ACSM Film Scoring, Class 7: Scoring Your First Film

what i thought i would do today is i would score this 60-second trailer for you in front of you now i've never actually written music in front of people before it's for me it's a really private and personal endeavor but you know i just want to show you what i do and if you can pick some stuff out of that that'll help you that'll be great but let's just talk before i start doing that let's just talk about it for a couple of minutes now some of you are using a notation program so what you're going to do before you score the film anybody venture a guess what you're going to make a score uh well before you do that even the the notes we did for the spot right spotting notes very good sam and you're going to map out on a piece of paper a spreadsheet you can write it out i don't care you know or with uh cursive you're going to make your spotting notes and that's going to be a road map now for those of you that are using notation i started showing you last week how you can set up your notation right so what you can do is one of two things if you have if you use sibelius you can put in your markers on the score and if you're using a notation program that doesn't have anything like that you can print you'll have you can print out i i'm going to give you tempos to write to there are two tempos that we're going to choose from so i'm going to make this i'm gonna make some choices for you two tempos work in different ways for this piece and we'll discuss that before i start playing what i've written so i'm gonna give you the tempos and you'll pick that one and this way you're going to keep one tempo from the beginning to the end and then you'll you'll do that thing i did last two weeks ago where i had the um single percussion line with just note slashes and where things happen on the timeline and you'll you could print that out and you'll have it right there and you can write your score and refer back to that as to when things will happen now in sibelius you can import a movie and have it play along if i have time to end the class i'll show you how to do that but you can just look that up online it's not that difficult there's an image so yeah and so let's take a look at what we've got here let me just get my screen ready all right let me just uh so in my project folder i've got my finding vincent master folder inside of that i have my pro tools session and i've got my movie inside the master folder now what i typically do command i for information and or the inspector and it brings up everything about this movie the format it's only 1280 by 720 so it's not high it's not high um high resolution but it's perfectly fine for what we have to use 24 frames per second and then there's a bunch of other stuff it's 45 megabytes in size and this is the data rate 5.72 megabits per second and this is the size 1280 by 720 hd is uh 1920 by 1080 and 4k is twice that so this right here tells you it's 24 frames per second i don't have a two two seconds up front which most films will have with a sync tone called a two pop i have it starting on the first frame of action i found in the past that having that two seconds up front causes more problems for the students than benefits so i've decided that to just chop that off and it starts from the beginning and right here i've got this little box not ken but anybody else remember what this is called yes but what's the actual term for that box it's four letters bitsy burnt in time code so if a director says you want bitc you'll know what they're talking about um yep okay so i'm just gonna play it right here there's no sound on this at all now this was a film i'd like to say three years ago two or three years ago this film was in the movie theater and it's base it's this amazing film uh it's called finding vincent and it's about a guy who's got a letter for vincent van gogh that he's trying to deliver to him and it's towards the end of van gogh's life and he's searching for him and the whole thing every frame of this movie drawn so think about that right there's 24 frames that have to be drawn in every second and they're all drawn in the style of van gogh because they're looking for vincent van gogh and if you ever get a chance to see this movie it's it's it's incredible and the score is amazing as well i i forget who wrote the score but it's really great so let's take a quick look at this all right so what's nice about this is that you'll have something for your portfolio at the end of the day now there's no dialogue on this so have at it you don't have to worry about writing music that fits in with a dialogue because there is none so that's one another reason why i'm i picked this one the other films all have dialogue to them the ones that you'll be doing for the final all right now i'm going to play it again and i'm gonna just i'm gonna play it two more times and i'm gonna talk through a couple of salient features as i play it the first time and then the second time through i want you to take a look and see if you can pick out how this is structured okay so the beginning right motion got trained somebody's on a train trip more train trip train again at night now this we're walking right and this guy here is looking for van gogh this guy here i'm just telling you that and then now we're black and white and that is van gogh's hand all right first time you see van gogh's face see a little bit more of him and now this is van gaal from the back with the full reveal and then turns into color and then the fade out i'll play it one more time because it's the first time you guys have seen this probably and see if you can tell me like discuss with me what you think the structure of it is yes mark this is from the trailer this is this is the trailer um yeah i took i i got i got this copy somewhere i forget and i took everything off all the audio off of it and i put the simpty in okay so you can't see it robert roberto can everyone see that no no i was able to see it after i watched the movie actually it's beautiful yeah daniel i sent you an email back that i did um put a folder for the today's assignment yesterday i think okay um i don't see the email but it's okay i just added it in right now okay great all right so anyone want to discuss how that's structured it seems like all the the first part which is the part colored is that kind of to understand the context of the place and then when he goes black and white he goes deep into the intimate part of you know what's the scene the van gogh part and then he goes back to color at the end okay anyone else definitely like starts out kind of like calm and like soft kinda and then gets a little more intense as it progresses which is kind of standard for trailers but you know towards the middle and it gets like intense versus the beginning which is a little calmer and like prettier i guess okay anyone else like there's a lot of textures that the piece is going through especially when you see the smoke it's almost kind of like this theme of the smoke coming from the train and then you see the smoke when he blows it out a little bit at the end almost and then also just the style that he uh the style of work that's very much impressionistic very much um almost like smoke so i just feel like texture is going to be a really big following the textures is going to i actually didn't notice the smoke like that that's good yeah and thank you mark for uh correcting the name i have like half-heimers with uh remembering the names of things what's your name again no seriously uh um okay so from my perspective there's different levels of form have any of you studied shankarian analysis oh no no so there's background you know middle ground and foreground so there's three different levels the background is the big picture and then the foreground is the the minutia right the the stuff and i actually studied with carl schachter for a year who is mr um mr shanker he taught at queen's college for and at manus for decades i mean i yeah i think he's still with us too um so on the background level there's two sections to this film right there's pre vincent and post vincent so the whole beginning is the guy tasked with bringing him the letter it's and the way it unfolds is right and well let's so that's the background and then the second half is showing more and more of vincent till the end it's simple right you can just look at it that way and then you can get like into a little bit more detail where that you could see the train from a field then on an overpass then the train at night and then you know so you can get into that detail and then you can take the part with vincent where you start off seeing tiny bits of him right his hand then him in the distance then him in the fields then you get a glimpse of his face for just a second then you're in the cafe or the public house or wherever he is and you see more of him and more of him is revealed until you get to the end where it's he's the only person in the screen from the back and he twists around and it gets back into color so that's much much much more detail the question is how much of that detail do you need to catch when you're scoring a film so one thing you could think of is that music has to flow in a certain way and if you're trying to catch every tiny little bit of action on the screen it's going to almost be cartoonish and there is a term for that anybody know have any guess it's called mighty mousing the film mighty mouse was a black and white cartoon starring a tiny little mouse who was like a superhero and the entire thing was like an opera right and um i barely remember watching it but what i do know is that every little thing is caught by the music you know if he was to scratch his head that would be caught by the music and any any tiny little thing because there was music throughout the whole cartoon as i remember it so there's actually a term called mighty mousing my thing is that unless it's called for specifically you sort of want to