A Trick for writing Orchestral Music like the Pros

let's talk about one trick that professional composers use in their music all the time it's a very simple concept based on one idea which is music is like an onion i'm being serious though like what's the one thing that we all know about onions well is that they have many many layers for example check out this track that i brought [Music] there's a passage i wanted to hear [Music] right now [Music] the reason why this sounds like this is because it's layered like a freaking onion and i want to talk about specifically that final passage with that upheaval of notes to put it simply what's going on is that we have an e power chord over b and then it's followed by a major b chord so it sounds like this piano it's a very uplifting sound when you put it in the context of the dark orchestration that came before that break is supposed to give you courage and that's how it sounds like now if we were a beginner composer we want to do something like that on brass we'd open a french horn patch from entrepreneurs 1 put the very same noise on the brass using the sustain articulation we'll get something like this which is fine but you know could be better the next step to make this a bit more proper would be to layer it so we're going to have the bass drum bones playing that on a lower octave maybe like this you know now it's more thick and why not let's add some trump as a player on a regular octave so when you put all together because of the different octaves we're reaching in different frequencies this now sounds a bit higher definition and more thick but if we place it under the percussion on the track in a moment it sounds like this i mean it's fine but it's kind of weak i think we need more energy so let's analyze what the percussion is doing and see if we can emulate that on brass the bracket should go something like this one simple node followed by complex rhythm one simple note again followed by the compress reader so we have that you know call and response so i think we'll be cool in the brush to do something similar maybe we play one simple note followed by the entire chord so we get something like this [Music] now it's a bit more energetic i'm doing marcato notes and not sustained notes the articulation you use changes the impact of what you're writing this is fine but it still doesn't sound as huge as i want it to be we need more articulations i think it would be nice if those marcatonos were accompanied by crescendos played by other french horns so something like this crochet flutter tongues that would be pretty cool so if we put those together we get [Music] but i'm still not fully satisfied i feel that when the percussion kicks in with that i really want to feel the weight of that and weight is brought by bass so we're gonna try to bring some bass in here by using another brass instrument this time the one that has some of the darkest stones the tuba and we're just gonna play the b over two octaves sounds so freaking dark and when you layer it together with the bass roman you get and here's the final secret sauce one thing you'll see professional composers do a lot is actually use several different libraries of the same kind to do the same thing and the reason is this so the library i've been using thus far in the process has been metropolis which i like what i want now from this base is for it to bite back like a rabbit dog so i need a library or a sound of brass that has a crazy attack and sharp sound aggressive sound in the way it was recorded one thing i could do is take what i have and process it with plugins like ott crazy compression and all the stuff but what's even better is if you can actually add another library that has a different sound you remember when you watched the power rangers as a kid yeah every power ranger had its own like robot you have the robot tiger or dinosaur all the stuff they got to their utmost potential when they all merged together because each single power ranger robot had something to give to the collective which was different so metropolis one in this case is like the dinosaur it's the foundation and it's big and it's bold but it doesn't bite as much as a tiger on the other hand we have metropolis arc 3 which bites like hell there's the low brass patch in r3 that has some decrescendos and crescendos that sound like this [Music] which you know they're very short and concise but they're so sharp and so aggressive so to recap we started from this french horn right but now that we layered it to oblivion and with different integration we got this way more energy why well because we just layered it on multiple instruments we used marcato's and crescendos to bring the energy back and then we have some extra layers from other libraries that bring the bytes so not only we have the weight of metropolis one we have the byte of entropy's r3 and now we put all that together with the other instruments in the orchestration we get this [Music] like you really feel when that percussion kicks in you hear the brass going like in the background and it really brings a lot of warmth obviously every single other instrument family in this bit is going freaking crazy and the whole point is when you compose orchestral music you really have to think that music is like an onion and you can take out layer by layer there's always gonna be more and you're gonna cry for every single layer you have to work on but it's worth it because it makes it so freaking strong in terms of taste like an onion now the tricky thing is that i just explained you about ten seconds in a four minute long track and for these ten seconds we only talked about the brass very briefly i didn't mention anything about the strings the piano the glock spiel the choir the solo values the woodwinds the percussion the mixing and the mastering and the composition itself there's so much that went into this whole project that if i had to explain all that went into it it would be like a six hour long tutorial and that still would not be enough learning orchestral music is not easy each one of these details figuring it out takes so many years and anyone can do it but it's a long freaking journey and it's full of hurdles figure out this stuff it's not easy and that's why i'm so glad that websites like evident exist evident is the sponsor of this video and right now they just announced their new composer accelerator program it's an eight weeks intensive program about music composition that is going to help you with live sessions with arn himself arn is one of the founders of eminence incredible composer for games he worked on triple a movies worked on loads of trailers but not only that he's also a very good teacher nar is the guy who wrote the cinematic music courses that i talked about in the past many times over on this channel and with this program you're gonna have access to him there's going to be some live q and a's you can do with him and ask him any type of question and each week of this program is going to be narrowed down on one specific aspect of composition itself and by the end of it you should be much faster better and this ideally will propel you forward in your composing career i've started on evidence courses in the past they really freaking helped me the other thing is that this accelerator program again limited to 300 people it might run out just like this because the value you get is crazy it also has some bonus content like they will give you access to a few courses for free and also it gives you access to some exclusive sample libraries designed by aaron himself and joshua crispin joshua being one of the most prolific trailer composers and sound designers of our time so you get a lot of stuff for free with this program if you sign up to it and also you get eight weeks of being part of a community of 300 driven people followed by an insanely good leader that is going to teach them so much so if i were you if you're interested in this stuff i would check out their website you're going to find a link to it in the description of this video and i'll see you in the next one bye

Channel: Alex Moukala Tutorials

Views: 121,123

Keywords: alex moukala, alex moukala tutorial, orchestral layering tutorial, orchestral tutorial, hans zimmer tutorial, how to sound like a pro, how to sound like a pro orchestra, alex moukala orchestra tutorial

Id: SaH_etxNeos

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022