Cue Tips: 50 songwriting, composing, and music production hacks to speed up your sync journey

by Dean Krippaehne

Dean Krippaehne, author of the #1 Amazon Best Seller Books, “Demystifying the Cue” and “Demystifying the Genre,” has done it again with his essential new book, “Cue Tips.” Cue Tips contains 60+ tips and tricks to help speed up the sync-journey of any aspiring songwriter, composer, or music producer. This quick reference guide holds the same tried and true strategies that helped propel Dean to secure thousands of sync placements in TV shows, Films and Ads throughout his twenty-year career. Learn what to do and what not to do in this no-nonsense, transformative guide. Formatted into 60+ short chapters with nuts-and-bolts tips on songwriting, composing, recording, production, networking, WFH agreements, and more, so you can quickly and easily find the answers to your most pertinent sync questions. This easy-to-navigate book is perfect for those just beginning their journey as well as a fantastic refresher for those already in the hunt.

157 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 3, 2024

Reviews

[David Rubenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second book I have read by Dean Krippaehne. The first book, written 11 years ago, was Demystifying The Cue: Thoughts and strategies for creating competitive Film and TV music in today’s new media world. Both books are about music production, that is, producing music for sync in TV and film. Most of the music produced for TV shows are taken from music production libraries. There are hundreds of these libraries, and each one may have thousands upon thousands of music tracks. These tracks are organized by genre or style, and further tagged by instrumentation, mood, and other attributes.

So, where do these music tracks come from? They come from composers all around the world. Dean Krippaehne has made a full-time career composing these tracks. (I met him at a TAXI.com sync music conference, a very cool, low-key dude!) He has signed over 1,500 songs and cues to music production libraries -- that's a lot! He knows his stuff. And his music has made its way to thousands of TV, film, and advertisement placements. It really takes a lot of these placements to be able to earn a living. The music has to be high quality, of course, but to earn a living it also has to be high quantity. This book is all about how to compose high quality, high quantity, music tracks that will be useful to music supervisors.

This book is not a comprehensive guide to the subject; his first book was a bit more all-encompassing. But this book lists fifty "must haves" in order to be successful. His "cue tips" are short and to the point. The book is very short, but that's OK. It is jam-packed with very useful information and guidelines that are essential to getting music accepted into production libraries and placed into TV and film.