Film & TV Music - Writing for Underscore

Since there are many classifications of production music, I thought I'd share my observations of what makes a thing called "underscore". I remember writing a trailer and finding out that it was actually more suitable for "underscore". I was wondering... "what is that?" Well, underscore is sort of what it sounds like - score for under stuff in the film.
The key to writing successful underscore is to provide a bed of music that both engages the listener's attention AND is easily ignored. In fact, there are techniques that we can use to make sure that our music is easy to ignore :). It might seem strange to want to do this - as composers, we like to think our music will be heard, right? - but underscore isn't without creative merit. The trick is to do both at once - make a musical impact AND not be on the viewers main train of thought. Today, I'll share my observations on how to go about doing that with a few specific compositional tactics...

[@mike-synthetica]

Thanks Chef, really helpful. If I am not really a musician but I want to add some depth and production value to my video with underscore. I was thinking of using something like Arkhis and trying to do it straight in Resolve's fairlight page although I also have Ableton. A short demo with something like that might be interesting. I guess I'm a little bit worried that I'm going to break some music rule that I don't know about. So maybe a guide with safety flags "If you stay in this lane you won't break anything". Good luck making it to 1000 subs!

[@musicchefpro]

You’re welcome, thanks for watching! I like your idea about making some sort of ‘Safety guide’ for composing - or even a quick and dirty recipe that can get you 80% of the way there most of the time. I’ll give this some thought and see what I can come up with!