avoid that it really it's too herky-jerky it starts and stops and and what you want to do with a film like this i think is have built build it up and have an arc to it and i think an arc structure is an interwoven arcs is a little bit more appropriate for something like this all right this is the pro tools session that i've set up but before i show you the music which i've just muted and how i've set that up i imported the film and the film's here at the bottom and i've set it up now you don't have to do this in pro tools you can have measure one start anywhere on the timeline so i did leave a little bit of space before measure one in the timeline and i have a reason for that which i will get to before i start playing the music but i like to have a little bit of space i don't want to have for me personally you don't have to do this but i don't want to have it so that the first beat starts right at the very beginning of the timeline i want to have a little space so i put two seconds of pre-roll and then bar one starts right here and then that's my one hour in simpti so i opened up my session and i did my session set up to help with that so the session starts at two seconds before one hour and the time call rate is 24 frames per second now i then changed my time base to be time code and i put in my markers and notice i don't have a lot one two three four five six seven eight not a lot right i didn't get and some of these i might not even bother with but they're up there does anybody remember why i'm using the time base to put my markers in i we went over this a couple of weeks ago if you change tempo nothing moves correct that the markers stay in the same place no matter what the tempo is and in pro tools and you'll have to see how to do this on your daw and if you're using a um i'm going to be giving you tempos to choose so you'll choose your tempo and then you can put your markers in i didn't know what the tempos were before i started set this up so that's why when you look here at my marker or memory location my reference here is absolute it's not bar and beat it's absolute so you'll have to figure out in if you're going to you know for the final project i'm not going to tell you what tempo to write at so you'll have to figure out what the uh how to put that into your session or your score okay now i typically have this on the second screen it's great i can have it i have a very large second screen it's actually bigger than my work screen so i can watch to get a better idea of the sense of it and it leaves my workspace clean you can resize these movies right if i right click on this i can make it tiny i can make it i can make it the actual size i could fill the screen right it's got full quality well some of these things don't really do much so that's full screen quarter size and then you can hover here and click and drag this out and resize it however you want so i'm just going to leave this up here okay one thing i like about logic is that in the channel strip area you can have the music in a little box and above the channel strip area over in this part of the screen is that correct mark you mean the movie yeah it shows up on the upper left like that yeah but it's actually in inside the set it's not floating like this screen yeah that's right you can have it a couple of different ways but it does nest into the uh yeah so like with pro tools you can't do that and that's that's that's a feature in logic i like because then it would be just part of the session and it wouldn't be covering any of the controls all right so the two tempos that i'm going to let you choose are 74 beats per minute which is what i'm going to do and i think the other one is 89 beats per minute but what i'm going to do is i'm going to make the click track play during record and i'm going to make this a little bigger so you could see it and i want you to see because we're going to be writing to a click track how this works and take a look at the feel of and i'm going to change the tempo and we'll see how that changes the feel can you hear the click yep okay one more time here we go so you could see that there are many things that hit with a click track right in that and the way that i did that was i just played around with the tempo i tried 70 i tried 72 i tried 74 i'm going to stay in this ballpark but what i'm going to do is i'm going to speed that up one beat a minute and it'll make it sound more it'll make it feel a little edgier because the click will anticipate instead of react and i i brought this up last week right a little ahead of it right a little ahead of it right it's anticipating the changes it's very subtle let me make it a little bit more exaggerated i'm up to 77 and maybe that'll help for me i can really feel that the music would be is it's a little edgier and i don't want to get that for this personally speaking right see that how much further ahead of it was right much further ahead there right it's off there ahead of that off there and that's an important screen shot so you can see how that tempo is really doesn't really work as well as 74. now the other tempo i believe is 89 beats a minute let's see how that looks see how that works different feel right see that's right on there and that is two two three four so either 74 or 89 beats per minute your choice can we choose both if you want to do two two versions can you say it again 74 right 90. i'm putting it in the chat thank you all right 74 or 89 there you know it's funny i told you about the clicks the hollywood clicks um click track there's actually an entire book that was made and i think it's knudsen's it's called and it's it's got every variation and it was the bible of hollywood composers for decades to figure out timings and then in the 80s or 90s i can't remember when exactly there was a software that i believe only ran on an amiga computer called oracle a-u-r-i-c-l-e and that was sort of like a calculator that composers use to map out their whole film score and but now all the daws have like i said built-in calculators so it really is helpful yeah it's funny mark in the 1980s why i was going to buy a computer i was [Music] looking at the amiga over the uh the mac and then i decided not to get a computer at all and then the amiga went belly up so i felt very nice very fortunate to not have wasted my money buying one instead i wasted my money buying a macintosh just kidding um all right any questions on that right you could see how like just a beat or two per minute can really make a difference in feel or how well your score lines up so you just basically you just experimented and told them how did you map that out i'm not quite sure what you mean by that mark well so you did you put markers in for each of those uh transitions no no oh well i put my markers in first before i did the tempo and then i watched and i thought i i first i had it at the a faster tempo and i was like 90 91 and i was watching it i thought it's too fast it's things are things are hitting a little bit too early and then i just slowed it down what i wanted to do with this was i wanted to just give you one tempo that would work right i definitely change tempos to make things hit differently as a piece unfolds i i change tempos all the time but i wanted to make this as i wanted to take some decision making away from you so you could focus in on writing the music right and if it's at one tempo i think that that's a little bit easier for everybody to just with the first time that they may be writing music for picture rather than always trying to figure out how to change the tempo to hit something and then hitting then making the music all flow when you're changing tempo it just gets to be more complicated and i wanted to try to take some decision making away and simplify the process as much as possible so i i got that faster tempo and then i thought you know what if i wanted something that was a little bit slower so then i played around in the 70s and i found that the 74 was the temp tempo that worked at that at that um a little bit slower pace i'm sure i could experiment around and find something in the hundreds that works now one thing to think about when you're writing a music right so let's say you pick 74 beats per minute grinding at that tempo gives you more rhythmic flexibility what do i mean by that well if you're riding at a really fast tempo you're gonna be stuck into eighth notes and you know like if if right for your stuff if you're writing it a little bit slower you can put 16th notes in there it won't sound too rushed won't sound too fast you can have eighth notes you can have eighth note triplets it gives you a little bit more flexibility because there's more space between each beat right so at the beginning like if there's a train going if i'm at like 120 or something like that tick tick tick if i'm at 74 right i can make a train i've got more flexibility at a slower tempo um in terms of the rhythmic values that i can write i don't do that here but that's just a thought i wanted to throw out there when you're deciding to pick your rhythm your tempo and if you're at a slower tempo it's a little bit easier to write like a little ethereal music as well right so okay i'm gonna hide the movie for a second and i've got my session set up here so i've got now let me just show you something here and you see how this works on your daw over here in the let me make this really big so that it's easier for you to see and pro tools and i'm not sure i'm not sure about the other daws i can choose how i view the film and this is a place where you can save cpu power so i can look at this as a big block right or i can look at it as frames and as i zoom in right it shows me more of the frames in the timeline oh please show up don't make a mockery of me there we go but you see how it takes time for it to draw in so i mean that's you know that's that is useful not for me though i i just make it blocks and then over here you have your output settings this is not an hd