10 Golden Rules of Orchestral Programming with Christian Henson

so we've got people coming in i'm trying to i'm going to do synth spotting hey everybody welcome i'm just trying to spot benoit pelletier's i'm just trying to work out what sense he's got in the background hi everybody welcome welcome everyone who's just joining us we are going to take a few more minutes to just let everyone get comfortable grab a beer or a coffee or a tea a snack um yes christian good for you it's been a long day fishy bushy wow long time no see how you doing where's everybody uh chiming in from zooming in ecuador nashville oh yes adam i saw you on our last zoom welcome back thank you for being here again london texas salt lake city edinburgh france who's in edinburgh miriam is that horton yes jeremy was here as well on our last year defenders welcome back everybody it's looking suitably murky jeremy there is there is edinburgh at the back here i know from new york i don't know if you can see that but that's very much autumn in scotland for those of you who are lamenting the heat so jealous i miss sweater weather all right great modular setup sir oh no it's terrible maddie says it's quite confronting seeing your studio from this angle [Laughter] yes yeah and not too many new lockdown toys my favorite new thing is this which is the uh four track recorder that i kind of started my my career in music on um not the exact same i mean the same model not the exact same one it's full of like this brown dust that looks like they i don't know maybe it's like was used in phoenix or something arizona um but it this has cost me three times what i paid for it in 1900 and frozen to death so incredible hi there christian henson from spitfire audio uh welcome to another spitfire audio summer master class thanks so much for joining me and thanks to a select few who have joined me via zoom who are going to be asking me questions along the way mediated by miriam uh md of spitfire what is it it's spitfire audio what's the name of us in america lifetire audio usa that's us i like it excellent stuff so thanks again for joining and hopefully the crowd that are here are going to ask questions that you would want to be asked but also i'm going to be live on live chat so make sure the live chat window is open on youtube and if you're watching after the event uh then just be sure to open the live chat uh to look at how the conversation went they say a bad workman blames his tools but there really is a massive latency with zoom so when i start doing some of the like the short passages it's um not because i'm utterly atrocious i'm not a very good piano player but it's uh it's because uh there is a latency so there will be um i'll have to use quantize so what are we looking at today so just a little bit of a warning i'm not a natural public speaker um so when i get nervous uh i i think it's advisable to suggest that i may swear apologies in advance for that not angrily but just in a nervous uh manner we're looking today at the 10 rules of electronic orchestration or the 10 golden rules of orchestral programming so for many of you this is going to feel like going right back to kindergarten i'm hoping that for those of you who are experienced there'll be just maybe a little bit of a refresher kind of element to this a way of maybe thinking about things in a way that you hadn't done so do stick around even if at the beginning it sounds uh very basic so i think the first thing we should talk about is the fear and i think this is just something that is inherent to orchestral music and i would just request the first thing to do before even adopting the rules is to try and chuck away any innate fear you have of orchestral it is still in this day and age considered to be a very kind of um dare i say it kind of upper class people of privilege people who go to the conservatoire having to read music understanding the the theory of music it isn't entirely necessary i do respect and and humbly congratulate people who do go to music college but music for me is is just a basic kind of human need to express ourselves and i really don't think that you should feel um that you can't work with an orchestra or orchestra music just because you haven't been to the conservatoire we recently for our composer magazine interviewed fantastic film composer terence blanchard and i thought it was really helpful for me and in fact gave me confidence to actually do this master class i suffer from imposter syndrome something rotten whenever i do these and what he said about orchestration is it's just coloring in and i think that's a fantastic way of looking at it we're capable of writing music we're capable of sitting at a piano or a guitar or a sitar bishi and writing a piece of music um translating it into orchestras is just a decision process of i would say maybe i would extend on terence's idea of coloring but also shading and details and maybe just advancing your composition by the the the the stuff that orchestral brings to you the inspiration you get from working with orchestral instruments i myself cannot read music i still have to say get buggered down fulham airport for the bass clef and um i didn't go to music college in fact the school i went to this is my actual school and i didn't wear the czech trousers but i did have flares like that when i was at holland park school not prison in late 1970s early 1980s so i'm from an inner city um background and i've made a career that i believe is moderately successful in music for media i've done a bunch of films and tv shows including poirot which for someone doesn't read music i was pinching myself when i was doing that series so all i'm saying is don't feel that your background um kind of ring fences you away from doing orchestral we're part of a revolution and this is fantastic and i think that what always happens with revolutions is it's about people suppressing our access to knowledge to information and i think that what's great about the revolution we're