Aug 17, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Orchestration Strategy When orchestrating music, one of my favorite strategies is to orchestrate from most important to least important which means that you start off with the element that you need to be perceived as the main idea and work your way down to the...
Aug 10, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Articulation variety One of the things that makes music interesting and lively is variety in articulation and phrasing. Many composers coming from the sample world hardly ever think about whether a line might work better having it not completely as staccato or not...
Aug 3, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Unprepared high entrances for Brass High entrances out of the blue are a nightmare for every brass player and particularly tricky for horns (due to the way they produce their tones). The chances are quite high they the tone will be missed or there will be a split in...
Jul 27, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Dynamic Shaping of Long Notes Hardly any musician in an orchestra will play a long note with a static dynamic as samples do. Even if you don’t write in any dynamics or hairpins, the musicians will shape sustaining notes dynamically on their own. It’s usually very...
Jul 20, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Organ effect problems One of the most common problems of inexperienced orchestrators is the “organ-effect”, which happens when you double too many instruments in a middle register with relatively long notes. At a certain point, the transparency gets lost and the whole...
Jul 13, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Intonation without context Remember that the intonation with most instruments in the orchestra doesn’t work like a piano where you simply hit a key and the resulting pitch is perfectly in tune. Rather there is with all notes a variability in how high or low the...