film it's it's only 24 frames per second it's not 60 frames per second so i can do it at full quality but you can do draft and best performance so if i might um if i'm working with 120 instrument tracks and i've got a for like an hd or a 4k film that i'm scoring i might put it on best performance or draft and then that will use less cpu so let me just show you i don't know if you'll be able to tell that much here you see now that this has gotten blurry i don't know if you could tell and if i put it here the image is sharper so it sort of reduces the resolution of the image you're seeing which means it less needs less cpu power to to view it now i've decided that i want to do a light orchestral piece for this right so and i want the piece to be so so that for me leaves out instruments that i don't need and i'll go over that in a second so what i've done here and i just started using these because they just recent version of pro tools but they're in every other daw from what i i know is i've got everything set up i've got my wins my brass pitched percussion regular percussion long strings short strings and effects strings and i also in the long strings i've got a choir patch and remember last when i discussed some of my scores i like to use ensemble patches for big gestures and then for detail put in solo patches and i told you the reasons why i like to do that and i'll go over them again ensemble patches sound different when you're playing them than the individual instruments so let's say i take a flute an oboe an english horn a clarinet and a bassoon and i write a passage for that using four individual instruments if i want to do a unison line that's going to sound a certain way it will sound more authentic right if you're playing or all those people are playing that note at the same time because that's what actually happens the room resonates in a different way and it captures a more authentic sound you have to be careful to not make chords that are too thick because all the instruments multiply so in other words if you have an ensemble patch a woodwind ensemble that has on unison flute oboe clarinet on each note so each note your play has three players on it if you're playing two notes each note that you play has three players on it three times two is six so that sounds like six you add a third note it sounds like nine players and you could see that you just have to be careful with that it does you know especially with strings or string writing if you've got 12 24 players in a string ensemble and you play two a two note chord you got 48 that's really can get very muddy and very diffuse the sound isn't really uh as crisp as it can be so i've got this organized in a way as i've said before where i've got all my instruments sort of like you'd see it in a score sort of i like to go from high pitch to low pitch but i also do something else so let me open this up these are all in what are called track folders and i can open the folder up and you can see that i've got all these instruments here let me uh this doesn't have to be that big so i've got a legato flute huh why is that not sounding interesting maybe no i'm clicking on the keyboard where it's white interesting is your vca up uh oh you know why it's not sounding i know why it's not sounding i'm an idiot i got the music output uh muted because i didn't want the music that i've written i wrote i wrote the first 10 seconds so that i'd at least have something to start with so i had that muted and i unmuted it huh interesting okay let's do this i'm going to close this session and i'm going to reboot stuff happens man it's live live tv i could tell you stories about broadway and weird things happening guys teeth for like an uh an older gentleman's teeth falling out on stage people coming out with their flies open like you know stuff like that people going up on their lines so there's this uh when i was playing at the original little shop of horrors there the actor and he was such a great guy amazing person five-ish finkel he played mushnik and he used to forget his lines occasionally and he would improvise something so one day in the second act he forgot his lines and he just started talking in gibberish like that at the same rhythm and pitch as his lines and the very next line seymour said is what's that supposed to mean and you know i mean it sounds stupid but we were all uh we were all in hysterics because i it was just very funny this will take a minute to load in did you ever work with a walter cyr and any broadway gigs i know didn't he play tuba in the ice capades or something uh actually ken was good friends uh ken that's watching this thing was good friends and worked and engineered many a session at sear sound you know that walter walter sear was actually a salesman from moog synthesizers in the early seven late 60s and early 70s and he did the same thing for the arp 2500 too yeah i only did a couple of sessions at his at his studio hey petey was also a great theremin player in the day and did a lot of film scores so does everybody know what a theremin is right it's an instrument invented by leon thurman i think his name was or leo leon yeah you put your hand in between these metal things and you use it to change the pitch the electrical fields and all the stuff star trek yes exactly i can honestly say i've never touched one me neither but um i've there's a woman elizabeth brown she lives in brooklyn she's a fantastic flutist and composer and she plays in a group called the flute force and i we went to see a performance that she did at baruch college and um she wrote a piece for uh three fl three flutes or three flutists and they played different instruments and everybody was in different like in other words one person played in this piece bass flute alto flute and piccolo and another person was just regular flute and piccolo and and then another person had uh like one of those flutes you had to stand up and and she played theremin on the stage and the other members of the group were all around it was really amazing she did a great job with that okay let's see if we're we're going here [Music] okay great [Music] great so we have sound i'll be cutting this out of the video that i post up online so okay so we've got our flute just legato solo flute a short flute legato elbow is that loud enough for you guys it could be a little louder okay let me do this and then short oh and then so i've got a few solo instruments right just the wind quartet i'm not even sure i'm going to use them but then i've got ensemble patches so i've got short winds that's low and then i've got high short winds [Music] i've got long high winds see like you hear how that sounds and let me do this right so i'm playing those four instruments the solo instruments together it doesn't quite have the same sound as playing a well-balanced ensemble patch so and then i've got a vca and i think i went over what that did and i just use that for separating out the sections and to control and i can solo everything and i can do it has an additional layer of volume mixing and then i've got my brass i don't have a lot of brass instruments one second let me close this with file folder and i can make my brass a little bit bigger so i've just got a legato horn a soft horn long oh not some solo and then i've got four horns long and four horns short i'm not even sure i'm going to use that tuba [Music] and then i've got an ensemble low brass and the reason i have this particular sound is that let me just set this up a little better at that volume it sounds like a choir almost it's beautiful and i might want to use that to fill out a few sections and just make it sound a little richer and then let me close that folder i've got my pitched percussion i've just got this thing called i've got an acoustic piano and then i've got a felted piano and i've got a celeste now let me show you what i did with this celeste this is interesting so this is from a company called cinesamples and this was recorded at the fox i believe at the fox studio or sony studios one of the big scoring stages in los angeles and let me just get it up to the way it came oops hold on [Music] so this is the original sound right that's a beautiful sound i don't i don't think it would work with this piece and the reason i and that i've got a lot like a very loose concept in my mind the reason i don't think it'll work is that there's too much information and it sounds like it's right in my face and i want to have something that's a little bit dreamier so a couple of things first thing i did was i added a high pass filter and i got rid of a lot of the low end let me bypass that see that how it gets rid of the that honkiness [Music] that's going to be better then i se i did a i could select my microphones here and balance them so what i did was i used the room and see how all of a sudden it's no longer right in your face it's a little dreamier but i wanted a little bit of definition so i did some of the overhead mic [Music] that's better all right so as i'm writing i'm mixing i'm thinking about how this is going to fit in to the final product then i've got a harp and just to show you that you don't have to have the latest and greatest i bought the this is sonifa sonavox symphonic harp i purchased the sample library original for this software called gigastudio like in 19 maybe like in 2001. [Music] still sounds great right 20 years later it was recorded in this place called mechanics hall up in worcester uh near boston it was beautifully recorded in 24 bits uh back then so it still works really beautifully [Music] and then i've got a glock and a tube and then i have some percussion not a lot i have symbols symbol rolls which i'll probably use piates i've got finger symbols which i added after i started writing and i'm going to show you how to quickly add sounds to your palette i'll teach you that too and then i've got a timpani i'm not even sure i'm going to use heavy percussion but i have it and then here i've got my