5 Alarm Music is your music concierge!  We may not be wearing those cool Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band styled jackets donning a pill box hat, but the 5 Alarm Music creative team is here to make your production have the best soundtrack around.  With over 120,000 tracks on our Search & Rescue website, we cover the broad spectrum of music genres.  We can even custom build a track to your specifications at the drop of a pill box hat from some of the most seasoned production music composers around!

Reaching us is easy

I’m E. Tyler Harp and I’m your Music Director here at 5Alarm Music. Many of you know what a Music Director does but for those of you that don’t, let me tell you a little bit about what I can do for you. Pure and simple, I’m the guy that finds you the music you need for your productions. You can call me, email me, fax me, send me a carrier pigeon, whatever, and let me know the kind of music you need. I’ll dig through our vast catalog so you don’t have to, and send you the tracks that I think will work best for you. Usually in 30 minutes or less or your pizza is free. (While supplies last) Also, remember that my service knows no time restraints. I am available to clients 24/7 which comes in handy for those projects that don’t really allow for sleep.

Now that thats all out of the way, let’s talk about searching on our brand spanking new search engine. As Craig mentioned in a previous post, we have a fantastic new search engine called 5Alarm Search and Rescue available to all of our clients. If you are still using our previous search tool, go to search.5alarmmusic.com, register for access and come on in and kick the tires. You can immediately start using the site to search and you’ll receive an email from us shortly granting download access to all of our music.

I’ve been using the new 5Alarm Search and Rescue site for the searches that I perform for our clients and I can’t imagine a more comprehensive search tool. Believe me, I’ve used them all. The great thing about the new site is that there are many built in functions that help you find, collect and download the music you need as quickly as possible. Now, you are encouraged to experiment and search however you like, but here are few tips to streamline your search process:

1. Specifics and Cross Ref:

If we type “rock” into the keyword search, even with our results grouped we’ll come up with 6241 results. Ouch, that’s a lot to sift through, but have no fear. We can weed the results down to a more manageable number. If you can, think of some other keywords and/or adjectives to go along with “rock”. Now comes the fun part. Lock down the current search results set by clicking on the lock button to the left of the keyword search field. With the lock “closed” we will search within our 6241 “rock” results only. Time to get crazy with the adjectives. If we type in “Fast” and “Driving”, we weed down our results from 6241 to 179 tracks. Whew! Quite a bit more manageable, wouldn’t you say? Also, keep in mind you aren’t limited to adjectives and tempo keywords. You can also mention instrumentation, specific music genres and/or emotive moods like “sad” or “uplifting”.

2. “Quotes”

Say we want to find all the solo guitar tracks. We can type in “solo guitar” into the keyword search but our results are going find any instance of the words “solo” and “guitar”. These results aren’t helpful because any tracks that mention either the words “solo” or “guitar” will come up regardless of the context. In other words, we may come up with guitar tracks that have drum solos. No good, right? There is a solution. If we wrap “solo guitar” in “quotation marks”, the system will only come up with the results that contain the words “solo” and “guitar” right next to each other, in context and in the word order we typed.

3. Exclude Words

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched for jazz combo music and come up tracks that feature instrumentation that I don’t want, like saxophone for instance. It wastes time and time is precious. Then one day it dawned on me – “E-Ty”, I said, “if this thing searches like Google, why don’t you throw a minus sign in there followed by keywords that you want to exclude, and volia! Saxless jazz music!”

It looks like this: Jazz Combo-sax.

You can get really specific. Say I wasn’t quite sure on the tempo I wanted, but I know that I DON’T want my saxless jazz tracks to be fast. I can type this: Jazz Combo-sax-fast. The “-” is basically code for “not” so essentially we’re saying this:

Jazz Combo(not)sax(not)fast.

Pretty cool, huh? Yeah… I’d say so.

4. This OR That

Sometimes to save time you might want to see results across two major keywords. For instance – let’s pretend we want to browse both “techno” and “house” tracks. If we simply type in “techno house” our results will contain tracks that have both techno and house keywords associated with them. But, if we instead type in “techno OR house”, we will come up with the all the techno tracks and all the house tracks in one result set. This is very useful when you have two main genres in mind and you want to search both. Once we have this dual genre result set, we can lock them off and cross-ref for other keywords using the lock function we discussed above. Oh, one more thing, make sure you have “OR” capitalized.

So there we have it kids. Three simple ways to optimize your searching and save time when using our new 5Alarm Search and Rescue search engine. We’re really excited to provide you with the best online search system available, but don’t forget, you can always trust me to handle all of the searching for you. As I mentioned above, I am available 24/7 and easiest reached by email. Feel free to send your music searches, questions and comments to tyler@5alarmmusic.com
I look forward to hearing from you.

Until next time this E. Tyler Harp saying: The search is on!