a part of is we're a massive community that can speak to each other and there's so much we can learn from each other so this is just my take on the very basics of orchestral programming and hopefully a few new ideas for those of you who are experienced at this so let's start with ensembles for life um a lot of us i think we fear going well what do i start with do i start with a violin or with a cello or do i start with a voice and from all of the composers that i meet everyone starts with something to write with i think that we kind of have to put our two hats on here and that's why it's so great to have you know orchestrators help us with this stuff when we need it is the writing is is one part of what we do the orchestration is another so i'm just going to stick something down on a piano and that's maybe the thing that a lot of us use to write with [Music] so very simple part there i've written that on the piano and it's basically that is my ensemble that is what i'm used to but also i have favorite kind of string sounds and it's quite interesting when i speak to uh composers how often they will say well i use this korg m50 sound i used to write with vocal acquire patch and i find that that in itself if it works on vocals it'll probably work with strings but let me just pull up a string ensemble here and just start with this all i'm trying to say is nothing to be ashamed about starting with ensembles and just using it like a synth these are the album neocon swords a nice kind of soft sound there gonna play exactly the same part but play it idiomatically for the sound so try and join those notes up a bit not use the sustain pedal just quantized it there just to get it in time because of this latency i will come back to timing in a moment but that's basically it your first step at orchestral programming is finding an ensemble patch so you're not working with the different sections like your first second violins your violas cellos and bases you're just working with a string synth patch if you will so i'm going to move on to the next rule do we have any questions yet miriam no we have a few comments about the piano being a good place to start um and she like you know gave some props for holland park comprehensive massive next up articulate these are i guess playing styles and you'll see with this we've got all of these different buttons there are so many different ways in which you can play an instrument and when thinking about conjuring a spirit taking your composition the way in which it plays is is often as important as the notes that you've written so what i'm going to do is is just take you through a few different articulations and show you the huge differences in sounds that you get with strings say for example we have plucked strings so the heart is there the spirit is there the story's still there of what i'm trying to say but maybe we're feeling a little bit jollier less reflective about the thing or person that we're thinking about one of my favorite sounds is something that we've developed over many years with spitfire called flautando and again isn't an advert it's just something i've really been working on string players to create which is something that's almost harmonic like every sound you use will have a a slightly different way of well i request a different way of interacting with it so i often find that playing the individual sounds in according to what articulation you're using is a good kind of practice so let's lay this in one more time great so that's articulations again i'm just quantizing that because of the latency i'll return to that momentarily so that's it for our articulations on to the next rule miriam any questions then yeah that's good um although there was a question about um voicing when does that come into the picture are we are we too early are we jumping we're too early i don't know about you who are present but i find voicing uh scary and we shouldn't be scared of it at all but i will return to that it's one of the rules but we'll get there after a bit more fun maddie said that the flattando is just awe-inspiring give some chills every time so bravo for that absolutely and i think that's what's really important about before we enter into kind of voicing and into orchestration our coloring shading and all of the you know taking this very blank kind of 2d canvas that we create and and getting our airbrushes out i think it's really important to find a sound that you find inspiring uh to work with and and often what you'll find and what i find is you can knock stuff up very quickly with your ensembles and merely just put a few extra bits in to give your directors if film and tv composing is what you do is to kind of give a sense of where you're going with the orchestration with the director without kind of piling in there um uh with with with all of those different kind of meticulous methods of working but i think what we haven't done yet i mean i'm really pleased that it sounds okay as it currently is but what we haven't sorry talked about is expression and this is i think one of the key errors that people make when they're programming orchestral is the need to express yourself and i guess that's one of the the things that you really benefit from working with live musicians too is to actually watch how they produce a single note it isn't flat it isn't stuff being triggered on like samples it isn't um a synth and whatever you give them they will always emote into that note so we have several different forms of expression we have midi expression which i always describe as a method in which you balance the instrument you're playing against the rest of the band it's basically volume and then we have time brawl expression dynamic expression and what that does is actually cross fade through various different recordings of the orchestra so let's have a listen to the flat hando again i mean it's still a very soft tone but you'll hear a definite timbral shift now i don't know if this is poor practice but