12 Common Scoring Errors

the production of this video was made possible by donors to the orchestration online patreon initiative please consider adding your support to the creation of free educational internet resources by visiting our patreon page linked below [Music] [Applause] hey there this is your orchestration tutor thomas goss with another video about mistakes when this channel first started i released a video about biggest orchestration mistakes as part of my intro to orchestration series the mistakes that i pointed out were mostly about the overall approach and training of composers learning and applying the craft of orchestration while that's one of my most viewed videos even today i'm still seeing a lot of basic errors in the orchestration online community especially in scores that have been submitted to the annual orchestration challenge so here's a video i threw together today outlining a dozen basic little errors if you avoid them it will not only make your score better but also save me the bother of repeating the same corrections over and over in the next round of orchestration challenge evaluations and whether you participate in the challenge or not this information will still be useful for any developing orchestrator timid dynamics timid dynamics occur when you score a lot of mezzo piano and mezzo forte all through your orchestration this error may be due to thinking of mezodynamics as a default level going louder or softer from there only as a special musical gesture sometimes piano scores have a lot of mezzodynamics as a matter of course which sound fine on that instrument but when you transcribe them onto an orchestra they tend to flatten out the dynamic level and make things sound kind of dull the cure for this is to really commit to one side or the other of the dynamic spectrum most of the time orchestral instruments are built to sound their best when they're played with restraint or with force piano or forte and there are plenty of shadings and nuances on either side of that spectrum where dynamics meet in the middle as a moderated sound rather than a committed one and is not the greatest for playing featured solos though it's an excellent support dynamic the worst overuse of mezodynamics that i tend to see is when the music goes crescendo from mezzo piano to mezzo forte and then diminuendo back to mezzo piano back and forth over and over it's like going from room temperature to lukewarm and back again there are just no interesting colors or excitement to the music so watch out staccato on pizzicato this error often occurs when the orchestrator copies a staccato line from woodwinds or brass and then pastes it onto the strings the staccato articulation remains even after the orchestrator marks the strings pizzicato of course pizzicato technique is already staccato by its very nature so if you mark staccato then you're telling the string player that you want them to pluck in a very dry abrupt way and to be honest that's the way that most pizzicato sounds on violin and viola to begin with cello has a more generous pizzicato sustain and double bass the most sustain of all so it might make more sense to mark them staccato sometimes if you want a really abrupt sound but usually this is all just overkill standard pizzicato matches woodwind and brass staccato beautifully and there's usually no need to add staccato markings to the strings in that case it just confuses things [Music] long durations ties and slurs on pizzicato to be perfectly clear about this pizzicato strings do not have the same clarity and length of sustain as a guitar or even a mandolin fingered pizzicato notes on violin and viola will last around one beat at most tempos with open strings sounding a bit longer as i mentioned before cello notes can sustain a bit longer and double bass is even longer than that but it's a mistake to think of pizzicato in the lower strings as having the same sustaining power as guitar or piano even for the longest possible duration of pizzicato the lowest open string on a double bass the fullness of tone will decay very quickly even if the string continues to vibrate in a humming sort of way check out my tip on the duration of double bass pizzicato notation from 100 more orchestration tips which anyone can read for free on the orchestration online website for more thoughts about this so you'll rarely run into tied notes when scoring pizzicato though a fairly short tie added for rhythmic clarity is of course fine as to slurs my advice is to stop thinking about adding phrasing marks to a pizzicato part because you're just confusing your string players slurred pizzicato is a specific effect meaning that the player plucks the first note and then lifts or applies further fingering to the same string this can be a lovely subtle effect especially in very intimate chamber music scoring but it's so quiet that it can be barely heard if at all in orchestral scoring of course most of the time slurs on pizzicato are just mistakes from the orchestrator thinking that the string players need some guidance how to phrase their plucking or even worse they've copied and pasted from winds and brass and forgotten to remove a slur so check your parts carefully long durations on triple or quadruple stops this is another issue that i discuss in detail in my book 100 more orchestration tips in chapter 76 triple slash quadruple stop articulation briefly string players can only hold down two pitches of a triple stop or a quadruple stop for any length of time this means that the lower pitch or pitches are usually dropped as the bow moves across the strings so it's kind of meaningless to score all three or four pitches as whole notes or to tie them across several bars there's an added level of meaning to long durations on multiple stops usually that the composer intends the players to dig in a bit on the lower strings