Maybe you barely think at all when picking music for your video project, or maybe you spend hours going painstakingly through dozens or hundreds of tracks to try to find the one that perfectly fits your video. Either way, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when picking a music bed that will be the best fit for your video.
Emotion vs. Vibe – In my experience, there are basically 2 aspects of any music track that make up how it feels to us, which I call “Emotion” and “Vibe.” Now, they ARE similar and definitely overlap at times, but if you can get these 2 things right when picking music for your video, you will go a long way toward allowing your music to further your message instead of distracting from it or even hurting it.
To start unpacking these ideas, here are a few words I would associate with each term:
Emotion – happy, sad, melancholy, cheerful, hopeful, courageous, confident, scared, pensive, somber, fearful, angry, oppressive
Vibe – simple, busy, aggressive, relaxed, chill, complex, forceful, laid back, tentative, chaotic
As you can see, you can take any word from the “Emotion” list and match it with any word from the “Vibe” list and have a pretty specific feel for a track (e.g., happy/simple, happy/busy, happy/aggressive, happy/relaxed, etc.) They don’t all work perfectly (pensive/aggressive is a little bit hard to picture, for example) but they get you MUCH closer to your target than if you were just to use “Emotion” words alone.
Now, I’m not saying you’re going to simply be able to punch an “emotion” word and a “vibe” word into Google and have it pop up the perfect track for you! But…as you listen to tracks, you’ll be able to weed out ones that might work for one word or the other but not both. And you should be able to zero in on the track that will best fit your video in no time.
Carry on.
Kerry off.
Kerry “James” Cox