Orchestral Music Production

I thought I’d take a moment to talk about the files used to make notated scores versus the files used to make audio mockups.  My personal opinion is that these two processes are quite different and are best kept separate. (more…)

I know I’ve been blogging about this one chord for a month now, but I wanted to mention one more thing before moving on. 

This post will be about the horns.  (more…)

In the last post, we talked about voicing a chord like the overtone series.  This is a common recommendation found throughout orchestration literature.  One of the observations about the overtone series is that the spacing of the overtones begins wide and becomes tight as the series rises in pitch.  This often leads to a general recommendation – avoid tight spacing of chord tones in the low register.

In this post, I thought I’d talk a bit about whether I thought that recommendation was sound and when it should be followed.  I’ll go through two examples of tight voicings in the low register, one that works well and one that doesn’t. (more…)

One of the most common guidelines you see in orchestration literature is to “emulate the overtone series when voicing chords”.  I’ll state up front that I generally believe this is good advice.  In this post, we’ll take a look at the overtone series and how this compares to the Tchaikovsky chord we’ve been discussing.

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I saw some good questions on that last post, so I thought I’d take a quick minute and respond.

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Over the next couple of posts, I thought we’d take a quick look at a chord from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6.  The chord is a G major triad and comes near the end of the third movement. It is a short, accented, climactic hit.

First, here is the full chord as scored for full orchestra. It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, one tuba, timpani, crash cymbals, and strings.  (more…)

In my last post, I talked about some basic business ideas I thought composers should consider.  That included defining your target customer, the customer’s “pains”, your product, and your competition.  If you have not read that post, it is worth reading here.

This post is a continuation of that thought.  Here, I will discuss four mistakes commonly made by composers, along with some suggested course corrections. (more…)

I thought I’d take a break from Orchestration this week and talk a little bit about business.  Basically, I often get asked…  “OK.  Now that I know all this great stuff, how do I make money at it?”  I’ll just offer some thoughts on that.

This is basically a business exercise.  It’s about providing a product/service to a customer…  So we’ll be thinking along those lines.

This post, I’ll offer some questions I think you should ask yourself so that you can formulate a concrete game plan.  In the next post, I’ll mention some common mistakes I see over and over again.

Question #1 – Who is your customer? 

It’s surprising how many musicians just ignore this one.  Ignoring it is typically something along the lines of, “I’ll just write great music and the rest will take care of itself.” (more…)

In the last post, we took a look at a horror cue that used some very dissonant chords, including a chord that used all 12 notes in the chromatic scale.  Such chords are very dissonant and not typically covered in traditional harmony courses, but they are useful in some commercial settings (like horror films).  They are also used by some current concert music composers.

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I thought it would be fun to post a little something I’m working on at the moment.  So, below is a link to a YouTube clip with me talking about a file.  The music is low-to-medium intensity horror music intended for use in horror type shows.  Musically, it uses a slight rhythmic pulse (much like a ticking clock) and layers weird and dissonant hits and effects on top. I hope you enjoy…