5 Tips for Writing for Orchestra

writing for orchestra is so intimidating with my background as a drummer i'm used to playing in groups where every instrument has a very clearly defined and consistent role the drummer drums the bass player plays the bass line the singer sings the melody the guitar player strums some chords you get what i mean but every instrument in the orchestra can play melodies or counter melodies or bass lines or like a million other different things and none of them can just strum some chords on top of that there's like an infinite number of potential different combinations of instruments to choose from to play any given part you write and that is just too much for this little old brain box to handle in spite of all this there's something very attractive to me about the idea of writing for orchestra so i put together an arrangement to see if i could do it last year i dipped my first toe into arranging for wins by studying and replicating ideas from the soundtrack to the lynx awakening switch remake and this year i wanted to expand on the same concept using a bigger ensemble you may remember the sultry sounds of medlix on flute and oboe bassoonify on bassoon and sounddoll music on clarinet from that last video and these folks graciously returned to make up the win section of this new arrangement this time though they're joined by a full brass quintet recorded by john stacy as well as a full string orchestra performed and recorded by the mastermind behind the phenomenal video game music cover channel orchestral fantasy everyone here is a fantastic player and they actually all upload video game music covers to their respective youtube channels that you really owe it to yourself to check out seriously go watch their stuff tell them papa 8-bit sent ya for the ensemble i wanted to split the difference between a chamber ensemble and a full-size orchestra instead of having several parts for each instrument i treated the ensemble like a collection of three quintets a wind quintet a brass quintet and a string quintet though each part of the string quintet was layered multiple times to simulate a full string section put together you get an orchestral color but it's not quite as daunting when you have just one of each instrument to worry about for the arrangement i chose to adapt your affection from persona 4. this might be kind of a strange choice for an orchestral treatment but i was inspired by kingdom hearts arrangement of hikari known in english as simple and clean for orchestra arranged by kauruwata do i thought that an orchestral approach to a pop song like this would make for an easier crossover for my garage band roots to the orchestral world and when trying to think of other vocal j-pop tunes in the video game music canon persona music seemed like the perfect vehicle for this kind of project this arrangement was a big challenge for me and i feel like i learned a lot so today i want to share with you five tips that i figured out in the process of writing this arrangement for anyone who's in a similar situation looking to try their hand at writing for a larger more orchestral ensemble so without further ado let's go so do so tip one create a minimum viable product when nintendo started working on super mario 64 a bulk of the development time was spent designing and tinkering with mario's basic movement controls in an empty room shigeru miyamoto wanted to make sure that the actions of running jumping flipping and all the different moves that players could pull off were fun to do these moves were the means through which the player was going to be interacting with the game for the entire experience so it was imperative to miyamoto and his team to keep working and reworking the movement mechanics until they felt just right adding in the colorful world and obstacles and enemies and everything else after that was just icing on top of a fantastic cake base the outcome of this initial basic stage of development is what's called a minimum viable product something that showcases the essential nature of your project so that you can tell if it's something worth pursuing and get feedback on it before you put a bunch more work into it this is the approach i took to this arrangement what i mean is that before i started the actual arrangement i tried writing just eight bars of the toon's chorus arranged for string quintet the much smaller scope and length and instrumental options made it a lot easier to put notes on the page and the sense that this was a demo and would probably end up scrapped kept me from being too self-conscious about whether the ideas i was putting down were good enough i ended up with eight bars that i really liked so much so that they made it into the final arrangement completely untouched once i finished this little section it inspired me to finish out the chorus where i had the idea to add in these brass cluster chords below the melody and fill in the space between the melody with these big low shots this might be my favorite part of the whole arrangement i now had one full chorus of the tune arranged for orchestra and more importantly a direction to follow for the general style and tone of the arrangement as a whole a functional cake base i could ice with all the elements needed to turn this into a full length arrangement of course even if you don't use your minimum viable product in your final arrangement it can be just as helpful as a trial run to figure out what you don't want to do or can maybe offer just one or two ideas that you can take into your real arrangement either way there are a lot of notes to fill in between