As most of you already know, we have a nifty music search engine with over 130,000 tracks at your finger tips (click HERE to get started).  Think of our Soundminer search engine as Google on steroids for all of your musical needs!  Since I’m the gal who puts all of the music online from our fabulous music libraries, I am going to shed some light on tricks of the trade to find exactly what you are looking for in the least amount of time.  As the saying goes, “Time is money!”  Now that you’ll be saving tons of time/money, you can take that trip to Hawaii you’ve been daydreaming about.  Be sure to send us a postcard!
 
The first trick I want to share is the magic of the padlock tool.  The padlock is found to the left of the search bar:
 

 
Let’s set up a music search scenario, shall we?  Let’s say we need music to score a cocktail party scene set in a swanky hotel lounge.  There is a live jazz quartet playing in the background featuring a vibraphone player.   When searching for music, it is best to think in broad terms first and then narrow the field.  The first thing we are going to type in the search bar is “lounge jazz” since that is the most broad overall snapshot of what we are looking for.
 

 
The search for “lounge jazz” yields 1083 results.  That’s a lot of music to pick through, right?  Here’s where the magic padlock comes into play!  Click the padlock so it’s in the closed position.  We are going to start to narrow this search down to the nitty gritty.  Type in “quartet” so only lounge jazz with four musicians will pop up.
 

 
The word “quartet” has taken the search from 1083 tracks down to 60.  What a difference one word makes!  We can’t forget the fact that the scene features a vibraphone player in the background.  The cool thing about the Magic Padlock is that once it is closed off, it stays closed.  The final step of this music search will be typing the word “vibraphone.”
 

 
Voila!  We have 5 tracks that would be perfect choices for the cocktail party scene.  I can almost taste the martinis…..
 

 
Since we’re on the topic of music searches, we are proud to introduce our new Music Director JD Adams!  JD and our creative team are available 24/7 to lend a hand for music searches.  We are your music concierge!