long strings these are all ensembles except for two solo instruments so in here i also have bundled the choir and yep let me just do this so i've got this choir [Music] and i like that but i want it to be ethereal and some of these things i'm going to be teaching you and showing you today are not things that you're going to be able to do because you don't have the technology yet but there are ways around that but i want to show you that why it's important to learn technology all right so um i have added some i've done something here that i don't normally do i've inserted a time-based effect into the signal chain as opposed to sending a copy of the audio through an aux track with that time-based effect and because this is the only instrument that's going to be using that so i want it to be baked in as part of the sound so i've got this thing called this is not an expensive plugin it's called valhalla shimmer so here's our choir now listen to what happens when i add the shimmer [Music] right i'm no longer playing hear that that ethereal so what's happening there is that it's a reverb and then there's pitch shift going on at the same time for the reverb signal and octave higher and then there's um some chorusing going on with that there's a right there's mod rate and mod depth that's doing that and i've got that pretty pretty wet it's at 70 percent wet and you could play around with that so without the valhalla and with it right so as i'm going along i'm thinking about the final product and how i'm going to shape the sound to make that and then i've just got solo i've got violins legato cello legato and then i've just got long strings consordine and now articulations consortino ponticello flautando harmonics [Music] tremolos [Music] so like i said i'll be writing with the sections and adding detail with the soloists and if i need more i can add it in later and then i've got short strings spiccato spiccato with mutes on pizzicato bartok pits colegno anybody but daniel know what colegno means correct you're bouncing the back of the bow on the strings string players don't like doing that it ruins their bows but it's a great sound i'm sorry daniel their bows are expensive yeah so you know what what i would say is if if you're gonna if i was gonna hire string players and i needed a lot of uh a lot of caleno bring your cheap bow and your good bow and then you know or i would just leave the the caleno from the sample library in there and then i've got a solo base pizzicato and then just one other food group fx strings and this is something that i would strong if you're as you're building up your sample libraries to do this and you don't have to do this today or tomorrow there's something to think about there are things that instrumentalists can do to animate the sound that you can't really program especially with long notes long notes a string player can play a note and they can change the timbre and the feel and they can do all sorts of stuff in real time that you just can't really program in well so you need to capture those performances and add them in judiciously they add a lot of life and expressivity to the music you write so i've got these evolving patches so this is the first one and you see how that went from quiet to um right that's one note it's unfolding over time right i'm not doing anything if i were to switch the view you'll see you can't really program that in you know so it's good to have that and i've got a second one [Music] so they got to be used judiciously all right oh this just needs to be colored better yes uh professor i have a question um you might have showed that already but would you mind like uh showing quickly how you how you created those subfolders to each track yeah i haven't taught you in uh our other classes because some people only have older versions of pro tools and this is in a recent version of pro tools so the way that you do that is let's see okay i'll i'll do that in a second all right give me uh roberto just give me 30 seconds and i'll get to a spot where i can make one and use it sure thank you so this is my folder for all my aux masters so i've got all the outputs of each of my food groups routed to this one each individual track and this will help me when i'm mixing and also help me if i have to make stems because i can just bounce out these individual to get you know break down my whole score into one two three four five six seven eight tracks which will you'll you'll need to do that sometimes so there's another step i'd have to get to but that's what i and i i can actually instead of adding reverb onto every instrument i can just get it all here and let's say that the whole wind needs a little bit of high pass filter i can add it right here instead of on each individual track so that saves you cpu power so having these additional tracks to route everything through is very helpful and then at the bottom i've got my two reverbs so i've got a long haul which has three point right about a three second decay and i've got the same haul and i made it a lot shorter and i also turned down the decay rate so that i can use the same hall and have two different perspectives because i'll just tell you when you're mixing sampled instruments short articulations don't need as much reverb as long articulations they need shorter reverb times uh because when you play an a a short articulation all of these instruments were recorded in the room so you're getting the sound of that room when a note is sustaining you're not really hearing the reverb of the room so it just seems to me that it sounds better when i'm using a longer hall and having control over that with my long instruments so now if i wanted to put these two guys in their own folder command shift n one new basic folder and i would call this fx and i would take these two guys and i would drag them in here they've got the little gold bar around the track that means that i'm right in there and boom they're in and i want to color code that so i highlight all of them and i just match the colors up so you first create the subfold like the subtracts and then now you don't need no you don't need to no you no you could just take you could put sub you could put folders around any tracks oh okay i got it all right i have a question a couple of weeks ago when you showed us a score you had a couple of blank well not blank tracks that you had scoring tracks they weren't assigned to any instruments yeah i was just getting to that [Laughter] so so let me just show you how when you're working you want to set things up in advance that will save you time so if you can save a minute here a minute there you know over the course of a project it adds up to a couple of hours maybe and that's and also the amount of time that you're you have to spend doing things that you could set up in advance that takes your mind out of being creative right so i like to set things up in advance so if we look in my tracks list which is over here on the this white area over here and i'll make this bigger you don't see that screen oh thank you and i won't even be in the screen so you'll see it okay let me just move this out of the way on the second thing so this is my tracks list over here and these are all the active tracks up here they're in regular uh letters now if i were to open up the wins track watch what happens right in this area here boom you see all your tracks and then boom they're hidden which makes it a little bit more manageable in terms of how many tracks are in that list so if i want a new let's say i want a new track i have to do command shift n new stereo instrument track create then i have to go here and i have to add my con an instrument i'm going to add contact i have to wait okay so that was about 30 or 40 seconds right there to do that and it was a pain in the neck let me just delete that because i don't need it let's say i wanted to add another instance of contact show and make active boom there it is took two seconds right and i keep them at the very bottom now and i've got so let me just hide and make that inactive now let's say i'm working with this wins no let's say i'm working with my my long strings right now what i've done here is i've got things set up in groups and things routed i've got things set up in groups i've made groups over here which will help that's why i can add my vcas and i've got things routed to certain outputs and they're all set up these guys here don't have that done so what if i wanted to add an extra string and have all the routing and everything there very simple i would highlight let's say i wanted to add a solo violin instead of a ensemble violin i would highlight the violins or any of these tracks but i want my i'm going to have it up at the top i'm going to right click on this and i'm going to duplicate i am not going to duplicate the playlist or alternate playlists because i don't really want the midi information i just want to get the insert and the sends and the group assignments right okay now i just have to name this rename this and then go here and just pop in a solo violin don't you want to get rid of the other instrument first no because i i want an additional not instead of well i mean the one that's already in that instance of contact yes i will thank you i wanted to find where the solo strings were but knowing me i would have i would have put in this one and then i would have to delete that one and change the midi channel so and then i can just put in um oh let's see let's say i could put in there we go and i'm going to leave this in here actually and i'm going to purge so now this is half a gigabyte's worth of samples i want to purge my samples which i went over last time and i've got all these articulations available to me so now i've got a solo violin this doesn't have legato though so that might be an issue [Music] i'm going to leave that all right and notice it's color coded correctly right and the output goes to the right output over here and if i look at my if i want