before ending up on the higher strings and this is complicated further by the kind of articulation that's marked on each note so try to be a bit more precise about your intentions when you can and your string players will thank you for it not splitting the middle between rhythmic groups many composers come from a piano background in which you have to be your own time keeper so it's not surprising that this error crops up frequently orchestral players are following the conductor's baton and need to know where each beat lies especially right in the middle the third beat in a bar of four four time or the fourth beat in a bar of six eight so the orchestral composer has got to let these players know where that is by tying note values across these natural divisions whenever possible this is just a basic courtesy that lies at the heart of most concert music so if you've developed the habit of not splitting the middle then get over it now the exceptions to this rule are in regular syncopations like quarter note offbeats in 4-4 or a row of quarter notes and 6 8. you may also ignore this rule in 4 4 with half notes and dotted half notes there are also very famous instances in which great composers flouted this rule as in the adagietto from mahler's fifth symphony but mahler was a great conductor breaking a rule in order to more clearly guide his string players through a certain exaggerated rhythmic emphasis so make sure you're breaking the rule for the right reasons and not through sloppiness failure to clearly mark entrances a mistake that i saw over and over in many orchestration challenge entries last year was the use of the marking ah one as i remarked back then i'll repeat now so hopefully i don't have to so much in the future there is no ah one a due or a two is a marking telling the score reader that both available players are playing the same single line of music when you write a one you're just telling us that you want only one of those players to play you're not telling us which player this is just one of many problems that i'm seeing when orchestrators and composers don't mark entrances very clearly there's a great video over on the music engraving tips channel about the proper marking of parts in a score with regard to a2 1 and or 2 and so on very briefly if you want only one wind or brass player to play on a staff in a full score mark which player by number usually one or two followed by a period you may add the word solo if you intend that the conductor should balance the orchestra so that the solo part stands out in the foreground of the texture never use the words unison or davisi on wind and brass parts unless you're writing a band score those terms apply to strings only [Music] and always mark a dynamic on an entrance i have a video about this too which you can watch for specifics on marking dynamics after a rest transcribing piano style phrasing directly onto strings wins and brass this is actually an error that's so pervasive that it's become a whole approach of its own list used to score long piano like slurs over his orchestral parts trying to convey a sense of connectedness to a phrase and in the case of my orchestration challenges many developing orchestrators do the same thing just copy pasting hugely long slurs over wins and strings perhaps even brass but this creates a whole raft of problems for the orchestra wind and brass players have to know when to breathe and while some instruments can go for pretty long without a breath their lungs are still not inexhaustible string players need to change direction with their bows much more frequently than wind and brass players need to breathe sometimes two or three times per measure if not more and even if all of these players could somehow sustain such long slurs the music would end up lacking any kind of metric emphasis my strong feeling is that if the orchestrator knows what they're doing then the phrasing of the music will be so easy to grasp that a long slur will be completely unnecessary in addition just slapping a long slur over a part and nothing else is no substitute for learning how to wisely and helpfully score a series of shorter slurs that indicate workable breathing and bowing slurring across a pickup [Music] this is a bit of a footnote to the previous error starting a slur from the pickup note sometimes this is fine provided there's a good reason for it like a jazzy slurring into the downbeat but most of the time slurring from the pickup across the rest of the following bar robs the downbeat of emphasis it can actually make a score quite difficult to organize at rehearsal if very few players have an identifiable downbeat conductor or not if a player raises their hand and asks who has the downbeat on such and such bar then your slurs may need some adjusting dumping the piano part onto the harp part [Music] at this point i've released over a dozen tips on harp scoring in both of my books many of which you can read for free over on the orchestration online website and most of which illustrate how harp technique is not the same thing as piano technique in addition my annual orchestration challenge guidelines stipulate no harp concertos and that heart part should be for filigree decoration and support nevertheless i still get scores in which the orchestrator has copy pasted the entire piano score onto the harp part and added orchestral doubling to the same pitches around it [Music] i love you all and i forgive everyone who's made this mistake but this approach is not orchestration what will happen the harpist will practically kill themselves trying to learn a largely unplayable score and on top of that no one will be able to hear a thing they're playing over the orchestra [Music] so if this makes you look at your entry and say oops i did that what do i do now then the answer is to start over the harp is like dessert it is a