i tend to use because i come from a showbiz family so it's all about jazz hands for me i tend to use a combination of expression and the dynamic control to give me much more kind of bandwidth [Music] if you get these little dropouts it's the actual controller i'm using it's got some little dusty pots so apologies for those now on the kind of mention of theatrical naturally film tv games music is theatrical but particularly with drama film and tv the reason why orchestral is so it has so much staying power is because orchestral the thing that i think defines something that is symphonic is dynamics it's loud and soft and what's great about orchestras is you can get them to be loud and soft very quickly so it's really convenient for ducking behind dialogue and following the emotion of the story you're trying or your directors trying to tell whilst still keeping it sounding like music this is a little bit more difficult to do with say some rock music or some indie music because to suddenly change and shift gears um is not so idiomatic of that form of music which is why i think orchestra music has the staying power it has now often what i will do with the expression you'll see for you those of you on zoom you'll see i've got my expression controller here my dynamic here what you'll often see is um what sorry what i'll often do is is i'll record my right hand first and then my left hand so i can actually control it whilst i'm programming so i do something like this [Music] but if i'm in real kind of writing mode i'll just slap these downs like i have done and then record the expression afterwards and i think if you're looking for advice on shape it is musicians string players tend to start slightly softer build into the dynamic you want and then come back for the next note strike so that's what i'm going to try and do is imitate these these kind of wave shapes what i'll do here is just get up the midi so you can see what i've done let's get this little cheeky chappie out of the way and i'm just going to literally overdub the expression it's always very good at the beginning of your piece or cue to give your expression control a little wiggle to bring you to the point that you want it to be one of the mistakes i've often made is start doing some expression say here and then when you roll back here you'll get whatever you left your midi expression in fact let me just show you what i mean i'm gonna go and then if i don't have midi expression data here what will happen is it will kind of pick it up here so we always need to do a little bit of a mix here so let's just have a listen to that and it suddenly kind of jumps and catches up so always give it a wiggle in your pre-roll let me see if i can get this there we go so we've got expression let's do the modulation the modulation wheel cc one is this kind of default for most libraries for your dynamic control and expression is cc 11. a mistake that people often make i'm wiggling the first fader here expression you see it's to the right of dynamics the mistake a lot of people make is to put it by cc order so to put your dynamic control as your first fader your expression as your second the dynamic control is the one you want greater detail out of so i think to use this finger which has its own dedicated tendon i believe is so that's a rude sign in england um is is is the way to go so you want your your index finger to be controlling dynamics and your expression to be controlling the slightly more kind of just balancing elements of what you're doing so let's do the expression for this part [Music] okay it's just a little bit hot for me so what i'm going to do is just drag everything down a little bit like that and probably leave the expression where it is i'll do the same with the harmonics so what i'll do is i'll just bring those in gradually so they're not so hot at the beginning give it a wiggle nice and low [Music] there are different ways to express yourself with different styles of articulations here i've got some spiccatos and we express ourselves with velocity for these so the speed in which or how hard you hit your keyboard oh latency christian do you mind if i jump in sure we've got a few questions and i think that they're they're actually irrelevant um so saad bushnock is asking if you can maybe explain a bit more in detail the technical term behind wiggle like what do you mean exactly literally wiggling my fingers so give it a wiggle so it's at the level that you want it there's the little wiggle that actually just makes sure that your um your uh your instrument is going to come in at the correct volume as opposed to setting the volume playing it and then say fading it out or fading it up and then whatever level you left it at the end of the region will be the level when you start playing again what's really vital about giving a little wiggle is is playing stuff back to directors you want to make sure that the the mix is set via midi um as opposed to where you last left the um the project pointer if you know the marker i hope that answers that yeah and then maddie um was asking how important is it to you to play the midi again versus just copying it from above and then just maybe editing it into the midi window well i do a mixture of both it depends on it depends on the deadline i think something i'll return to later is the fact that the the the more independent pieces of midi information you can put in with humanity with you responding to each articulation the more real uh it'll seem i mean this is something i think is really interesting is the ear is so incredibly sensitive or rather the brain's interpretation of whatever the ear chucks it is incredibly sensitive and whilst we can't quite pinpoint these different things i think there's a sense of knowing based on the fact that you know if i was to emphasize that slightly strangely everyone in this room would go why did he put the emphasis on the word size it's a very subtle difference and i think that that's the same with music and