to modify groups and i look at my long strings my solo violin has been added to my group so that's how you quickly add another instrument to a group that you're working like like a section that you're working on so i would had to have manually added all those steps i would have manually had to color code it manually had to set the output and manually had to add it to the group this way all i have to do is delete the one rename it delete the one instrument that's chosen and put in the instrument i want much much quicker i have a question about the spitfire samples you uh you would recommend the bbc uh library yeah the discover it's free for students yeah yeah what i wanted to know is so that comes with its own player can that actually be loaded into contact do you know no no let me just show you no it's its own player it's a plugin right i know i'm using it no no it just gets put into an insert right so this is the player here that's not contact that's their own proprietary player and a lot of the companies are going this route now because they have to pay a lot of money to get the license to have it show up in the instrument area of contact you know what i mean and so like let's say i wanted to put bb another one if i go to spitfire audio all of these are in their own player so i would just select it here or in the instrument folder is there a way to purge samples in those players not yet no it's that they need to really do that yeah that's why i was asking yeah so yes and i i have seen where in some where one of the guys that one of the two guys that started the company said that they're working on that but it's easier said than done you know okay any questions on the setup and everything let's get our movie back in here i had asked about the uh the sketch track that you had in that other um project couple weeks ago yeah one more time with that mark you had uh in the store you were showing us uh for a session you were showing us two weeks ago you had these four tracks which were white they were up on top of the oh oh right so what right okay so what i did for that right that's for the animatic was after i was done i wanted to use it as a teaching tool so i created a sketch score of note in notation i'm not i i don't use notation when i write i just i write with my ears and i look at the midi thing occasionally i look at notation in the edit window but i don't look at a score when i'm writing so you're basically just playing something into a track or into an instrument as you go yeah i'm improvising greg also what's the a shortcut to get to the uh to see the video in pro tools like uh it's command and uh yep so let me close this oh you can't see it let me do this command and this 9 here if you can't do if you have a laptop you don't have this side keyboard here it's under window video all right so i can make this a little bigger and still work all right let's get everything the same size and let's do this okay so i started and right now going forward unless i'm looking at you directly and changing the look we're going to look at me here because i want you to see what i'm doing on the keyboard on this controller here with the mouse and what i'm playing all right so i think that that'll be very helpful it's like i'm running a tv show here come on it's the pete show let's take a listen to what i've done so far oh one other thing yes another important thing i forgot almost forgot good thing i it came into my head let me uh this is way too big i don't need to see all that now you'll notice this is bar one right you'll notice before bar one there's a lot of data what i did was i record enabled all the instruments and i set a softer volume so that the instruments don't come blaring in which is why i had to turn them up a little bit for you to hear them right so i just recorded that in so that it starts off at a softer volume and then i can just bring it up as i need it so i do that at the beginning of every piece this way they're all in about the same volume area because some instruments are recorded louder than others and it just it just helps out to preset that so let's take a look at what i've done so [Music] far okay this is where i stopped so how's the volume on that is that loud enough right okay so it's just i've got harp so i'm going to start opening these things up so we can see them and what i've done here is [Music] interesting interesting so this is something new with folders that i never realized it kind of defeats my vcas huh interesting [Music] oh unless i did something bad here hold on a second ah forgot a solo safe okay no matter how long you've been doing this there's always something you mess up [Music] so very simple right a little like almost like quasi debussy in harp and the celeste is very simple [Music] and that's a point that i want to bring forth is that simplicity right i need to get somewhere i don't want to start off with big chords on the celeste it only needs that one note to really help the harp out right light and and that motion it's a kind of it's a train but it's not heavy and hitting you in the face right it's not like uh um faster than a locomotive kind of a thing all right it's this impressionistic painting and a train in the countryside over over a water body at night and then with that i have a choir and let's take a listen solo to the choir [Music] see how having that shimmer has this beautiful etherealness so let me just show you a couple of things that you need to learn how to do i am animating the sound as it's going forth and what i'm doing here is i'll play this right and as i played [Music] i'm using these two controls i've got one mapped to the mod wheel which goes through the dynamic layers and i've got another one mapped to expression which just controls the volume not the dynamics but the volume whether the the sample is louder or softer but not a softer dynamic layer in other words the mod wheel controls whether somebody's singing softly as opposed to taking a loud sample and playing it softer and what they do with these samples is that they are multi-sampled so that you've got softer [Music] and different levels of volume so you might have pianissimo piano mezzo piano mezzo forte forte fortissimo so you play one note and it has all all of those programmed and you go through the different dynamic layers using the mod wheel and you supplement that with the volume now i don't typically use midi volume to do detailed work i use midi volume as uh like a gross like if the whole track is too loud i bring it down with the midi volume but i can do my detail work with mod and expression now not every sample library is programmed with mod to go through the different dynamic layers and the bbc discover orchestra doesn't have that they you know they didn't add that in what do you want for nothing just has the really nice recordings of those instruments but you can use the expression i i do think the mod works as turning volume up and down but it's not um going through different dynamic levels it's just playing one one one sample louder or softer now if you don't have one of these guys and i did this for a decade for literally if i said i did this for decades i wouldn't be kidding because i've only incorporated this over the last three or four years is you would have the pencil tool in your daw and you would open up this is called an edit lane in pro tools so it's where you can assign all your play around with all your controllers so what i do here is i would just draw something in right i would play it in and go back afterwards and draw it in but you got to animate you got to automate to animate to make your stuff come to life you know if you if you're not animate if you're not automating the those different parameters and everything is at one volume it gets very boring very quickly [Laughter] nobody plays like that unless they're playing a piece by philip glass ouch and i won't be editing that out i won't be editing that out i won't be editing that out i won't be editing okay anyway i do like philip glass i like steve reich much more though all right so i've got that and then i've got some pizzicato strings here just to give us a little little motion and then all that and then one other last thing is i've got some wins just ensemble wins playing some staccato lines over here speaking of uh philip glass or steven reich right [Music] now let's talk about arranging everything doesn't come in right at the beginning you piece right i'm starting off with harp then the celeste then the choir the bass and then the winds so the the instrument the instruments come in in the timeline they unfold they're characters in this play of music that's sort of how i look at it okay so i'm just going to start working from this point going on unless there's any questions on anything i've done so far and over the next we're going to go a little later today because i want to make sure that i get through a good portion of this with you here so you can see what i'm doing all right because we don't have a class next week so won't be around for a couple of weeks oh i've got my little finger symbols also just to add a little mystery right just a couple two hits with the finger symbols right just and if we listen to the harp i mean the celeste the finger symbol and the um base pizzicato it's kind of interesting [Music] right see how those those guys work together just a little a little something all right so what am i going to do next let me take a look [Music] okay so i'm getting rid of this because i want this i've instead of making a big change right when the picture changes the tremolo strings end because it doesn't happen on a beat [Music] see that [Music] and that helps me out [Music] [Music] okay so let me just see if i don't even know if i like this next section [Music] okay so there's i don't like that i'm editing because i want to have something different the second time so yeah so right i played that in and i just went about editing it okay so i need something here