How To Write Music (If You Can't Read It???)

right before i start this film a couple of reminders i'm trying to get to 100 000 subscribers before the end of october if we do that then i'm going to do something mental that i think you'll really really like also there's a composer walk up here in edinburgh on the 14th of october i've still got to provide exact details and maybe a little signiany thing so that we can work out how many people are going to come so do subscribe to this channel for those two reasons hi there my name is christian henson a few years ago i made a video for the spitfire audio channel it was on i think santa monica beach where i told an anecdote about how i had a nervous breakdown basically burst into tears it was properties and snot all over the keyboard the fear of creating my own orchestral music for the first time and what i realized when i overcame that was it was fear itself that was preventing me from doing so so to continue in the spirit of that video i want to take it a step further i hope with my work with spitfire audio i've proven to many of you that orchestral music isn't beyond our grasp regardless of our abilities theoretically or our ability to write music and that doesn't change when you're working with live musicians so in the spirit of that video what i'm going to do is i'm going to work with this very simple string part that's very poorly programmed and get a bunch of 24 amazing string players to play it from the scottish session orchestra in collaboration with clockwork sessions we know that we can make orchestral music in the box because doors allow us to in these amazing sample libraries whether you buy them or get them for free and in order to get a band of maybe 24 players or a quartet or just a single flautist to play your music you don't need to employ orchestrators arrangers copyists you can do this yourself even if you can't read music and that is because yes our door allow us to imagine and create these wonderful orchestral worlds but they also enable us to spit out this stuff so let's have a listen to this piece and you'll see that i haven't even bothered to do any expression programming during the middle because i'm going to get the orchestra to replace everything [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] nothing really to write home about i'm going to show you how an orchestra with absolutely no instructions other than the notes and the rests can absolutely transform this piece of music unfortunately if i was to give them this they would go this is as a friend of mine once told me just a pile of bat poop so we need to organize it a bit better now the theoretical knowledge i'm going to assume you know is that you understand what the difference between a note and a rest and a clef and a time signature is however i'm working on this blagger's guide this whole bit up here explains the theory of notation before we start getting into some ideas of the different clefs how accidentals work dynamics and how to phrase it and some basic instructions this is basically everything that i've picked up over the last 25 years distilled down into a sheet that i'm really hoping that you'll help me get kind of even richer in content more about that later so what's the first step well you'll you'll see that i'm a bit of a sustain pedal hound so i'm actually going to just in the global format this isn't a logic tutorial so i'm not going to be honing in on what hotkeys i'm using and all that kind of stuff whatever door provided it has a notation function this tutorial will help you with that one too okay so that's rid of the pedals now what i'm going to do is i'm just going to duplicate these so that i can always just go back a step now one of the problems is you can see i've played it live and i'm anticipating the beat which is what you kind of have to do with string samples but what then happens with that is you get all of these really weird rhythms the logic interprets it a little bit to verbatim so let's snap it to the grid and i'm going to do that just with a simple eight note quantize and you'll see every step of the way it'll start making things just look a little bit more legible now this is basically in a piano stave so the treble clef is your right hand is your higher clef your bass clef is as it suggests a lower clef is your left hand now what we need to do is organize that into basically single parts for each instrument when composing this piece of music i had in mind who i was writing it for and that's a string section which means five voices first violins second violins violas cellos and basses now you can have more voices if you want but you need to then split off some of the sections so half of the section plays one note and half of the section plays another which basically means it can sound a little bit thinner less of a section so what i've been wary of is not using more than five voices at a time for this string section because it's only 24 players i mean a symphony size string section is about 60. so i don't want them suddenly becoming smaller and smaller subdivisions if you know what i mean because they're going to replace all of the samples so what we need to then do is voice it and this is the part that really scares people but it's very very simple first violins take the top note second violins take the next note down violas the next note usually kind of in the middle cello's the next note down from that and bass is the very bottom note so you simply have to organize it by stacking one note on top of another by section they never cross over and if they do they'll usually raise their hands to say i'm going above the first violins at this point so how do i go about doing that well let's create the five sections the five voices so we got first fallen second villain or violins section v a which stands for viola vc which is the full name of the cello which is the violin cello or violin cello then cb which is contrabass which is the full