The best online film scoring courses can teach you contemporary film scoring techniques and give you invaluable music production and MIDI orchestration tips. The advantages of online film scoring courses over campus courses are many: a flexible schedule, freedom of location, and lower total costs. The following list has everything from video tutorials offering film scoring tips to film scoring programs and courses offered by accredited schools. We’ve even unearthed some free online courses of interest to film and game composers.
If you have an online film scoring course or program to recommend, let us know in the comments. We’ll be updating this list regularly, so make sure to bookmark it and check back soon!
For extra study material, check out our picks for the best film and game scoring books.
Hans Zimmer Teaches Film Scoring
Did you know Hans Zimmer is a self-taught composer? Learn how to use film scoring to tell a story in 31 video lessons from the legend himself.
Film Scoring Tips & Tutorials
This section lists one-off courses you can take to brush up on your film scoring, game composing, and music production skills.
Lynda (Audio + Music Tutorials)
Lynda specializes in software and technology tutorials in general, and music producers in particular will find a wealth of in-depth courses here. For $25 a month or $250 a year, you get access to the entire library. Whether you want to learn music production, mixing and mastering, post production, audio engineering, recording, music business, or how to make the most of your music notation software or DAW (REAPER, Logic, Ableton, Pro Tools, etc.), you can find it here. If you’re more of an interactive learner, there are project files you can download and work on with the Premium subscription ($37.50).
Example Courses
- Film Scoring with Pro Tools
- Music Editing for TV and Film in Pro Tools
- Producing Music for Advertisements
- Getting Started in Audio and Music Production
Online Film Scoring Programs
Berklee Online
If you have the budget, Berklee College of Music offers several courses of interest to film and game composers through Berklee Online. For-credit courses are $1,449, while non-credit courses cost $1,200. Berklee Online offers online certificate programs (including “Orchestration for Film and TV”), and they recently began offering bachelor degree programs, including a degree program in “Music Composition for Film, TV, and Games.”
As a Berklee student, you also get lifetime access to the exclusive Berklee Music Network, which includes a regularly updated job board and discounts on gear and services offered by industry retailers to Berklee students.
Free Courses for Film and Game Composers
A MOOC (massive open online course) is a free course you can take online with thousands of other participants. Many of these are offered by top universities. You can browse MOOCs using aggregators such as CourseBuffet.
Here’s just a small sampling of music business, production, and composition-related MOOCs of interest to film and game composers:
Berklee College of Music MOOCs
Berklee offers a number of free online courses through Coursera:
- Introduction to the Music Business
- Introduction to Music Production
- Songwriting
- Jazz Improvisation
- Modern Musician Capstone — “The top 10 students who complete the capstone course will receive a $1,449 scholarship toward a Berklee Online course of their choosing.”
More Free Online Courses for Film Composers
- Fundamentals of Music Theory (The University of Edinburgh)
- Write Like Mozart: An Introduction to Classical Music Composition (National University of Singapore) — I took this MOOC and I highly recommend it!
- Fundamentals of Rehearsing Music Ensembles (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
- Introduction to Digital Sound Design (Emory University)
- Fundamentals of Audio and Music Engineering (University of Rochester)
- Critical Listening for Studio Production (Queen’s University Belfast)
- New World, New Map: GPS for Today’s Music Industry (West Virginia University)
- Introduction to Acoustics (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)