie is supposed to evoke emotion. Each and every scene carries emotional energy and it’s your job as a filmmaker to discern what the emotional core of that scene is and how intense it’s supposed to be. How do you do that?

Ask yourself this very simple question: What emotion do I want the audience to be feeling during this scene?

Is it heartache? Longing? Excitement? Fear? Anxiety? This is the emotional core, and once you’ve pinpointed it, you have a pretty strong start to finding the right music.

PremiumBeat makes it easy, too, by cataloging tracks into separate moods. Going for something somber? Cheerful? Sensual? PremiumBeat has a collection for it.

Pay Attention to Tempo and Pacing

It’s not just about emotion, though. Before you choose a musical track, you also have to consider the tempo and pacing of your scene. Two scenes might have the same emotional core but completely different tempos. For example, let’s take two scenes that both have “sorrow” as the emotional core: one scene depicts the hero dying during an intense WWII firefight and the other depicts the hero dying in a hospital bed surrounded by family. These two scenes will evoke the same emotion but require different kinds of music to capture their different tempos.

A war battle might need a driving, beating, patriotic score that features loud toms and brass instruments, while a quiet death scene might need a soft, gentle, slow score that features strings and pianos.

PremiumBeat has a great feature that allows you to filter music based on tempo and length, which makes finding the right track so much easier.

Credit: Matthew Kwong

Consider Music Genre

A single piece of music can change everything about a scene’s tone, but so can an entire music genre. Music genres carry certain characteristics that often evoke very specific emotions that are unique to that genre. For example, think about the tonal difference between heavy metal, disco, bubblegum pop, and mumble rap. Vastly different, right?

Another thing to think about: music genres are often synonymous with different things:

• Film genres: jazz with film noir, electronic with sci-fi, or classical with period pieces and epics
• Places and people groups: country with rural communities, reggaeton with Caribbean communities, punk with counter-culture movements
• Time periods: classical with the Age of Enlightenment, swing with the 1930s, hair metal with the 1980s,

Now, let’s go back to our example: you found your scene’s emotional core (“sorrow”), and you decided a soft and slow solo guitar piece would fit your death scene perfectly, but—do you choose the soft and slow Spanish guitar, country guitar, or folk guitar piece? Looks like you’ll have to determine which matches the characters, location, time period, and genre of your film.

Once you figure that out, you can search songs based on genre on PremiumBeat, which is nice if you know that you’ll primarily need tracks from a specific genre.

Test Your Tracks

You might think you found the perfect track for a scene, but you won’t know until you take it for a test drive. Find a handful of tracks you think would work and play each one separately over your scene. Take notes on how each track changes the tone of the scene. Does it match the emotional core? Does it match the tempo? Does it match the genre?

And you don’t have to test the entire track, either. PremiumBeat has a built-in preview tool that allows you to download 15, 30, and 60-second samples (as well as the full version) to test over your scene. It’s as simple as hitting the download button.

Music Quality Matters

There is a saying in filmmaking: audiences can stand bad video quality, but they can’t stand bad audio quality. Make sure the quality of your tracks is the best you can get your hands on—no plosives, no muddiness, no over-compression. Your tracks should be crystal clear and have plenty of dynamic range.

Sometimes it can be a challenge to find high-quality tracks (especially all in one place), but PremiumBeat boasts studio-quality tracks that are professionally mastered. So, that takes a lot of the stress of vetting tracks off of your plate.

Put All of Your Tracks in One Place

While you’re out there in the wild looking for music, you’ll find tons of tracks that are fantastic even if they’re not right for your current project. What do you do with those? Leave them and forget them? No way! Put them all in one place so you can refer back to them later.

How? Well, if you have a PremiumBeat subscription, not only can you like tracks but you can create your own curated playlists and mood-based libraries. It’s kind of like TikTok’s “liked” and “favorite” features, where “liked” tracks show up in their own folder, and tracks can be added to playlists that you create. (This is especially helpful when building your score from scratch.)

Choosing the right music for your project can be a really difficult task, especially because the wrong track could ruin an otherwise great filmic moment. However, if you pay attention to the emotional core, tempo, and genre-related details of your project, you’ll be able to select your tracks with confidence knowing that your music will appeal to the most important elements of the cinematic experience.

PremiumBeat is a highly recommended resource due to the quality of the songs, streamlined integration with YouTube, and price point, so definitely check out its library and see if it’s right for you. If you want to give PremiumBeat a try, you can use the exclusive code NFSPB to get a 15% discount on individual tracks and Unlimited Subscriptions.