There are books on it but one of the best ways to learn is to do it and practice. Firstly do a lot of listening to the music that is on TV and in films. Practice listening right past the dialogue and the effects and get through to the music. Even the music in a reality cooking program can be cool.
Learn the underscore mode and thematic mode of composing. Underscore leaves out the themes and melodies and just sets a feel underneath the scene. It makes way for dialogue and effects. Thematic mode is for intros and themes and character themes etc..Where the music has to hold on its own. You must learn to tap into the emotion at any point of the film or TV program.
It is good to just create pieces for a few imaginary situations. Better still get onto a production company or film or TV maker and get a hold of short scenes from a variety of things and have a go at underscoring them. The movies will load up in your DAW and playback usually. You need to master the art of detecting hit points in the vision and learn to work with your software so to set up cues that start on certain hitpoints and proceed at a given tempo. It is all about seeing where the next hit point lands and what you have to do to adjust the tempo so things work out much better for the next hit point etc. It is all getting easier and faster now.
Some good books here:
http://www.amazon.com/Com...Business/dp/0634006363 and here:
http://www.amazon.com/Wri...Students/dp/0810847221 Jeff Rona used to write a lot of good articles in Keyboard mag. Jeff has got a cool book too:
http://www.amazon.com/Ree...Pictures/dp/0879305916 Does not hurt to get into the more technical side of sound recording, surround and effects and ADR etc with a book like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Tom.nson-Holman/e/B001IO9N1Y The sound designer is another person apart from the music composer with a music bent too and has got their foot into music and effects camps. very interesting area to get into.
You have got to have some nice synths and be able to create very varied textures musically but most of all capture the emotion and feel of the scene and build it into the music. Know what instrumentation it takes. For a tender scene it might only be piano and strings but for a killer corporate military thing it might be big kickass rock groove over an orchestra and a wall of guitars! You have to be able to do it and convincingly.
All the TAXI stuff mentioned here so far is also very good. They have got some great books available. Also those podcasts they do weekly are also very informative. Often great production library and TV composers get on there and talk about how they do it and how to do it usually with some nice musical examples. Here is a link to the TAXI Upstream. Watch all the podcasts that relate to writing for TV/Film/Games etc..
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/music-marketing-online Here are the Taxi books. There are a lot of books on different subjects here:
http://www.taxi.com/about..sic-business-books.html
post edited by Jeff Evans - 2012/02/03 00:20:17