to give me a little bit of motion and i'm going to try these string evos and see what i come up with [Music] no i don't like that because as i'm watching this i want to have something restful come in on the boats the dock that right there so because then right after that i believe it goes to black and white okay so let's do this i think i know what i want to do this so i'm going to get rid of this virtuoso violin because i think i want to have legato so i'm going to add that in and that didn't have a legato um patch in it all right so [Music] okay so i think that i want to change that sound a little bit so i'm making a little colder i'm taking the vibrato off [Music] i think that that'll work so let's and another thing i'm going to do is now that i've got something with a a pace i've turned off the metronome because i don't want to have that metronome i've got those rhythmic things going i'm going to play off of those rather than playing to the metronome at in this part so let's start here and i'm going to overdub something so right here this is called midi merge that means i can record more midi information without erasing what i've already done and i'm going to work on the vibrato and that last note's too loud i mean too long [Music] and then i need a little bit something else in there [Music] yeah i like that [Music] almost i'm going to undo that i'm going to come in a little later that's the prepared piano no that's a felt piano right as opposed [Music] so basically it's a piano that's that's got felt on the strings and the hammers hit the felt first and adds a certain mood to it [Music] good i'll keep that and let's see [Music] i remember i said i i was gonna have this brass here to have some nice warmth i think that's the chords there is it [Music] yeah so this is too loud here right so i'm gonna just bring the whole thing down right i'm mixing as i'm working [Music] i'm going to do something again i don't normally do i'm going to put a delay in there and i'm just going to use the like a basic the one that comes with pro tools so it's the mod delay 3. i won't use one of my fancy delays and what i'm going to do is turn the feedback up a little bit a little bit more and i'm going to take off some of the a lot of the high end and bring down the mix and then i'm going to do a dotted eighth note and a quarter note and let's hear what we got there all right so see i'm mixing as i'm going along i'm adding effects i normally do it as a send with with reverbs and delays but that effect is just for that instrument so i'm going to put it in there i actually in i don't let my i i discourage my students from doing that because i want to get them used to routing audio to send effects but i do add that in [Music] great okay so let me add my brass in here filling out that middle section up okay so that went too long and let me just i'm gonna do that one more time [Music] okay i missed it [Music] all right i don't know if i like that last chords let me fix that now i'm not going to be quantizing something like this [Music] okay great but what i am going to do now i'm gonna go back and i'm gonna do my dynamics by overdubbing so i've got midi merge turned on [Music] and what i want to do is i want to add a little breath between each chord right notice how i played them where the notes are overlapping so i'm going to put my playback head there and i'm going to use command e that separates that out and i'm just going to delete those and i'll do the same thing here on the last 16th note give the guys and women a chance to take a little breath and then let's see and let's do this here right so that we leave that this beautiful scene right here in the clear for the next bit [Music] okay so this is bothering me here what i want to do is make this shorter and make this last note longer [Music] right and i want to get a like a a gliss so i can change the velocity there and you'll hear what i mean yeah i need to have this overlap a little bit more and then with this one also i want this like they have the intervals between programmed in all right now there's a little bit of activity going on with the guy there um he's a little bit drunk and he's talking to the police officer i guess it is i've noted that i might come back later and play around with that like this right here or i might try to do something there now i was going to ask about that little little action there yeah you know it's like you could think of it in terms of you got a big piece of wet clay on a wheel and the first half an hour you're just making a general shape and then you get through the whole thing and then you go back and you fine tune and you keep fine-tuning so that's that's definitely a way to work and that is how i work [Music] so you know something like that right you could see that it just adds a couple of notes will add so [Music] so these are kind of cool chords uh i could you know show you some my hormonal concept it's basically i do a lot of things called intervallic harmony like the stuff that um david berkman teaches you in the harmony class it's fantastic it's great you know learning how to do all your like extended jazz harmonies or if you've taken undergraduate courses and you've learned your four-part bach chorales and you've studied harmony that way that's great but i sort of look at putting different kinds of intervals together so and using fragments of chords so this is basically a c major seventh without the e and that's a like you know some sort of d chord without the third and then just moving voices around so anyway [Music] [Music] let me clean that up [Music] so i don't need these delete those i'm not going to quantize this [Music] [Music] so i'm going to leave that in for now but what i'm going to do is i'm going to change the dynamics i'm going to leave the timing the way it is and i'm going to do a crescendo so very simply i'm going to play around with the velocity using the pencil now the pencil has different shapes freehand line and when i teach this in my classes i tell them to use a line at first right and because it's easier [Music] [Music] let me see what happens if i uh this area here it's i'm a little behind the beat which is unusual let me just quantize it a little bit not completely oops [Music] so i'm gonna leave that hit on the picture change for now i may get rid of that but i'm just leaving that there and right here i want let's see what do i have here right so i've got just like two and a half beats so let's go to our string effects and see what we've got [Music] right so let me come in a little bit early yeah i need to come in earlier with that and i'm going to do dynamic work [Music] nope now interesting right let me fix this up a little bit now i could have something new start right here and that's the obvious place or i can wait for the hand to come in i think that's that's right at beat two yeah so let's do this i am i see so i'm in two four i didn't go back to one so let me just change let me just play around with my meters so i've got four four here right i needed a measure two four right here [Music] now i got so let me just fix up my timing [Music] so this is a measure of 3 4 here not 4 4. you know it's funny i'm not even thinking in terms of bar lines i'm just thinking in terms of beats of music right so i always have to go back afterwards and clean that up so this here is three four that's just for your own benefit though right does it right yeah and if i want to make it look like you know like i know what i'm doing somebody else looks at my my uh music what are you doing there that's weird man [Music] this actually works out really well one two three four one great so that actually fixed my problem right so this is where his hand is comes in right after the downbeat there so that really helps me out actually it's sort of a happy accident right i don't know if you do you understand what i'm talking about i fixed my time so that it's it's it's more accurate so there's a measure of two four a measure of three four and then i met then three measures of four four or 12 beats till this comes in here at this tempo if i had just left it at 2 4 it was coming in uh like on beat two instead of downbeat okay so now i'm going to have to bring my click track back in so actually i'm going to move this over here so what's nice about this is i've got 12 beats from here one two three four two two three four three two three four one vincent's face for the first time right so i've got to come up with 12 beats of music here so i'm gonna go back and watch the whole thing down uh i don't want the click to play when i'm listening [Music] i'm watching all right so i think that i want to have here i'm gonna come in with regular piano [Music] all right so i was just on c so [Music] no i don't like that i like the beginning of that but not that [Music] okay that's getting somewhere right [Music] i don't like the last chord though so let's let's leave that loose for now and let me take a look at this piano part now i'm a little bit ahead of the beat which i don't like so instead of quantizing it i'm just going to take everything i played and just slide it back just a tiny bit so i just adjusted the color of the piano i could have done that with eq it was a little dark for me [Music] let me go back to my shorts up i hate when i do that [Music] ah my fault [Music] yeah it's like jazz man [Laughter] yeah that's so i just want to get that rhythm a little better [Music] good and let's do this let me take a look at the piano part for a second so i've got a c d o a c f e a c f e d okay great [Music] no i don't like that solo sound didn't fit in i see i can make that decision really quickly um that was too weak so i'll just go to the full string pizzicato and this is actually a chamber ensemble it's not a large string ensemble [Music] i like that i just want to double check that so i'm going to solo it [Music] yeah so i need to just clean up so my velocities here need to be a little higher so i'm just listening to