Orchestration, Tips and Tricks for composers. Options

[jesshmusic]

Hello All!

I thought it would be good to have a topic devoted to the art of orchestration. Great things can be accomplished when composers put their brains together.

Especially in orchestration... certainly the most difficult aspect (and most rewarding) of composition.

Feel free to get it rolling. Here are a few tricks I have learned in my days:

1. Less is more. Don't be afraid to have smaller parts of the ensemble playing. I'm sure everyone know's this.. An orchestra playing with every instrument at full force the entire piece is boring.

2. Know instrument's limitations. The bassoons, for instance, will not be heard very well in loud sections of the orchestration with a lot of instruments playing, but they can still make for good filler. During the big choral part in Beethoven's Ninth, they are playing the fast ostinato pattern with the strings.

3. Listen to as much music as possible... especially modern. Analyze scores and see what the masters did. Research.

These are vague things. I hope many different composers will post specific tips and tricks they have picked up over the years. Instrumentalists can also use this topic to tell us composers what not to do. We sometimes can make life hard on you guys. (Especially Horn in F players!)


Jess Hendricks
Composer & Arranger

[X4fer]

I have a pretty basic question on this. I have Logic and haven't used sample libraries other than the ones included in Logic itself. Garritan Personal Orch. seems like a good candidate for me. I'm curious how to get the range of sounds and articulations out of a violin when I'm using a keyboard to drive it. Where are the lines between using, say, a bowed violin sample vs. a plucked sample, using the parameters you can alter with the keyboard (e.g. attack, velocity, duration), and altering envelope characteristics.

Just trying to visualize this in general. I'm sure that this could get pretty hairy in extreme circumstances, but I'm just wanting to have a reasonable level of control over things that one might reasonably want to do within the context of a piece with some variability in it.

TIA,

Daniel