the secret behind orchestral programming is to understand how the ear has developed to kind of accept and trust this form of music and if you use the orchestra in a way that it hasn't evolved it'll just seem queer to the ear but i think as much human interaction as you can give with your music the better particularly where expression is concerned which is why i spent a little bit of time on on this one so we're just going to lay down these spiccatos which are kind of short staccato notes mistake we often make with midi is is is often we will when we want to turn something up we will just like maybe turn the velocity up so it's nice on that but it suddenly has a very computerized nature and that is becomes very obvious with orchestral programming because what you're actually doing with these different velocity layers is actually going through different recordings at different timbral levels different loudness quietness mp mf all of that kind of stuff so here it kind of bites a little bit more the harder you hit it so be very wary when you want to turn up and down your staccatos of turning up and down the midi much much better to turn up and down either your track or your expression and also when writing orchestral kind of short parts that use velocity just think about how you accent these things again very rare that an orchestra is good it's more likely to be yeah and the way you accent these things will really bring out the musicality of your orchestral piece so let's just try that one more time with the help of a little bit of quantize so already these little accents i think are helping out so let's move along to legato which is the third way in which we express ourselves and what's very key about legato is these are joined up notes they're monophonic they only play one note at a time and the way in which most orchestral libraries understand how to produce legatos is for you to overlap the notes if i don't overlap them [Music] it kind of re-bows for each one now on this particular library which is the chamber strings uh depending on how loud you hit it will actually switch between the articulation so [Music] and this is a great way again of creating really expressive parts now in the original uh string part that i put down here there is a little line [Music] so what i'm going to do is just going to turn that up a bit and lay that down and i'll try and get maybe some different legato techniques in there but if not i can always edit it afterwards so let's just have a go with that that's what that's doing is it's really kind of bringing out that slightly kind of melodic uh part that's in the middle of the harmony so it doesn't just sound like a synth pad what i'm gonna do is just a little bit of post-production on this just to to make sure that everything's overlapping i have this in solo [Music] that looks all overlapped to me so i'll return to that shortly the other interesting thing and the final piece of expression uh that we can operate is also vibrato which is the way in which string players will kind of wiggle their fingers to create this kind of passionate sound so if i just have a listen to this part what i might do is something called 5050. but let's let's hear it with without the vibrato first [Music] so what you'll see there is it has a kind of an odd sound most string players play with a degree of vibrato but something that often uh will happen i don't if you're familiar with uh uh i don't know a lot of maybe soul singers will sing using something called 5050 which starts with it kind of with without vibrato and then you bring the vibrato in so i'm just going to try a bit of that as well as the expression that we used the modulation and the cc 11 and obviously these lovely legato articulations when they slide into the notes so here we go that's the kind of idea i'm going to record that wiggle it down so those are the kind of various forms of expression that you can input with midi and there's one more i'll come back to later which is something that is often kind of forgotten about with modern uh methods of production next up timing and i think this is a kind of a bit of a contentious uh uh discussion because uh what happens is is there's there's when you play an instrument you have a thing called action and then you have the note if you look at a piano the beta goes down and there's a whole kind of interaction between you hitting the key and that triggering the beta a damper coming off it hitting a string and then this whole action of inertia of the string starting to vibrate the more you cut your samples into just the note the less real they sound so good orchestral libraries will make sure that it will include for example the tuba playing player having to blow into his instrument for the air to have to circulate to a point at which the instrument is playing you can hear the actual note that there's a kind of and then um it's really kind of it's a massive gap between the uh so what we have to do and this is it's something you just get used to with orchestral programming is once you've laid your parts in and maybe quantize them i think i would recommend not quantizing them too strictly so i always have a little bit of a rule of maybe 50 there you then have to compared to your click try and drag them ahead of the beat now musicians when they're playing live will do this naturally this is why piano players when they switch to synths always play frustratingly ahead of the beat guilty as charged so let's put the click on [Music] for any of you djs out there you'll hear that that's slightly behind the beat so don't be shy you can go mega and what i'm going to do is pre-delay here and you really as i say you can go mega and you'll find that this will help keep your arrangements together now this doesn't just apply to short notes it applies to long and the long notes will particularly these kind of quiet flat handos will really take a long time to sound so let's try and find a good point so this all feels together i'm going to