Here you go

http://www.idnmusic.com/education/the_mechanics_of_song_structure.html

Do searches on the internet for song structure or creating music etc.
I would also purge the minds of the people on the Acid forum.

I personally found it much easier to purchase royalty free music instead of creating it so I could spend most of my time devloping new projects, editing and effect creation. Digital Juice Stack Traxx is also excellent.
DH

Thanks Tor,
Your building analogy is quite good.
When I try to use Acid I feel like someone has delivered a load of lumber to an empty lot, I am handed a saw, hammer and nails and have to build a house. If I were a skilled carpenter that might work, but since I'm not it would be much more useful to get two things:
1. lots of prefinished components (walls, doors, windows, etc)
2. Simple instructions on how to put them all together
Once I was competent at building a house that way maybe the next time I could construct my own walls, etc the next time but to start out it's a significant challenge.
So I was hoping there might be a couple of good loop collections (Sony seems to have a lot of them) that would contain the components (not just loops but starts and endings, etc) to build a song to get me started.
I have purchased an ACID book (can't recall the title right now) but it didn't do a very good job of explaining what I need, which is a real simple cook-book style of guide to get me going.
Rick

I would recommend a class in music theory, or even a book. You can learn the technical rules of music, which are pretty fundamental and enough to get you off and composing your own music.....then from there you can go about breaking the rules and understand why some notes play together well and why others don't. In simplest form music is based off of a "musical scale". Each scale has a type of feeling it brings to the overall song. For instance a Major scale, usually brings an up and happy feeling, where a minor scale will bring a dark, omninent feeling. Each scale also has a "root note". A typical musical phrase will always start and end with that root note.

With loops that have music in them (ie non drum loops) it will usually tell you the "root note" of "key signature", which is another way to describe the musical scale the music is structured around. If it doesn't then you will need to figure out what that root note is. So in Acid when you assign a loop a root note, acid uses this information to transpose all the other notes to the master key signature in the project. Therefore, you can take 2 different loops where one loop is in the key signature of "D" and the other in the key signature of "C" and have them sound good together in a master key signature of "G". You cannot take a loop in the key signature of C and play it with another loop in the key signature of "D" and play them together and expect it to sound musical. They must be transposed to the same key signature to give them a remote chance of sounding good together. Those are just some of the basic rules of music theory.

I started studying music at age 13. I'm now--well, much older and I think you are tackling a subject that can potentially engulf you unless you stay on a narrow tack as to what you want to accomplish.

My suggestion would be to search the Net for one of the inexpensive software programs that teaches students basic songs on the piano (or Moog keyboard--or computer keyboard) in a short time, and this would give you the foundation for understanding why musical compositions seem to "stick" together.

I am doing some rough scoring of a DV film track and I found Richard Davis' softcover titled "Complete Guide to Film Scoring" very useful. It has a lot of information you may not need, about the film music business, but Chapters 13 and 14, and a few others, are valuable descriptions of where and why to drop music cues in a film or video scene (and where not to), and why to choose certain musical styles and flourishes over others. I'll bet Amazon has the book.

TorS has some great advice above (which I'm also going to follow), and consider that sometimes different characters or repeating motifs can have characteristic variations in the music bed each time they appear. An extreme example is James Bond's "theme" from 007 that followed him around like a swarm of flies. (007 was a movie from the last century--ask Granddad about it--har.)

...acid's great but Sonic Fire Pro is what you're describing ... got beginnings, got middles and ends ... they call it block music ... mix 'n match ... but spend some time with acid after you're caught up when you have some time to dabble ... amazing music can happen with acid....

I really appreciate all the comments. I would agree that the best way to learn something is to start with the basics and build from there. But my goal is to come up with music to use in video. While it would be nice to have the time to learn it properly I was "hoping" there might be some shortcuts.
Buyout music is the easiest way, except you need to find the right music and then deal with the length issues. Then there are applications like SmartSounds that can create music to match the length of your video. I'm looking for the next increment, a little more flexible (and creative) than SmartSounds but not where it will require protracted training to be marginally proficient.
I guess it sounds like I'm just lazy, but my goal is to produce the video, not become a musician. Not that I wouldn't enjoy becoming a musician, I just don't have the time.
Rick

Thanks "Clip",
That's kind of what I'm looking for. I was just looking to see if I could make SB Acid work in a similar manner if I had the right loops - sounds like maybe I'm hoping for too much.
Rick

"I guess it sounds like I'm just lazy, but my goal is to produce the video, not become a musician."

There are 2 ways to work when scoring music with Video. One is Audio Pre-production, where the audio is made first and the Video is edited to match the audio. The other is audio Post-production, where the Video is made first and the audio is edited to match the video. Usually audio pre-production requires a skilled video editor and audio Post production requires a skilled audio editor. You decide which way you want to work. I had a career in audio Post production for 4 years, if there was an easy way to do it without any effort, then I guess there wouldn't be a need for that career and people wouldn't have come to our Post production house and paid $300+/hr. for the service.

I recently went the SonicFire route and love it for what I'm doing. All the Acid stuff I heard sounded pretty "techno" which just doesn't work well for romantic or emotional moods for weddings or touching slide shows. I went for the $149 option with the ability to download extra tracks as needed instead of a higher priced version with track I would probably never use.

I like it.
MIchael