Structuring the cue

Structuring the cue is like creating a musical roadmap. It considers what the music should be doing during the beginning, middle, and end sections of the commercial. Before the composing process begins, it’s important to know the overall story of the commercial. You will want to look at the entire commercial and come up with a structure for the cue, which will involve looking at the scene cuts and determining what type of music needs to be there and when, or you may get a rhythmic idea. This will give you a general overview of what to do musically.

In general, we are going to create one continuous piece of music, or one cue. To outline the process of structuring the cue, we will start with the lo-fi piano to set the overall mood with a few ambient sounds in the background. At bar 11, TC 01:00:24:05 (Cut to the bridge car passing), we’ll start to bring in more sonic elements to start building toward the middle section. At bar 16, we will use the...