Big Band Swing has been back in favor recently and you just can’t beat that sound. Gone are all the production effects, loops  and synthezisers used in today’s music and the quality rests solely upon good arranging and good playing. We’ve had a lot of fun arranging Big Band music for a dance show, which will be touring the USA and Canada.

This particular 16 piece band actually consisted of  5 musicians, multi-tracking their parts and  joined via the internet!
Our job has been to write the arrangements and make sure that they sound stylistically authentic and are easy to read.
These excerpts are completely unmixed  but you can clearly hear the quality of the playing and hopefully, the writing too

If you’ve ever sat down to work out the notes of your favourite tune then you’ll have some idea of the daunting task of transcribing and arranging  individual notes for 5 saxophones, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones and rhythm section. When it all comes together and you hear that sound, there’s nothing to beat it.
So if you need a Big Band sound but don’t have a Big Band budget…all is not lost

Every day you can now download a different, completely free, full length royalty free music track for your non-profit projects.
Simply login or register and visit this page for your free download:

http://www.smartassmusic.com/royalty-free-music/free-downloads.html

We’re introducing film composer Yuri Sazonoff this month with  a  stunning collection of  orchestral pieces – recorded with a live orchestra in Moscow.
Both the playing and the writing are simply wonderful.

These tracks are available to download either as a collection (including various edits) or as individual edits.
Orchestral Soundtracks 1 includes:

Passion of Love – A beautiful,  romantic, 8 minute  uplifting orchestral score. Beautiful string writing.

Vengeance – An exciting Hollywood style action score suitable for  battle scenes and action sequences.

Requiem – A stunning romantic, melancholic piece similar to Barber’s Adagio for strings. (No separate edits available).

9th Sense –  Mysterious, romantic, uplifting, sensual, soundtrack similar to Danny Elfmann.

Olympic Glory – Strong, slow theme. Sophisticated, rich, warm, beautiful, Hollywood style theme.

Olympic Spirit – A triumphant, uplifting, winning style orchestral soundtrack . Exciting and moving.

Each of these tracks (excluding “Requiem”)  have multiple edits available to download.

If this collection was purchased as individual edits it would cost over $400  but you can download this entire package for under $95

Native American Background Music Package:
A great value package of 6 Native American tracks, from Film and TV composer Alex Khaskin.

The collection comprises of dark, brooding underscores, full of mystery and spirituality, conjuring up images of a dark Alaskan landscape.

Native Soul – Edit 1
A dark underscore using Native American Indian flute, percussion and subtle vocal effects.

Native Secret – Edit 1
Opens with a Native American Indian Flute the percussion and subtle modern effects are added at 32s. More optimistic sounding

Native Mystery – Edit 1
A slow, broody, mysterious piece with Native American Indian flute and percussion

Native Legend – Edit 1
A quiet, dark piece with light percussion at 62 seconds. Native American flute

Native Fire – Edit 1
A dark, mysterious Native American Indian underscore.Wooden flute, vocal

Arctic Depth – Edit 1
A mysterious, dark background track. Native American influences, light percussion, wooden flute.

The package of  all 6 Native American background music tracks for under $49 is available here

With Valentine’s day around the corner you’ll be needing great sounding romantic music and I’m not exaggerating when I say it doesn’t get better than this!

We’ve just added some fantastic romantic orchestral tracks,  composed by Yuri Sazonoff and  recorded by a live orchestra.

Passion of Love is simply stunning. 8 minutes of beautiful romantic orchestral music with wonderful string writing.
Olympic Glory is another live recording by Yuri and is an uplifting, romantic track.
I’ll be posting more about Yuri soon……….

Following the huge popularity of our sophisticated Hip Hop track “Urban Symphony” , we’re adding more  tracks to the collection.

Each track is a mixture of authentic hip hop beats and production combined with the sophistication of a classical string section. Also, each track contains multiple edits, loops and stings.

Street Walk is an edgy track with  a great, boomy  kick drum and authentic urban loops. The strings gives it a classy edge, with the catchy melody on top.

Urban Class is a more classically influenced track, especially towards the end when you hear a full on baroque style accompaniment from the strings.

You seem to like them and we’re having fun with these, so they’ll be more on the way.

We’ve just added some wonderful new tracks from our electronic music composer Jon Cooper and he’s just gone all acoustic on us!

And it’s brilliant.

He’s applied his usual, wonderful minimalist approach and innate musical taste to these 3 acoustic tracks:

Dreamers combines a mellow, laid back beauty and a modern quirky approach to instrumentation. Acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and accordion, arranged with great confidence.

On a Hill combines the acoustic guitar with an ethereal synthesizer but manages to create a warm, human feeling throughout.

You Complete Me is a beautiful, warm, touching, solo acoustic guitar track.

Also, we’ve currently got about 4GB of great music waiting to be added………and a brand new site on the way!

We’re very excited to announce that work on our brand new version of smartassmusic.com has begun.
Since the current site has grown over the past 2 years, we realize that it’s become increasingly difficult to search quickly for the music that you’re looking for so we’re building you a new site from scratch!

I don’t want to say too much now but our focus will be on speed and search and we’ll  have an additional part to the site which I’m really excited about………….but that’s under wraps for now!

 Just a quick post to let you know that some of our loop collections have dropped in price

Our Hip Hop Loops package consisting of 19 loops and 4 stings is now only £4.99 ($8). This includes your royalty free license which allows you to use these urban loops within podcasts, videos, websites, local radio and TV and students films.

Hip Hop Loops Package 
Don’t forget that all of our edits and loops can be purchased separately and now for only £0.49p ($0.80c) each.

Many people are confused about exactly what “royalty free music” is, so I thought I’d clear up some misconceptions

 
Firstly: Royalty free music is NOT free. It’s also NOT “copyright free” music.
 ”Royalty free” means that you don’t pay the “royalties” ………but you do need to pay for the license to use the music, either within a production (such as a TV program,video or film) or other usage such as public performance or “music on hold”.
Obviously this differs from commercially available “chart” music, where the CD price or download fee does NOT cover any commercial, broadcast or public performance usage and is only for private listening.

Initially, “stock music“, “production music” or  ”library music” would have derived income  from  a “needle-drop” fee (royalty) each time a piece of music was played. The cost of each “play” would also depend upon the usage e.g. Film, TV, radio, etc. 
By purchasing royalty free music,  media companies can access  music far more cost effectively as well as being able to  license  music quickly. Alternative methods of licensing can still be time consuming and expensive whereas royalty free music is now a vital source of legal music for use in corporate videos, internet video, radio, TV, film, animations, podcasts and websites.

Over the years royalty free music has gained a reputation for sounding cheesy and cheap but  companies such as SMARTassMusic, are trying hard to change that image by only including the highest quality music, composed and recorded by professional musicians.
We reject approximately 95% of submitted material and we pride ourselves on the high quality of composition and production. To help keep our standards high we have absolutely no user-generated content and never will. The criteria for inclusion is that either the music is good enough so that we would enjoy listening to it ourselves or if it has an obvious media purpose.

Check out some of our showcase tracks here: Editors picks 

For more information:
Royalty free Music
Music Cue Sheets
Buying Guide
Licensing