Nov 15, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Dynamic Shaping of Sustained Brass Brass instruments have the greatest timbral change over their dynamic spectrum. Therefore swells, crescendos, sffz, fp are highly dramatic and very effective on them. If you use long sustained brass chords or tones on key parts of...
Nov 9, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Hiding Behind Orchestration Having the sound of a full symphony orchestra at your fingertips to play with is always exciting and opens up endless possibilities for interesting soundscapes. However, orchestration should never be a tool to compensate for a weak...
Nov 2, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Piccolo Flute Highest Register In it’s highest register, the piccolo flute can be very piercing and shrill and sometimes even painfully loud. This can be a great effect when you want a really edgy sound. For example in action or horror music this sound can work...
Oct 19, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Harmonizing Melodic Key Motifs If you have a melody for example in the trumpets (it works in any melodic writing but it is most prominent on brass themes), it creates a very nice colour to harmonize the melody on key motifs or phrases. Coming from all trumpets playing...
Oct 12, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
The Orchestral Percussion Section The use of the orchestral percussion section has become twofold in the last couple of years. In trailer music and modern Hans Zimmer inspired scoring, very often its function has become to mimick a drum set, basically providing a...
Oct 5, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Melodic Ideas in the Same Register This is one of the first rules one learns when learning to orchestrate and still I very often see it being done wrong: make space for important melodic lines. You don’t want to have several lines and textures in the same range walk...