name for bases they don't mind being called basis though and i'm just going to copy that part across all of them let's mute that and it's as simple as this what i'm going to do is get the first violins just to take all the top notes so let's just delete all of the notes underneath the top notes and that's the violin part voiced and then what we do is we delete the very top note and then do exactly the same process as we did before deleting all of the notes underneath the new top note which is the second violin part now where the ranges of the instruments are concerned if you actually instead of using an ensemble patch um i'm actually not going to have the cellos coming in at first they're going to join in there and then the bases will join in there where ranges are concerned if you switch your parts these individual parts to actually the individual sections so not ensemble patches you'll get an indication from the sampler when you've gone out of the range i've also on the cheat sheet started working on the ranges as well both by midi value and by notation alongside the tunings of each individual string that's the cello's done and finally the base which is everything except for the bottom note and i don't want them coming in until here and there's your piece voiced and now if we have a look at that so we need to format each individual voice or section so we're going to go from piano to violin or just the treble clef same for the second violin and let's change it from violin to viola this is a kind of weird clef where middle c is in the middle so it's in between the treble and the bass clef we go cello there it uses the bass clef and then the contrabass uses the bass clef but if we go to contrabass you'll see has a little eight beneath the bass clef and it basically means that these exact notes as they're written in the bass clef but they sound an octave lower so you'll see suddenly we've got something that to me resembles music however there are some anomalies if we have a listen to this bit here you'll see this donates a rest now do i want it to rest well it certainly doesn't sound like it again because i'm a sustain pedal hound what i need to do is a thing in logic called force legato which is just basically make all the notes nudge up against each other so there's no gaps and this way logic will interpret it better so it'll look even simpler and this becomes the composer score or the conductor score where you can see what each individual instrument is playing at one glance but what you need to then do is separate it off into individual parts and i'd give it a little tidy so that for example the bar lines aren't crashing into the staves that kind of stuff so let's return to the score and you will hear that without any indication of dynamics of phrase markings any instructions they will interpret the piece of music holy human holy musical and i think you'll be surprised at how by just literally tidying up your parts and spitting them out as music how musical it actually is but this is just the first of four takes i'm going to take each take on a step to get even more nuance and dynamic out of them so let's have a listen to what this sounds like [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so what you'll spot here is a copying error there's actually this octave part that is all joined up and there's a gap there and you can hear that the band probably in rehearsal recognized that there was this flowing octave line and we were probably missing a note they're familiar with copyerrors they're not the end of the world you can usually work out what's wrong on the day so we listen to this bar here i'm going to take it from bar 18. [Applause] you'll hear that the band is going um excuse my singing [Music] [Applause] but what you can actually do is ask them to phrase it differently imagine if instead of da da da da da da da da da da they sang well they do that by bowing less so currently what they're playing is da da da da da da da da and that is the implication with the notation you're basically giving them no phrase marks between each note so they assume you need one bow per note but day a day a day a day it's kind of like joined up writing but instead of every word joined up it's every other letter is joined up and how do you know take that well if you look at these marks here logic has already put a phrase mark in and what that means is simply don't rebow this is basically one note the same note and the reason why it's put what's called a tie across is because it goes across the bar or measure so you can use exactly this mark to do the joined up bits that we were talking about so if we go in here and get our pencil out the first violins would now play uh i'd match that phrase marking for the lower violins as well so instead of da da da da da da da da da da da they're going day a day or rather bowing in twos so when these lines between the same note they're a tie when they're between different notes they're a slur and you can get wind and brass players to play slurred as well so with a wind instrument or a brass instrument you tongue each note pop type for your brass but you don't have to slur it in twos you can slur it in four so day a day a day yeah yeah yeah but i prefer twos so i'll stick with those the opposite of joining up is making little gaps between each note so you'll hear on this part [Music] what if we want them to go now we could make them shorter notes and add rests but a quicker way of doing this is to add a staccato mark here and maybe for the part below and that indicates that you want very very short notes and using instructions which are words you can describe how long or short but a staccato will be done so not massively short but definitely a little bit of daylight between each note the next thing i want to talk about before we listen to the next take is that i've not given them any instruction of how loud or quiet i want this to be played and it's not just about setting a level for