how even [Music] that's early so let's get that on closer [Music] there [Music] oh you know something see as time goes on you sort of think about things that you could add to places right so [Music] right so i just added that choir in that one little spot and maybe this whole thing can come a little bit earlier right so you don't really hear it while this other stuff is going on [Music] and then i could you know if i wanted to orchestrate that a little bit [Music] okay standard mallet roll [Music] and then you know if you really wanted to emphasize that downbeat there right what you could do it's coming in right here i think right yep okay so let me come a little earlier than this [Music] one two three oops came in too early and too loud oh my goodness that's horrible [Music] bye so see i'm dragging that so that it comes in right at the beginning of that that's fine and i'm going to drag that velocity down and also the volume is too loud even that so let me just bring it down here so like i said i use midi volume for gross adjustments in the volume and i made it disappear good [Music] and the piano is too loud now [Music] right so let's see it's [Music] i don't like the sound of that for sure i want to have something in the mid-range it's a little weak [Music] great one more time [Music] nope [Music] let me take a listen [Music] hmm [Music] i just added um this the fourth chord it ends up being that i want to try something here so i'm going to jump these up an octave [Music] okay i forgot to turn the sustain pedal off when i stopped playing some notes are extending after i played so let me get rid of that [Music] [Music] what happened to my strings i erased my strings let me fix that again [Music] why did it not record that great and then i am going to double that up for the first entrance of our legato horn [Music] now why am i not hearing that okay let me let me do my dynamics oh whoops midi merge more time [Music] let me fix that up in here and what i want to do here is i want there to be a little bit of breath here and i want that to slide up right but these slides are coming in late so i need to drag these notes a little bit early yo so you know what i mean by the dra that's the slides right it's the legato intervals that they play right those intervals to slide up between the two intervals i don't like portamento yeah that's all baked into the samples just a little late and let's see how that sounds with the [Music] strings okay so we're going to change our articulation [Music] [Music] so [Music] hmm let me just see something here [Music] nope [Music] [Music] okay great would you ever just have a rest on his face before before adding more music i'm sorry what did you ever just leave like a gap before coming in with that new rhythm if if that's what i felt like doing sure why not i'm just asking no no ask away mark please and it may end up that way right so this i don't want it here so i've got that [Music] i could play the rolling stones never mind yeah okay so i'll add a little punctuation [Music] all right just adding a little punctuation to those rhythms and let me get them a little tighter [Music] huh okay [Music] hmm ah sorry [Music] just added some low base there here we go [Music] ah [Music] let me clean up that dynamic [Music] does pro tools have something like retrospective record uh yeah it does and i've never actually learned how to use it it's a recent uh edition and i forget where it is exactly but i i i'm fairly certain that there is something like that in this it and because i remember reading about it when it came out but i've never used it so i don't know i have to be honest i don't know how to use it comes in handy like you do that first improvisation then you just hit the retrospective record and it has it yep i tend to take the attitude of like if it's meant to be i'll record it and if not i'll come up with something better [Music] right okay so this is a good time to go back and listen to the whole thing and let's see how it's developing [Music] oh there's no uh film i'm sorry my fault [Music] i might go back and redo the whole thing now i'm only kidding anyway let me continue on and see if i can get through the next bite [Music] did just gonna play around something [Music] so let me i gotta get the timing two three four one two and then so it's one two three four one two it comes in on the and right so let's see what we wanna do here [Music] okay so i'm going to make this a measure of 3 8 here and you'll see why in a second and then i'm going to make oh it might not be interesting that might not be right let me just see let's see if that comes in on the downbeat [Music] yeah it kind of does yeah okay and now i can get back here and let me just see i'm gonna get my grid down to eighth notes here and let's see so i got one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11. so i've got 11 beats he's entering the pub or this guy's entering the pub here actually right so he's actually starting before that so this brings up an interesting dilemma like there's a guy crying there sort of out of the blue right it's sort of almost like a non-sequitur uh it doesn't really fit in with the rest of what's going on you understand what i mean so what do i do about that [Music] i think i'm gonna make that part of this and then start the next bit there so that would make this a measure of 3 4. do you understand the choice that i'm making here right this this guy here what it what is that like in other words it seems like it doesn't really fit as part of the story right he's in the he's in a club somewhere or a pub and then he's out in the fields like you know doing his landscape painting and now he's running with his oils and then there's a guy crying and then we're in the pub right so i'm gonna make the guy crying part of this bit and then come in here with the pub so i want to move this back here not happy with where i put that [Music] okay oh plus there's a mistake oh my goodness i made a mistake when i played oh the horrors i was able to tell that there was a bad note there because of what it looked like here all right [Music] so yes i'm copying and merge pasting and i'm going to do is try to do something where it's just a little off beat as well [Music] yeah okay cool let's copy this and pop that there oh i didn't get it really okay let's try it this way [Music] hmm [Music] nope [Music] so i want a little bit more action happening there [Music] and then i'm gonna come in there with a little run up [Music] i don't like that last note on that run up and it's also rushed so let me just slide it oop not everything everything else looks good and all right so let me just show you something about doing harp things like that a little programming bit [Music] these single notes fine except what i'm going to do is i'm going to stretch hold out this one here and this one here right [Music] and that there i wanna i want it to be off on the downbeat but i'm gonna stretch all of these out so it's like almost like a gliss you know what i mean great and then i want to fix my velocity and it's a little sloppy rhythmically but i'm gonna leave it because it's [Music] human all right so at this point we're a little bit halfway through over halfway through and i any questions on what i've done so far we're going to leave it here today is that helpful at all i mean i've never really done that in front of anybody before i mean people that live here hear me doing this stuff all right but they don't hear me talking about it while i'm doing it it's a little bit i have to sort of it slows me down a little bit because i have to go back and forth between my creative mind and my rational mind you know what i mean so when when my rational mind is if i'm sitting at the piano and i'm trying to ingest a new fingering for something or scale i'm being really careful and detailed and i'm paying attention to mechanical things at first until i repeat them often enough that they become internalized in part of me when i'm writing music the things i'm telling you and talking about i'm just doing so for me to have to talk about it while i'm doing it kind of takes me out of the creative space you know and um it makes it a little bit more cumbersome to write you know it's not as much of a flow as i like so this is the way that i write music i do not write things very rarely write things out on paper i can i have um i do print out notation after the fact sometimes to have as a guide so i can refer back to themes as i'm scoring a film bring back stuff reprise things and give a continuity to the score like in the next bit i was actually thinking about this taking this which is the harp right you can't see that sorry thank you so basically i copied the harp at the very beginning and i'm gonna go to my short strings and [Music] right and then when i have to do this so like i just i actually kind of like that so look at how low the velocities are i want to have it be a little bit more energetic so i'm going to raise those velocities up these first few notes need to be a little more biting and i want this now just let me i'm going to do a couple more things while i've got you here so i'm going to copy these notes here and then i am going to go to my collino track and i'm going to merge paste them here so this is what this is doing and so let me get rid of this these notes here they're confusing the issue [Music] see how they just give a little bite to the strings right so that's layering that's midi orchestration layering things together and if i wanted to do um right if i then what i could do here then is i could take this so i'm just lassoing these top notes here and that's happening at okay at the second 16th note of bar 13. so i'm copying that and then i'll go up here okay second note so then i'm going to go to four horns short oh so it's actually it's a 16th note okay so let me get the grid and i'll merge paste that there [Music] all right so let me just think about this for a second [Music] right so see how