an idea of how you want the arrangement to go and having an actual arrangement in front of you which is why you should tip number two use a reference track in mixing you'll often hear people recommend using a reference track to compare your mix to for untrained ears it can be very difficult to hear what you could or should change about your mix to make it sound more legit and comparing your work with a professional mix that you like can help you identify what you could improve i think arranging can present kind of a similar problem it's easy enough to assign the melody and bass line and chords to different instruments in an ensemble listen back and think yep that's an arrangement but the sky's the limit when it comes to the power color energy emotion or any number of other things that an arrangement can have comparing your work to a professional arrangement that you admire in my case kingdom hearts hikari can give you an idea of what you can do to elevate your arrangement give you textual or structural ideas that you can adapt to your own arrangement and can be a reference for you to critique where your arrangement falls short most of the ideas i took from this arrangement of hikari were textural since this is the element of orchestration and arranging that i know the least about by this i mean ideas about what kind of instruments should be playing what kind of accompaniment figures i love the quiet intensity that the verse has played by the winds over these chugging string chords so i took that and the triumphant sound of the trumpet running up a scale to join the strings and playing the melody over top of brass chords i took that this staccato triplety accompaniment figure for the climactic finale of hikari's arrangement feels so grandiose that i just had to steal it but i put a little spin on it by changing the rhythm to switch between 16th note triplet straight eighth note and eighth note triplet figures for some rhythmic push and pull i also padded out the figure with more brass than hikari used because i love the way brass sections sound and tight rhythmic figures like this when mixing this tune i would just isolate this brass part and listen to it over and over it gets me so hyped up for a more in-depth look at how analyzing and copying an arrangement can teach you ideas for how to arrange on your own check out my previous video that i mentioned where i look at link's awakenings remakes soundtrack although if you're looking to make an actual arrangement that's not for a youtube video about stealing ideas i'd recommend having a handful of reference tracks that can inspire you instead of taking a bunch of stuff from just one tune anyway these ideas are great but actually mapping these ideas out onto parts for a bunch of individual instrumentalists can be really daunting which brings us to tip number three think of each instrumental section as one instrument coming up in the world of rock bands and small jazz ensembles i'm used to thinking of music in terms of the melody and the chords so it felt a lot more natural for me to think of a quintet of instruments more like one chordal instrument like guitar or piano this allowed me to fold five separate parts into one part which made things a lot easier to conceptualize but it's important to remember that different groups of instruments sound better with different kinds of voicings strings are the most flexible when it comes to voicing chords since the sound of each instrument in the family is so similar and i tended to treat the section like a guitar and a bass the double bass mostly pans out root notes throughout and the range and voicing structures that fit naturally on guitar sounded pretty good on the other four strings check out the chugging strings underneath the verse melody where the alternating c minor 7 and d sharp minor 7 voicings and rhythm would be totally appropriate for a rhythm guitar part i actually did experiment quite a bit with more complicated voicing structures for this part like stacking fourths or adding more extensions but these simple drop two guitar voicings sounded by far the best that's one lesson i'll certainly take to heart from this process follow your ears instead of your brain the brass section was also quite versatile for this sort of thing there's a lot of wisdom out there about voicing brass chords like how fourths and fifths sound good how it's good to voice triadic figures up high and the more important chord tones than the lower voices things like that i didn't end up using much of this advice in this arrangement though because my personal preference for the mellow sounds of low brass came out in this ensemble tuba bass trombone trombone french horn and one trumpet the range of this quintet trends a lot lower than a typical brass section with several trumpets to carry the high end so i ended up leading the trumpet out of the chord voicings a lot of the time and giving the other brass basic piano voicings check out the chords i used under the string melody in the intro where i wanted to have a descending top line to contrast the ascending bass line and filled out the notes in between with basic triadic voicings this big climactic turnaround into the final chorus is a little more complicated but i viewed it almost like a left hand and right hand of a piano player the left hand of tuba and bass trombone take the root and seventh of these chromatically descending chords while the right hand of trombone and horn take the petaled third and fifth until the horn jumps up for a little counter line i also found it very effective to sprinkle a little bit of stank into these