the entire piece you can actually vary the dynamic and this is where orchestras are really coming to their own this huge sense of not only light and shade but loud and large and small and tender and if you look on the cheat sheet there's a whole list of dynamic markings now when the musicians are just handed a bit of music without any dynamic markings more times than not they'll play at mezzaforte which is the kind of medium level but you've got forte loud fortissimo and fortissimo and in the other direction mezzopiano piano pianissimo and pianississimo and you can go quieter than that and you can go louder than that but i just didn't want to cram too much information on this so let's have a look at how i phrased up the next take so you see we start every note with piano but we don't have to write it under every note they know i'll play at this level until otherwise instructed i met a forte a little bit louder here and then we've instructed the cello who's coming in here to play at mezzo forte two and you'll see that i've phrased everything up mainly boeing in twos [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so i hope you agree there's almost a more lyrical quality to it a couple of interesting areas this high note up here is at the wrong dynamic it needs to be a lot quieter i wasn't there on the day but if i had been i would have gone to the first violins between bars 9 to 16 inclusive so they know it includes the whole of the contents of bar 16 play down a dynamic which would mean they play mezzo piano or piano or specify piano or just say p or pp or mp the other thing that i thought worked really well was the staccato because it really made the cellos sing out this felt more like an accompaniment as opposed to part of the the kind of the voicing of the piece if you know what i mean i've not used the correct language there but let's just have a listen to that [Music] i guess it's because there's more daylight in the arrangement at that point now if we go back to the dynamics on my cheat sheet you'll notice at the bottom there's these lines here this is a crescendo so this is a line opening and what that suggests is between these notes and this note we want you to gradually increase in volume diminuendo is the other way around forte to piano so gradually decrease in volume and you'll see that on this chart we don't have any of those markings what you'll hear from this section into this is a big leap that again just isn't as lyrical [Music] almost feels like an edit so what i'm going to do in the next one is to be just a little bit more lyrical with the dynamics but also introduce things called instructions that again really steers your players into the way in which they interpret the music so you'll see that we now have these markings here so what we're doing is we're at the end of our piano section we're actually building anticipating that we're going into mezzo forte and the same at the end here just as i demonstrated so we'll actually get increasing in volume between the piano section and the forte section but also we've got a lot more words so dolce i believe means kind of tender and beautiful it's affectionate really i believe then we're going into artificial harmonics now if you're a guitarist you'll know that you can produce artificial harmonics by fingering a note and then putting your little finger or another finger i think it's about four frets above and just resting it on the same note then produce a harmonic which is roughly kind of it sounds kind of two octaves above the note that you're fingering well exactly the same thing applies with violins they can produce harmonics in the same way and cellos and basses they're not the easiest thing to produce so i wouldn't do incredibly complex passages with harmonics you'll also see i've got this thing called pits which stands for pizzicato which means to pluck the note they can do this with the bow in the hand with a spare finger but it's quite difficult to adjust between one technique and the other so what you'll see i've done here is actually chopped off the last note of that section so they can move comfortably back to their bows which is signaled by the word arco if you imagine kind of a bow and arrow an arc also with the word normal the first violins will know to stop playing artificial harmonics there's a there's a way of actually writing these with a little diamond sign but i couldn't find that in logic so just give them a straight instruction espre that means espressivo which usually is interpreted as more intensity so they'll usually warm the sound up and by that they'll play with more vibrato and that'll get a bit more more kind of expression then you'll see we're going in this piano section to sultasto which is one of my favorite techniques it's where they play or bow rather further up the fingerboard and this actually produces less tone and more of the rasp of the bow stroking the strings i remember once really wanting to make a moment very tender and the first violin is said well maybe should we try sultasson oh what's that and he explained it to me and the minute he played it was like yeah and then to take it a step further you can instruct flauntando which is the same position as sultasto but it's kind of using half the bow you'll also see that i've accompanied that instruction with poco vib so vib means vibrato poco means a little you can also say sensor no vibrato or malto vibrato or just vibrato and then it's it says moving to soul pont so basically you can imagine during this crescendo they're going saul pont which basically means going in the other direction of sultasto which is towards the bridge and the further they get towards the bridge it produces quite a kind of ugly metallic sound other than that i've also added some glissandy this is to slide between the notes and you'll see here what's unusual is i've i've slurred the same two notes in the same bar making it a tie so what's that all about well this gives an