i'm orchestrating this and then maybe what i do here is i would enter the first time maybe add to something new right so i'm back in e minor and that's too loud so let me just bring the volume of that down a little no it sounds like the nfl sorry i got to get rid of that i know what i could do so this is cool too so i'm going to add an oboe line and a flute line instead of playing them i could play them two two times and that would be uh probably more authentic but i'm gonna hold the shift key down and i'll record enable that and i've got both of those playing together and i can record the two of those at the same time okay so i like that except i'm gonna edit it right so that was like totally one take right so let's see so let me lasso this so i get both of those notes and i want this to start earlier and i want to get rid of these notes because i was verbose and last through this and just drag this out so that's still editing both tracks i'm editing both tracks yes at the same time like for example uh mark if i wanted to right you see that i have the brass i can have the brass in there and they're all color coded and i could do all sorts of editing all in the midi editor at the same time i don't really teach that because it's enough for the students to be able to just you know edit one one line at a time but i do have both so like for example see i i lifted that up and the other note is right underneath it and what you can do is you can if i clicked here like this i think it is let me just see something here right i can make them be both two different colors uh even though they're color coded the same color if i really wanted to okay so that needs to go until vincent's pipey thingy happens [Applause] great and then i would make that into a measure of whatever um i'd have to figure out how many beats that is there and have his pipe come in on him smoking the pipe on the downbeat and save save save save save constantly save don't lose your work all right so i'm gonna i'm gonna uh i'm gonna call it a day now i'm uh exhausted okay and i hope this was helpful um you know this is the way i work this is the way i would say 95 of all film composers work i would say that a vast majority of film composers i know don't really have very good keyboard skills um and they might not be as fluid at doing this stuff as i am but i can improvise and for me improvising is the quickest way to get things from out there through me and that's really the the the that's another philosophical discussion about how the amount of resistance that you can alleviate from yourself and allow creativity float from and i'm serious this sounds like you know new age garbage but everything is out there and you are a vessel for it and the most the biggest things that you can do to clear your mind and allow the music to just come through you so that when i'm doing that stuff and i'm really in the zone i'm just the observer i'm watching myself work i'm not really working i'm just watching myself work i'm like a another person standing above me just wow look what he's doing right creativity is out there you could study or everything study study study study internalize it get it to be so that you don't have to think about it and and and it's out there when you guys are blowing your jazz solos if you're thinking you're not playing i you know and people say hear something in your head and play it well i just i watched a video um where chick corea was somebody asked korea what he's thinking about when he's playing and he said i'm not thinking about anything i'm just being you know and he's one of the greatest pianists of the past half century um so and the guy is 75 and he's still unbelievable or maybe he's even older than that so that's another philosophical debate but you see this is the workflow you don't have to do this whatever you can do to get going on this get going so i'm going to write up a a brief and i'll post it up on the google classroom site and sai tosai please email me to make sure that i send you one are you here today let's see yes suiting i mean yes if you could just email me to make sure i send you an email okay yeah with the with the brief and get started so get your get your um spotty notes set up however you write it doesn't have to be as sophisticated as mine but it has to be organized in a way that's going to help your creativity okay oh that was for everybody you were talking about creating an arc do you ever envision the whole arc of the in this case the whole minute worth yeah because right now i see you're just like you're going piece by piece by piece did you have something longer in mind yeah but it does build right i'm going piece by piece by piece but i'm thinking about the whole thing as i'm writing right like in other words on a shorter on a shorter level this whole opening [Music] i'm building this up [Music] building right [Music] to this point here and then now a new dynamic a little bit more in depth bigger a little bit more intense you know the energy and the harmonic language and then right here i might want to bring it down a little bit and then start building it back up again which is sort of what's going on there i didn't need to do more work to that section to make it better but you could see how as i'm working i don't have to be thinking about that arc it's in the back of my mind and i've been doing this long enough where it just happens you know what i mean like you know mark when you're out playing with wonder stories you you you don't have to think about the dynamics of the music you've been playing all those songs for so long that you just it just naturally happens you know it's a similar similar to this do you have an idea when you're doing this like kind of where are you going to end or a little bit where do you want to go or you are just building an angry i think it takes you it depends it's it's it's both you know it depends upon every i might this is what i'm working this is the way this is turning out right i might have another piece where where i have to do something differently right every every piece that you work on is will dictate to you which one of those choices you make or other choices right so that's why you have to i i i i'm not big on telling people this is the way you do this the only thing i'm big on telling people to do is sharpen your axe before you cut down the tree you know because as i've said many times some people might be sick of hearing me say this failing to prepare is preparing to fail so if you don't prepare to write a piece of music that means getting your spotty notes that means setting up your markers or making a little guide a little road map and then organizing your session you're creating too many roadblocks if you don't do all that stuff before you start writing you're creating too many roadblocks that will hinder your chances of success so that's really the only thing i tell i insist people really think about before they start writing but as far as how you actually write that's a personal thing for every one of us and but what i will tell you is that your writing technique and your writing skills should be so strong and so flexible that they can shift to the demands of each project so i'm using a certain harmonic language here right much different than um the fifa world cup theme that i wrote much different than the special olympics world game theme much different than the music i wrote for the democratic national convention each one of those projects required a different musical skill set you know it's harmonic language melodic language orchestral colors the score i wrote for the espn film pat xo about the late pat summitt great women's basketball coach was all delta blues with acoustic guitars that's much different language than this or your writing skills should be so so strong that you can make those shifts and keep your individuality while you're doing those shifts right so that it's uniquely you does that help you and i yeah no okay i like to yak a lot i've got a lot of opinions about stuff you know but anyway so two weeks from today we will meet please get underway don't wait uh this'll be due one two three november 4th okay and i'll put that in the brief that i pop up on our um on our google classrooms don't wait to start writing until november 2nd start soon and do a little bit every day and then go back and and keep a diary version one save as version two and build on what you're doing if we have any doubts can we send you like so what we'll do is at our next class we'll go what i'd like to do is uh we'll continue oh our next class we also have a guest we have jeff rona uh composer he's going to be talking with us for an hour and you guys can ask questions i'll send you a link for his website um he's a great guy he's a great composer and he's going to talk i'll i'll interview him you'll get someone else's perspective besides myself he's done great work and he came at composing through being a synth programmer and a woodwind player so he had a different trip than i did but we'll um get back to our survey if you've got questions bring them to the next class bring and upload your piece to dropbox so that i can go over it because the questions you have will be benef and my answers will be beneficial to everybody else most likely okay have a great two weeks and i will catch you then thank you so much thank you so much thank you thank you and stay safe thanks for the class yeah the review video will be up in a couple days of this class you

Channel: Pete Calandra Music

Views: 2,199

Keywords: How To Score A Film, Film Scoring, How To Compose Music, Orchestral Music, Neo Classical, How To Use Spitfire audio, Spitfire Audio, Orchestral Tools, Fab Filter, Native Instruments, Kontakt, Midi Composing, Pro Tools, Sample Libraries, Film Music, Music Technology, MIDI Sequencing, Loving Vincent, Using The BBCSO, BBC Orchestra, Spitfire BBCSO

Id: 5-_2oJr21Po

Length: 152min 46sec (9166 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020