“Cut!"

Writing Easy Edit Points for Your Shows

If there’s one thing we’ve learned at CSS Music over the past few years is this: Make music that’s easy to cut.

We know how frustrating it can be to find the perfect track that doesn’t have an easy-to-paste ending or points where you can cut on an ending. We know you want a simple, tonic-chord-ending that can be spliced on just about anywhere.

Our writers’ main responsibility is to compose the music in the same key. While this may make the track less exciting, it will guarantee the last chord always matches. (See “Haven’t Got A Cue?” for further discussion.)

We then ask the writers to create edit points throughout the track. This is where the genius of the CSS Music professional composers shines. The art of writing natural sounding stops or pauses is a true art form! And for you the end user, having the flexibility with various segment lengths and easy-edit endings makes your editing job much faster.

We are also experimenting with a double ending on a few new tracks. The idea is to provide a short, strong tonic-chord-ending and a second ending that “hangs.” For example, you’ve found the perfect CSS Music track that’s working great for a scene in your show and you’d like to reprise it in a bumper.

Simply cut on the short ending to wrap the segment and then edit the longer, “hanging ending” for your bumper. Of course, both endings will edit well into just about any point in the track.

If this is something you’d use often, please let us know and we’ll add some tracks with the double endings in the near future!