do a pre-delay massive one and on the harmonics that would be good enough for jazz now the legatos are particularly laggy because basically what that sampler is doing is working out what note you're on and then the next note you play it works out what note you're going to and it inserts the in between bit in between those two samples so there is much more of a lag so i'm going to bring that right forward and also the way that that glissando work the sliding bit i'm going to drag that even more forward so let's just do a general thing of like maybe 100. that's badly quantized that let's check it okay usually with orchestral players you want them the note they're going to to be at the point at which you want the note to be so you'll get them to gliss into the note and at the moment what we're doing is we're triggering that transition at the point where we actually want the destination note to be heard so i'm going to really drag that along here let's have a listen to this it's nice still a bit laggy maybe like there no i liked it where it was before it had a kind of a passionate laziness about it so timing a real key to think about and as i say with your short passages don't be tempted to quantize stuff too much again our ear will go that impossibly regimented impossibly computerized miriam any other questions before i move to the next rule very active chat at the moment but i'm happy to report that our community is answering each other's questions which is really nice um because i can't keep up but uh there is one thing in particular that i thought would maybe be interesting um do you keep two versions of your session say one with everything on grid in case you're getting a live recording and need those to be notated um and then maybe another slightly off-grid to get rid of the lag for a demo uh no uh what what i find i do is is um orchestration when you're physically converting something into a chart dots um i will then go through a whole housekeeping process at that point but i won't bother until the very end of the process because as we know with film and tv stuff changes and you have to redo stuff so basically if it sounds good i'm happy with that and then i'll worry about excuse my french there's a fantastic composer called paul english but he's done some orchestration for me and he said you know orchestration is very easy when someone gives you a logic file which is the door i work on um in the sense of of making sense of it but it's the cleaning up of the bat that takes all the time and it refers to it as bat because it's just it's just a haze of notes that are ahead of the beat that have all of this uh expression and modulation data and stuff like that and they tend to have to clear all of that out and if you've got a nice and friendly orchestrator if you're using an orchestrator they'll do that for you but as i say when i'm working on like low budget stuff i just go through a housekeeping process before creating those charts right next up where are we at timbre the thing about orchestral it's not just about dynamic it's about the number of colors that you can get so i think what i'm going to do here is i'm going to be really repetitive i'm going to switch maybe the lead kind of instrument [Music] that legato string to maybe a bassoon playing exactly the same melody [Music] in fact what i'm going to do is just going to turn those i'm actually purposely going to turn the velocity down so not only are we going quieter on the spicatos but we're actually playing quieter dynamic layers so you can really hear this beautiful bassoon as a composer you think okay well we need like a part b of that melody well it's not necessary with an orchestra because all you have to do is maybe just flip it to a different instrument so instead of a bassoon i'm going to play exactly the same thing with an auto flute i'll need to turn that up always reminds me of pink panther [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you see instantly your your attention is being kept these voices are changing and you have all sorts of other ways of really kind of keeping people's attention span and just keeping it alive with different ideas i think the thing i often hear with orchestral programming is the minute someone introduces a new sound it's like you need to use that all the time and it can be just these little plantalistic textures like maybe a couple of pizzicato notes maybe in the right note there though henson or indeed a little chime let's get down and it may be a little bass drum here as well let's listen to this section [Music] so i think that's the thing that i would really encourage when really investigating orchestral is that something defines orchestral music is all of these amazing different colors that you can adopt and switch between different voices and i think that's a really good way of thinking of these different instruments different voices and you get these call and responses all of those kind of things empathy i think that this is something that is possibly one of the most crucial things about um orchestral programming is is trying to understand what the player is having to do so often when i've been like demoing sounds that someone will jump up and play some mad kind of stride piano honky tonk thing with a flute sample and you're like well that's not going to sound very real because the instrument isn't designed to do that and i think that we must see that the evolution of orchestral music goes hand in hand with the evolution of instruments and the technology you know we we try and make a sound on an instrument and then we go wouldn't it be greater if that instrument was better at making that sound or that style of melody and then we can make that melody and we go wow now we can do this melody and i think there's a this kind of collaborative evolution that's happened between instruments and as a consequence orchestral music has itself evolved and if you ignore what our brains have been conditioned to understand as orchestral