How to Brief a Composer for a Commercial.

What to put in the brief

In roughly this order. Most of it is one line each; the whole thing fits on a page.

• What the audience should feel, and specifically what they should feel in the first three to five seconds
• Where the music sits — is it carrying the spot alone, or underneath a voiceover that is doing the talking
• The moments it has to hit: the cut, the reveal, the product shot, the end card, with timecodes if you have them
• Two to four reference tracks, each with a sentence on what you want from it
• What you explicitly do not want, which is often more useful than what you do
• Deliverables: durations, stems, alternate edits, the file spec
• Usage and term — where it runs, which media, which territories, for how long, and whether you need to own it
• The actual deadline, and what is fixed about it

Describe the job, not the arrangement

The most common failure in a music brief is specifying the solution instead of the problem. A brief that says use a piano and strings, mid-tempo, builds at thirty seconds, has removed the composer's ability to solve the problem and replaced it with a set of instructions. If the instructions were the right answer, they would have needed a session player, not a composer.

The version that works says what the music has to accomplish: the opening should feel like something is about to be announced, the middle needs to sit under a voiceover without competing, the last five seconds should feel resolved rather than triumphant. That is briefable, it is arguable, and it leaves the composer able to find a better route than the one you would have specified.

Adjectives on their own do not survive the journey. Warm, premium, modern and clean mean different things to everyone in the room, and a brief built from them produces a first draft that satisfies nobody and cannot be usefully criticised. Anchor each one to something: warm like the second reference, premium meaning restrained rather than expensive-sounding.

How to use reference tracks properly

References are the most concrete part of any brief and the easiest to get wrong in two opposite directions.

Too many is the commoner error. Twenty tracks in a playlist is not a brief, it is a mood, and the composer has to guess which quality of which track mattered. Two to four is plenty, and each one should come with a sentence saying what you want from it — the rhythm of this one, the instrumentation of that one, the restraint of the third. The sentence is what makes a reference usable; the track alone is ambiguous.

The opposite error is sending one reference and meaning it literally. If what you actually want is that track, the honest route is to licence it, and the sync cost is the answer to that question. A composer asked to produce something legally distinct but sonically identical is being asked to work in the narrow band between imitation and infringement, which is bad for the work and a genuine legal exposure for you. Say which qualities you want carried across and which you do not.

The line that changes the price

Usage and term belong in the first conversation, not the last. Where the music runs, in which media, in which territories, for how long, and whether the client owns it outright are what set the fee — far more than the length of the music or the size of the arrangement.

The same ninety seconds of music can differ several-fold in price between a six-month online-only regional use and a worldwide all-media buyout in perpetuity. A brief that omits this gets quoted against an assumption, and the correction arrives late, when the work is done and the budget is committed. It is the single most common cause of an awkward conversation at the end of a music job.

When to brief, relative to the edit

Timing changes what the composer can do more than most people expect.

1. 01Brief at rough cut, not at picture lock

   Music written against a locked edit can only fit it. Music written while the edit is still moving can shape it — the editor holds a beat because the music wants it. That exchange is where the best results in this format come from, and it is unavailable after lock.

2. 02Expect the first pass to be a question

   A competent first draft is testing an interpretation of the brief, not attempting the final. Reacting to it is how the brief gets sharper. Judging it as a finished article wastes the round.

3. 03Consolidate notes before sending them

   One set of agreed notes from the whole team is a revision round. Four people sending separate and partly contradictory notes is four rounds of work and usually a worse result, because the composer is averaging opinions instead of following a direction.

   • Say which notes are mandatory and which are preferences
   • Where two notes conflict, resolve it before sending rather than after

4. 04Lock the music before the mix, not during it

   Late music changes cascade into the mix, the versions and the loudness measurement on every cut-down. A change that looks small at the music stage is rarely small three stages downstream.