TV & Film
Production Music
Six lessons. How to write production music for television and film — understanding briefs, composing to picture, and building a sync catalog that supervisors return to.
Writing music that works
on screen and in the market.
TV and film production music is the backbone of the sync licensing industry. Every scene in every show and every film needs music — background cues, emotional underscore, genre-specific library tracks, and licensable recordings that editors can drop into picture and trust. This course teaches you how to write that music, understand the market for it, and build a catalog that earns repeat placements.
Course Objective
Give you a working understanding of the TV and film production music market — how briefs work, how music supervisors think, how to compose to picture, and how to build a catalog that targets real placement opportunities across television, streaming, and film.
Course Format
6 lessons delivered by email — one per week at your own pace. This course pairs with the Music Mixing & Production course in Cohort 2, where both are taught together as an integrated live program with group calls and direct feedback from Dr. Smith.
Who Teaches It
Dr. William E. Smith — composer with placement credits on NBC, CBS, Fox Sports, Bravo, the NFL, NBA, and Smithsonian Channel. This course is taught from direct, working experience in the sync market — not theory, not secondhand advice.
Instructor’s placement credits include
Built for composers who want
real placements.
If you’re writing music and wondering how to get it into TV and film — or if you have placements already and want to build a more strategic catalog — this course gives you the market knowledge and compositional framework to do both.
6 lessons. The complete
sync pipeline.
From understanding how music supervisors think to building a catalog they return to — each lesson covers a distinct stage of the TV and film production music process, with practical exercises you apply in your own sessions.
How the TV & Film Music Market Actually Works
The sync licensing ecosystem — music supervisors, music libraries, licensing agreements, PROs, and how production music actually gets from a composer’s hard drive to a television screen. The market structure most composers never learn until after their first placement.
Reading & Responding to a Brief
What a sync brief actually asks for, how to decode the language supervisors use to describe what they need, and how to translate a brief into compositional decisions — tempo, key, instrumentation, mood, and energy arc — before you open your DAW.
Composing to Picture — Scoring Without the Film
How production music differs from scoring to a locked picture, and how to write tracks that work independently of any specific scene. The technical and compositional approach to writing music that editors can drop into any moment in a show and trust — spacious melody, clear emotional arc, and proper dynamic range.
Genre, Mood & the Production Music Toolkit
The genre and mood categories that drive production music licensing — Drama, Comedy, Action, Romance, Tension, Underscore, Inspirational, Sports. How to write intentionally in each one, what makes each category structurally distinct, and how to build a catalog that covers multiple categories from a single core compositional approach.
Building a Sync Catalog That Gets Return Placements
How to think about your catalog as a product line rather than a collection of individual tracks — consistent sound, strategic genre coverage, proper metadata and tagging, and the submission workflow that keeps your music in front of supervisors who already know your work. The habits of composers who get called back.
Delivering Professional-Grade Work — Mix, Master & Submit
The technical standards for TV and film music delivery — sample rates, bit depth, stem exports, mix headroom, and loudness targets. What supervisors and libraries expect in a submission package, and the quality threshold a track needs to clear before it’s ready for placement consideration.
Practical knowledge from
a working placement artist.
Every lesson connects directly to what you’ll do in your next composition session — and the next submission. No filler, no theory for its own sake.
Taught by a composer with
real placement credits.
Dr. Smith is a working composer and Associate Professor of Music Technology at Bowie State University with over 30 years of experience at the intersection of music composition, production, and education.
His compositions have been licensed and placed across major television networks, sports broadcasts, and nationally syndicated programs — including NBC, CBS, Fox Sports, Bravo, the NFL, NBA, and Smithsonian Channel. He knows what supervisors look for because he’s worked with them directly.
This course is built entirely from that working experience — the market knowledge, compositional process, and submission practices behind real placements, taught in a format that any serious composer can apply immediately.
Write music that
gets placed.
Six lessons covering the full TV and film production music pipeline — from understanding briefs to delivering submission-ready tracks, taught by a composer who’s done it.