music you'll find that it just becomes less kind of believable what i'm going to do is i'm just going to pull up a concert flute player and i'm just going to double up the bassoon and the alto flute all the way and demonstrate a very easy way in which you can emphasize or empathize rather with the instrument so here's our lovely flute okay i'm going to turn it up a bit okay i think the octave down is good and what i'm going to do is i'm simply going to breathe out whilst playing it in and when i run out of breath whilst most flute players have a much bigger lung capacity than i do i know it's probably about time to think of a good gap in which they can take a breath and all of these tiny little observations these little empathetic observations will mean that your music is more believable i hope let me demonstrate [Applause] [Music] i think that then what i would probably do is introduce similar breathing patterns within the bassoon and again in the alto flute and then hopefully already just on a psychological level it just starts feeling a little bit more human it doesn't sound any different we're just responding to it in our brain as if there are some actual humans playing it so let's have a listen to that and this can apply to string players you know you'll often hear or you'll often see composers rather be very surprised that a string section can't go with pizzicato all of those kind of things so this really kind of leans into trying to this doesn't mean like massive amounts of textbooks which tend to be kind of quite abstract but this leans into a point that i'll be coming to later on which is the most important investment i think you can make in your future as an orchestral composer how we doing miriam apart from you wanting me to hurry up apart from that we're doing great so next up is uh voices and as i say you know this is something not to be scared of um voicing is taking your pads and giving them to the individual sections or players that you want and it really is incredibly simple and where midi uh composition is concerned you will get greater reality by actually giving each finger that you have which is like your voice to a different section so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back to the first legatos and i'm just going to lay those in here but actually they're actually the second violins because they're underneath the first now what i could simply do is go into my arrangement here and copy it down to here let me just copy it into the firsts and to the violas the cellos and the bases and it's a really simple rule basically section players if the second violins are going above them in pitch they will feel weird there's a simple pitch hierarchy so all you have to do when you're looking at voicing your different parts is to basically separate your parts into those voices so the highest part which is just this continuous note here goes into the firsts we've already done the seconds so that's the second part so we get rid of those we've got this very stationary part surprise surprise in the violas and then we've got these octave parts in the bases and cellos here and here that's it i've voiced that entire part it really is as simple as that but what i'd also recommend doing is to actually play those parts in one at a time not only because you will give them different kind of expression and modulation which will again just make it feel like it's different players different sections playing this stuff but because you'll also try and find better voicing make them more like little melodies that they can play into if you know what i mean so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take these away and i'm just going to start with the bases and the cellos octaves i'm going to do a little trick here i'm actually going to transpose this one down minus 12. does that work no i'm going to do it on the this is one of my little tricks uh because bases are actually written an octave below or rather sound or not a lot an octave below their written i think it's quite a cool trick keep on clicking on sorry guys there we go okay what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into advanced and i'm going to transpose -12 okay which will give me hopefully between the bases and the cellos the octaves and then when we repeat that you'll get dumb so i've already found a little bit of something extra in there so the next part we've got is our static g here let's see not only if we can enter in some nice interesting expression but also maybe just a passing note here and there to to give us more interest [Music] and then finally the firsts which are this sustained note i was doing before [Music] so instantly we're starting to create more voices more of a choral kind of environment and as i say you know i could put that in flutes or bassoons voicing stuff isn't something that you should be scared of by any means again it's just slightly more detailed coloring on to the next one miriam yeah just really quick charlotte was wondering um the the melody here seems to be born out of the first chord progression that you played on the piano do you ever just write the melody first um no because i'm a terrible singer so melody and being melodious is not doesn't come naturally to me i'm i'm my background is drum and bass so if i could start with like an 808 kick i would but obviously uh on a track like this it wouldn't be appropriate my melodies as a composer tend to be very simple but i'll just try and stick the knife in with the chords and you know dropping down a minor third and all of those cheesy tricks next up the last art of tempo and this is something that i think is just you know that's the other thing that's just amazing about orchestra music is that you're not having a bunch of teenagers playing drums sound like such an old man boomer speaking here uh you know kind of keeping something kind of metronomic to dance to orchestras ebb and flown if you actually listen to some some proper kind of repertoire it's insane