brass parts these two cords setting up the verse section are one very crunchy c7 sharp 9 to a c minor 11. and i love the way it resolves to this voicing with a whole step between the flat third and fourth of the c minor chord definitely crunchy the brass cluster chords that come in after the solo string quintet section that i mentioned earlier i thought were also quite effective if i do say so myself though note that these clusters are built entirely out of major second intervals i found semitone rubs in the brass just a little less appealing than i would find in a piano voicing again trying a lot of different stuff and seeing what sounds best to you is probably the best advice i can give the woodwinds all sound very distinct from one another and what range they play in can drastically affect the quality of sound which means that there's a lot more to consider when using them to voice chords on the flip side though each instrument's distinct qualities combined can make even the simplest voicings sound great i love the sound of a spread triad voicing in the flute oboe and clarinet also known as a drop 2 voicing what that basically means is that you take a triad then take the second note from the top and drop it down an octave putting an interval of a fifth or sixth between each voice this is how i harmonize the melody in the very beginning of the arrangement simple but effective compared to a sex section where a melody might be harmonized with moving full four part harmony i found myself opting for much simpler techniques with this orchestral wind section in the four bars leading into the verse the flute oboe and bassoon take the melody in a three octave spread and the clarinet harmonizes a third above the bassoon part adding one harmonizing voice a third away from the melody just sounds right here if you treated this melody like it was written for a four-part sex section with four different notes all crammed together with plenty of crunchy intervals and extensions it wouldn't quite give the right effect this kind of sound is not really what you see orchestral woodwinds used for if you're just getting started writing for wins i'll just say that third and sixth intervals between voices are your friends i found focusing on that extremely helpful in creating functional wind parts thinking of a section like one chordal instrument may be a lot easier to work with but you're not really taking full advantage of having a bunch of different individual players working together that's why it's important too tip number four think of each instrumental section as a collection of individual voices even without diving into full-on polyphony having individual parts break away from the others for counter lines or little flourishes makes your music feel so much more alive the verse melody played by oboe and later doubled up the octave by flute is interspersed with little figures dropped in by the clarinet bassoon and french horn culminating in this octave line in the clarinet and bassoon that splits off into sixth for the last two notes i think this style of writing especially works with wind sections like this where you have such different colors dropping in and out but it's very effective in the other sections as well for the string quintet section i mentioned earlier i tried to have one inner voice moving each bar to fill in the space in the melody having the moving inner part bounce around between different voices made the section feel more like a living thing similarly in the final climactic chorus i broke up the staccato brass chords with this counter line played in octaves by the trombones and french horn it's based on a base figure used in the original tunes intro the following four bars see the french horn trying to steal the spotlight with this call and response variant of the main melody at a later point in the arrangement like this one when you've heard the melody a handful of times already counter lines like this can afford to take a little more attention away from the main melody i found myself using the french horn for counter lines a lot but adding a couple of trombones to play with it added this big epic brass effect for lack of a better word juggling a more polyphonic approach with a chordal approach is a good way to create variety but the most important thing is to make sure that each instrument section sounds good on its own no matter what each section should sound complete on its own that way it can support the whole even if every section is doing something different from one another also breaking things down into these two basic types of approaches can simplify things and help you avoid the dreaded analysis paralysis that comes with having a million different potential things for each of 15 instruments to be doing at any given time this might not be a universal experience but i found the arrangement process more of a mental game than anything else which brings us to tip number five separate your writer brain and your editor brain this advice applies to basically any creative pursuit but the part of your brain that you access to create something and the part of your brain that you access to judge whether something is good or not are completely separate from one another and should never mix if you critique your work while you're writing it you'll get hardly anything onto the page because you'll be cutting down your ideas before you even finish thinking of them that's my problem if you never turn a critical eye to your work though you'll end up with a bloated mess where the one or two good ideas are outweighed by 50 bad ideas so you have to kind of