delicious and intriguing timbre that entices the listener when it's used sparingly and at exactly the right moment and just like dessert if it's all you experience all the time in an orchestral piece then it becomes rather excessive and less convincing even in an actual harp concerto the harpist usually takes frequent breaks to let the orchestra do its thing so choose your heart moments carefully and make sure that the part is easy to hear alongside the other instruments [Music] unbalanced use of wind and brass registers the biggest error i see in orchestration challenge entries is giving one or two flutes the melody in their lower and middle registers in thickly scored and or loud passages i have repeated a caution against such scoring many times and it still crops up again and again please do not assume that low flutes can compete against the strings and other winds playing strong dynamics let alone the brass i will have far more time to talk about other things to fixing your score if i don't have to go over this problem [Music] this is a basic imbalance that orchestrators should learn at the beginning of their training on wind scoring bookmark that and never forget it the reverse of this imbalance occurs at the top of the flute's register and for the other wins and brass as well you really have to know what you're doing when you ask one of these players for a very soft note at the top of their range i made an entire video about the problems posed by revel's stratospheric oboe solo from the start of daphnis and chloe and in general it's very hard for any wind player to have minute dynamic control over their top few notes and such high playing can quickly tire the embouchure playing soft high seas on brass can not only be demoralizing but painful for the player trying to rein in their instrument's natural tendency to scream and then of course right after that they're often asked to play a bunch of low loud notes before the tension in their lips has a chance to relax this is such an important topic that there's a whole tip about high c's for brass in 100 more orchestration tips and it's worth reviewing if you have a copy whether you're planning on scoring anything way up there or not [Music] sticking to the exact pitches and registers of a source score no matter what the biggest problem with piano music from the orchestrator's point of view is that the pianist has only 10 fingers there are only so many notes a pianist can play at once and a natural limit on the complexity of different functions so when an orchestrator decides to adapt a piano work there's a natural impulse to fill in gaps between the hands add certain functional parts that enhance the meaning and pacing of some passages and double some thematic lines and bass lines and octaves that is all very commendable in my view so long as the result conveys the spirit of the original score which i'll talk about more in the next section what's not so great is when the orchestrator completely limits themselves only to the exact notes and the source score if you think this respects the intentions of the original composer then think again some of the greatest composers who orchestrated and arranged their own piano works changed keys altered accompaniments added textual and thematic elements and often surpassed the original score so effectively that the orchestral version has become the more often played form on the concert stage consider that piano music is mostly scored within the middle four octaves of the piano that immediately cuts out most of the high registers of the upper winds as well as the lower registers of double bass contrabassoon tuba and bass trombone and even without these arbitrary limitations piano music often clings to the very center of the piano within the middle two octaves so staying completely faithful to the exact octave in which each pitch is written for piano can make your score sound somewhat closed in simplistic and limited in scope my advice is to follow the music when it gets expansive expand the sound picture when it becomes intimate you may want to contract again or jump up or down an octave devise a soft but widely scored texture or any number of other options you can imagine and that takes us to our final error not conveying the spirit of the original music as performed and whether or not this is an error depends on your intentions maybe you want to completely re-envision a composer's work and if so that's fine in that case you have the liberty of abandoning any kind of reference to the original work as it's usually performed but most of the time even for the great composers orchestrating their own piano works there's a focus bringing what's essential about a score to life in an elevated way so as i see it a deep responsibility lies on the orchestrator to be as powerful a listener as they are in a ranger and really observe all the nuances of tempo dynamics and even peddling from a great interpreter of the work they're choosing to orchestrate the more that these qualities of interpretation can be realized in your efforts the more convincing and natural sounding the orchestration [Music] these nuances are so important in realizing the latest orchestration challenge excerpt that i'll be releasing a score plus recording version here on youtube on 15 july 2021 the first day of this year's round with the most commonly applied alterations of tempo and dynamics written right on the score for you to follow visually these changes have also been included in the templates i'll be uploading to the resources on the orchestration online website and on patreon i hope that you can join me for this year's challenge and that you'll apply some of these cautions to your entry and to your own work if they seem useful [Music] you

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Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021