if you were to draw a tempo map of what they're doing it's absolutely nuts how they're also expressing themselves with tempo now earlier on i found this part felt a little bit pacey and i've spoken about voices and stuff and i've always thought that really the job of a film and tv composer is to help tell the story and i think if you're telling a story you know you take gaps between well i don't but you you know you take pauses between what you're talking about your chapter market markers your page turns that kind of stuff so maybe what might be nice here is to just slow it down a little bit and then just have a little not a pause but just kind of before we get into the motion of the piece just a little bit of a slow down and then a bit a bit of a speed up and obviously this would be different depending on whatever door you're using but let me just have a look at tempo tempo operations and i'm just going to basically take it down to you know and again don't be shy just like with my pre-delay i want it to be gradual i don't want to feel the kind of steps as you go down there and then what i'm probably going to do is just going to go again from 9 from 80. not 805. to 95. [Music] this is all very crude because i'm doing it live but i do actually spend quite a lot of time massaging the tempo and i've worked with composers like dario marinelli who will actually not work with any click whatsoever so i'll just write against the picture follow the tempo of the piece and then click their track up afterwards now in many countries handing someone a massive click track with peaks and troughs will be problematic but if you're working with musicians in the uk that will not be a problem for them at all they have at least 30 years of experience doing this so that's just yet another expression tool within our arsenal we've got our various forms of input vibrato expression modulation and we've got our loud and our soft we got our timbral expression but also we've got that of speed next up the glue of life or as i call it splosh or gravy and don't be purist about this the stuff that will make your orchestral programming sound more like orchestral recordings will be a better reverb because orchestral recordings use reverbs to enhance the sound when you see something live you're taken in by the 3d quality of the sound and when we record it we tend to have to hype this up a bit to give you that sense of what it would be like to be in the concert hall what's more if you are writing for film and tv um what you'll find is beneath dialogue and room noise is that you lose all of the top end so you lose all of this gorgeous sense of space that these samples have that kind of gets lost so you do have to enhance it a bit so what i'm going to do is just going to create a bus here going out to one and i've got an auxiliary here and what we're looking for is a nice warm hall now this is fantastic not sponsored by these guys but i do like their reverbs got this um fabfilter pro reverb i'm looking for large and the one i really like is where is it vienna there we are and you keep that as a hundred percent so basically these still are sending dry signals to your stereo out and then you're accompanying them with a bit of splosh now for something like these spiccatos that's an awful lot of reverb because they're already quite reverberant i'll probably put just a tad less for them and the same for the pizzicatos i'll probably take that down a bit and then for these cheeky atmospheric things maybe just a little bit more the glue of [Music] life [Music] and again i think that that that is also the way in which you will be able to glue live music into your orchestral programming uh that you're doing you know your sampled programming if you will um the thing that i never ever wanted to do with spitfire audio was to put musicians at work for me uh orchestral sampling enables a bloke who came out of comprehensive school to write music for orchestras and i've written about 50 film schools using orchestras and i got up and conducted once and i won't ever do that again but i think it's also very important to gain experience working with musicians so whatever project you're working on i just don't know of any excuse why you shouldn't try and work with at least one musician whether it give them a pint or you know just try and spend a little bit of that fee on working with musicians i think it's really important to get that experience most film scores you hear will not all be recorded in the same room often they'll be recorded in abbey road and air studios and then there'll be an overdub say done in this shed here and this reverb will really glue stuff together for you and it's uh there's no excuses there do work with your musicians get your experience of getting the best out of them they make our music so much easier to to produce we have to work solo so much less hard before i move on to the last point miriam are there any questions yeah there was a question about reverb do you usually write with it or add it on during mixing yeah yeah i've i'd yeah i've put the makeup on everything and just sparkly dress everything i want it sounding lovely i used to actually write in 5.1 just because it was so gorgeous put all the splosh on and enjoy it and again also what it helps you do is actually write into the the samples it helps you write with how it's going to sound and i think that the one thing you'll always be asked to do is to do less and with stuff like reverb and the timbral differences i'm talking about you can run melodies under dialogue without having to change the melody and maybe pull focus you're just going from the alto flute to the bassoon and all of that kind of stuff so that's that's my approach anyway right take us home final um uh uh rule is the the biggest and most important investment that you will make in your career as an orchestral programmer is to listen you can buy lots of textbooks and i i own them some have thumbed some aren't the problem with them is they're