consciously decide to be in writer mode and right and then consciously switch to editor mode to restructure and trim everything that you spewed out while you were in writer mode i find myself stuck on editor mode as a default but here are a couple tips i figured out that help me loosen up and get some ideas flowing first of all write everything out of order i already talked about the minimum viable product but even after i finished those 16 bars i still had this image of someone sitting down and writing a full arrangement front to back starting with the intro and ending with the outro i tried to do it that way first tried to figure out what would come next after these 16 bars and then what would come next after that the problem was that at the end i had an arrangement that made no sense there were too many ideas in it that didn't have anything to do with each other too many ups and downs and intensity but most of all it didn't tell a coherent story after showing the arrangement to an objective third party and thinking about it a lot i realized that the best way forward was to take the three and a half or so minutes of music i had written and chop it down into a two and a half minute arrangement that actually made sense it can be tough to get rid of stuff you've written especially stuff you like i ended up scrapping almost half of what i originally wrote and moving most of the stuff that i did keep into a totally different order it was surprisingly easy though to rearrange this collection of already written sections of music into something new and putting sections that i had written with one purpose in mind into a totally different place in the structure of the arrangement yielded unexpectedly cohesive results if i had to do this again i would definitely just sit down and write a bunch of different sections without thinking about how they're supposed to relate to each other and then do the work piecing them into an actual arrangement later that would probably have saved me a ton of time and a lot of stress secondly figure out the point of the arrangement editing a piece is useless if you don't have an idea of what you're trying to achieve by editing it for me when i realized that those first 16 bars i wrote were my favorite things i'd written in the whole process i decided i should make them the focal point of the arrangement and after that everything started to fall into place the string quintet section i started with is cool but the melody is far too obscured by the other moving parts around it to be a clear first presentation of the main theme bumping it farther back allowed it to be this big crescendo into the climax of the arrangement a role that fit the music i had written much better than what i had originally intended also having my favorite thing that i wrote right at the beginning of the arrangement would mean that it's all downhill from that point this decision made it so much easier to figure out what to cut from here on out instead of is this part good which is kind of a vague question it became does this help lead to those 16 bars of music or not which is much more clear focusing on the overall structure of the arrangement left me with something that i am much more satisfied with sure i had to cut some music that i liked but now i have those ideas i scrapped in my back pocket for the next time i want to arrange a piece like this the legend of zelda the wind waker famously had some dungeons planned out in development that didn't make it into the final game when the team decided they didn't have time to fit in all the content they wanted when asked about these lost dungeons director aonuma said that the ideas that they scrapped were split up and used in dungeons for subsequent zelda games if it's good enough for aonuma it's good enough for me huge thanks again to all of the amazing musicians who helped bring this arrangement to life and thank you all for watching the video i hope one or two of these tips were helpful to you more than anything i had a blast putting together this project and i'd highly recommend trying your hand at writing for a group like this if it interests you at all especially if you find the prospect as intimidating as i did it's a ton of work to put together an arrangement for a big group like this but once you do that work it's done forever you only have to write the piece once and then you have it there forever to listen to or perform or show off or whatever speaking of i'll throw the arrangement up on my bandcamp if any of you want to download it and if any of you want the full score and parts they will be available on my patreon for five dollar and up supporters along with all of the transcriptions that i make for this channel there's also other benefits for other tiers like getting to see videos early or getting to request video topics but i'll leave that for you to check out on your own and there's also an official 8-bit music theory discord server if any of you want to share your own forays into orchestral writing with a community of big nerds that are very into music and very supportive anyways thanks so much for watching and i'll see you guys in the next one you

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 165,825

Keywords: orchestral music, writing for orchestra, classical music, arranging, how to write for orchestra, how to arrange music, persona 4, your affection, simple and clean, hikari, kingdom hearts, how to write music, music theory, VGM, Orchestral Fantasy, JohnStacy, Medllix, Soundole Music, Bassoonify, 8-bit Music Theory

Id: aBaskXlcx9o

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021