Music for short films, made from your own cut

Tracks for short films

• Under the opening titles over the first image

  Dreamy Anime Pads · 0:30 · Ambient · Calm

• Low under a two person dialogue scene

  Quiet Expansive Close · 1:00 · Ambient · Calm · 81 BPM

• For a montage that carries time passing

  Birdsong Piano Sleep · 2:41 · Classical · Calm · 84 BPM

• Under a scene where something is quietly wrong

  Upward Downward Strings · 1:57 · Classical · Mysterious · 115 BPM

• Into the final shot and the end credits

  Unbroken Cello Line · 6:00 · Classical · Calm · 75 BPM

Library tracks are free for personal use. Commercial use needs Pro or above. More tracks like these in the music library

Use less music than you think

First time filmmakers tend to put music under almost every scene. It feels safer, as if the music will hold the film together. Usually it does the opposite: wall to wall music flattens a short film, tells the audience how to feel before the performances can, and makes the moments that really need music feel no different from the rest.

Before you add anything, watch the cut with no music at all and mark the places that feel empty. Those are your candidates. In a ten minute short, three or four music cues are often enough: an opening, a montage or turning point, and the ending. Everything else can live on dialogue, room tone and sound.

Spotting: decide where each cue starts and stops

Spotting is the process of deciding exactly where each piece of music enters and exits. Good entry points are motivated by something on screen: a character turns away, a door closes, the camera starts to move, a scene cuts to a new place. Music that creeps in under a held look often works better than music that starts on a hard cut.

Exits matter as much. Ending a cue on the cut into the next scene makes the change of place feel decisive. Letting the music fade under the start of a new scene softens the transition. Pick one on purpose each time, and avoid cues that just run out halfway through a shot.

Write your spotting decisions down as a simple list of timecodes: where each cue starts, where it ends, and one line on what it should do. It keeps you honest when you are tempted to add music everywhere, and it makes it easy to describe each cue when you generate.

• Enter on movement, a look, or a cut to a new location.
• Exit on a cut, or under a line that changes the scene.
• Never start or stop music in the middle of a spoken sentence.

The trouble with temp music

Most editors cut with a temp track: a placeholder piece dropped in early so the rhythm of a scene can be felt. The risk is that the edit grows around it. After weeks of watching, the timing of every cut depends on that one piece, and anything else sounds wrong when it goes in, even when it is better for the film.

Get to real music earlier. Upload a rough cut, generate for it, and live with that instead. Because Sonilo builds the music from your cut, its changes already sit on your scene changes, so the film is not being bent to fit somebody else's phrasing. When the edit changes a lot, generate again for the new cut rather than stretching the old music.

Music under dialogue

Dialogue is the hardest place to put music in a short film, and the place it most often goes wrong. If a scene needs music under talking, keep it very low, at least 15 to 20 dB under the voices, and choose sustained textures like soft strings, pads or a slow piano with long gaps. Avoid anything with a melody that moves while actors speak.

Often the strongest choice is to keep the scene dry and let the music arrive in the pause after the key line. When you upload a film with location dialogue, leave the speech setting on so the performances stay in the mix while the music is replaced, then set the music level by ear in the final pass.

Silence and room tone

Silence in a film is never truly silent. Every location has its own room tone: traffic outside a window, a fridge hum, wind across a field. When a music cue ends, the room tone should carry the scene so the cut to quiet feels intentional instead of like a hole in the mix. Record 30 seconds of room tone at every location, and lay it under any section where the music drops out.

Use the contrast. A scene that has had music for a minute and then suddenly loses it makes the audience sit up. That moment can be stronger than any cue you write, especially right before a confession, an argument or a decision.

A theme that comes back

Even a short film benefits from a recurring musical idea. A few notes that first appear under the opening and return, changed, at the ending give the film a sense of shape that viewers feel even when they do not notice it. The return can be slower, fuller, or played on a different instrument to show how the character has changed.

Describe that idea in your direction when you generate the opening and the ending, naming the same instrument and mood, so the two cues feel related.

Runtime and pacing

Most shorts run between 3 and 20 minutes. At that length there is no room for a slow musical warm up. An opening cue of 20 to 40 seconds over the first images and the title is plenty, and it should set the genre straight away: warm acoustic for a gentle comedy, sparse piano for a drama, a low pulse for a thriller.

Montages are where shorts compress time, and they are where music can be most present. A montage cue can carry a melody, build, and end on a change of scene. Keep it shorter than you think; 30 to 60 seconds is long in a short film.

Final shot, credits and screenings

The ending is where music earns the most. Let the final cue arrive a little before the last shot and resolve on it, or cut to silence on black for a harder ending. End credits can carry the same theme at a gentler level, and should not outlast the credits themselves.

Check your mix in more than one place. A film mixed on headphones can sound very different in a cinema with large speakers and in a browser on a phone. Listen on both, and make sure the dialogue still sits clearly above the music in each.

How to make music for short films

1. 1

   Upload the cut

   Upload your short film or one scene of it. Sonilo reads its cuts, pacing and scene changes.

2. 2

   Pick a preset or describe the film

   Choose Quiet drama, Indie warmth, Thriller pulse, Opening titles or Final shot, or write your own direction. Leave the speech setting on to keep the dialogue.

3. 3

   Generate and export

   Generate on the create page, which shows the credit cost before anything runs. Pick the better of the two versions, set the music level, and export.

Questions before you start

Music for other kinds of video