deeply abstract if you're not used to that practical application of what you're you're learning so what i would recommend more than reading books um obviously reading books is great as well but is to listen and to listen every moment you possibly have and to quote the great john powell amazing film composer whatever you do don't listen to film music but in all seriousness as i say orchestral music is an evolution that is a collaboration between our environments our experience what we've learned from one another but also the evolution of these instruments and the more you listen and understand how orchestral music works and actually how some of the great classics i mean if you want hits nutcracker is a great starter because every three minutes you're handed something that you think was orchestrated differently but often it'll just be so amazingly simplistic so that's the one i would say most important golden rule of orchestra orchestral programming is to listen because that is where you will learn everything and just hearing the fact that for example um you know piccolo players uh can play forever and very low brass players can't play forever because it requires a lot more lungs and all of that kind of stuff and it's not that you have to form that analysis it's just if you absorb this stuff when you go to write it it will be innate in you and so you know remember that the ear is a really wonderful thing or certainly what our brain can do with it so in conclusion don't worry about using ensembles that's your compositional tool pick those articulations that match the mood use expression it's there to be used express yourself with modulation dynamics expression with vibrato with tombra with speed timing is absolutely fundamental to creating successful sounding orchestral um pieces use your timbre the orchestra is used there for you to use even if you're just using strings flip through your articulations empathize with the players um violinists can't go you're gonna get it surf guitar on pizzicato so don't write it express yourself with tempo don't be scared of voicing smack some splosh on it and for god's sake listen to good music which in an easy to remember acronym is it it's a rival there you go thank you oh thank you so much christian that was a great wrap-up um so i hope that wasn't too kind of basic and even for many of you are massively experienced there was just some different ways of thinking about stuff there but any questions about this or anything else indeed uh happy happy to answer um well we've got a lot of thank yous people quite grateful for this so of course absolute pleasure thank you for sharing the genius the experience and the brilliance with us um we do have a question from alvaro in general how do you avoid the retrigger sound with long notes in any spitfire string library legato or long patch um it's not a problem i i have the thing to do and this is something that jake jackson who's our engineer screams at me about is uh no musician uh playing a stringed instrument or indeed probably a wind instrument will stop dead so basically when you come to the end of a note roll it off because no musician goes dirt like that they'll always go dumb even bass players i've seen my brother do it we'll roll off the note as he comes to an end so if you're feeling a jump you've just you've got to roll those notes off in order for them to work effectively great um someone has asked if there's uh you know any chance we can get a hint about who this uh special guest is for the next zoom course but i'm gonna go ahead and say no no because also they haven't sally hasn't told me so um i don't know even better um okay and it looks like we have one more question we'll round it out why would you say um listening to classical music and musicians is maybe a little bit more um inspired than film composers or is that something that you you know no i mean when i say i mean the word classical is is a is a very broad canvas i i don't actually like the classical era per se the kind of mozarty stuff i know it sounds terrible to say that i like a bit of baroque but i'm a big fan of the very challenging music of the 20th century i spoke to um one of my favorite film composers cliff martinez who's absolutely obsessed about not repeating himself and doing original stuff and he said it's really simple really you just take three diverse artists and try and combine them he he goes well i'm gonna take led zeppelin and and some uh i don't know some barber shop brass band music and uh some edm music of the 1980s in sheffield and england chances are that the bits from those different influences you're going to take are not going to be the same as the bits someone else takes if they decide to combine those very strange disparate influences so as a consequence you'll probably come up with something interesting it'll probably create attention along the way i don't know i think it's good to keep the gene pool fresh and i think if we're all copying each other in this relatively small industry uh i think that um i think our children will suffer all right christian thank you so much again for this for your time and expertise so thanks as ever for watching to the end and thank you all of you for joining me on zoom and so nice to see some familiar faces as well if you haven't subscribed yet well there's more summer classes coming up soon so please hit that subscribe button thank you so much miriam for your fantastic mediation skills but also to the spitfire team who you can't see here who have put this fantastic series together it's been a technological challenge but we got there and i doff my caps to all of you so one of them for all of that lot will be much appreciated see you next time

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 133,393

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, summer school, how to, program orchestral music, tutorial

Id: 0uGmnhBMVMY

Length: 62min 58sec (3778 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020