indication of where i want the gliss to begin if we start there it'll go [Music] but here it's [Music] so i think that'll be interesting to listen out for so right at the end normal malto espressivo so triple f gradually building you'll hear i believe that it's more intense by well obviously you're going really bloody loud at the end but also just by growing that's kind of getting and building and building and building building in passion so let's have a listen to that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so just just to point out this soul ponch technique right at the end there's when they're right up close to the bridge and that the note actually starts breaking up i'm not sure i like it a huge amount again i wasn't there on the day so at this point it's simply about collaborating with the musicians and going you know naming the bar numbers between say listen cut the soulpont instruction for that bit and experimentation something that i will often do when watching the film that i'm scoring is ask them to play with mutes this will usually mean that the the piece isn't quite hitting the tender or emotional element and adding mutes which is these little rubber things that attach to the strings basically mutes the amount of resonance that the strings have to create a softer slightly quieter it's like you imagine it's kind of like them going down half a dynamic so often you may say i want you to play with mutes but play everything up a dynamic so it stays at the same volume but it produces this very soft sound now something i have to warn you about is with smaller bands like this one it can create a slight thinness to the sound that actually isn't particularly attractive particularly when you go down to maybe a quartet but i've done a take with mutes on so you can really compare the difference [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so i don't know about you but i think in the quiet passages it just sounds absolutely beautiful but here [Music] instead of going la la la so getting them to take the mutes on and off i would get them to basically punch in takes uh otherwise you have to leave big chunks of space so the different sections can take them on or off and it is a noisy business but what you can also do is just take one take without sword and one with and simply comp it like you would a singer so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the thing that musicians love doing more than anything else is collaborating and being part and involved in the process so don't be frightened to experiment just like you would a guitarist or a singer one technique i may have adopted would be to say listen can we split the sections in half half of you have your mutes on half of you have them off trying all sorts of crazy stuff like that and if you don't know the italian term you can just go i want it to sound like more [Music] etc etc so don't be scared to collaborate and i just the only thing i would say is always treat musicians with respect thank them for each take say that was wonderful but don't be scared to do it again if they didn't quite nail it and if there's a part where the intonation i.e the tuning is always out it's absolutely to normal to say listen we keep on hearing a kind of an intonation issue in bars 17 to 18 and they will amongst themselves work out a way of better fingering it or possibly make some suggestions to can we drop in here to make that the better performance that you want they're so used to working with modern technology and they never want to be seen to be giving a bad performance often you'll be happy with the take and they'll go listen can we just do one more we think we can do it better for example so thanks so much to the scottish session orchestra and clockwork sessions for organizing this as i said it cost me just a few hundred pounds so you might want to think about spending less on that next expensive spitfire library and actually get yourself on the ladder to working with musicians it takes practice like everything else and working up that rapport and learning the things that you learn from musicians is a really valuable part of your journey and one i'd urge you to get on as soon as humanly possible so check out the clockwork session links down below and join their mailing list and they'll let you know when they do these amazing shared sessions wherever you are in the world you can dial in remotely and help produce the session or they'll just produce it for you in your absence but it doesn't just have to be remote sessions it could be a flute player that you know down at the pub or your mate the cellist and even with just a single solo cello or violin under that terribly programmed stuff that i played you earlier it would really elevate it okay right i'll get off my soapbox if you hit the links down below you'll get a study pack full of the different takes that i've done so you can really a b the difference pdfs midi logic files for if you use logic etc etc and a link to my bloggers guide and if you go there and i i'm definitely making mistakes i've made any mistakes or indeed you'd like to suggest some great examples of these instruments playing wonderful repertoire then just click on the comments section and i will work with you to create a resource that really suits the needs of all of us blaggers thanks as always for watching to the end a reminder that i'm trying to get to a hundred thousand subscribers by the end of october so if you haven't subscribed yet it's going to be real really worth your while ding that bell as well i really advise that one of those for the scottish session orchestra and clockwork sessions and just get on that blower to a musician and see how much they can elevate your music best of luck with it see you next time

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 8,462

Rating: 4.9744411 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: eW-mvPR-H18

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021