Orchestral Programming: Day One

my name's Christian Henson and I'm a film TV and game's composer I've written about 50 orchestral film scores over a couple of hundred TV shows and a couple of Triple A games the thing is I never studied music okay so to be totally candid with you first time I tried to write a piece of orchestra music bearing in mind and I don't read music haven't studied harmony or orchestration I was so utterly petrified by the prospect that I started crying on my own in my studio not a single tear like tears and snot blubbing I was so consumed by this I decided to call my girlfriend up crying tears and snot she left me two weeks later on reflection I had nothing to worry about the allure of orchestral does paint it as this kind of closed fortress an impenetrable zone that you can only gain access to if you go to the Conservatoire I have good news for you however the 20th century where this period of time which started at the beginning of the 20th century with a kind of quite a conservative approach to classical or concert music whatever you want to call it and then it went through this incredible period of just being bonkers from fish's being thrown into pianos to piano pieces that are entirely silent so impenetrable to listen to so intellectual but not enjoyable it was empty in concert halls around the world but this bloody revolution was necessary because it leaves us in this amazing privileged position of there being no rules no laws of the laws of physics if you want a tuba player to play in the piccolo kind of register you may be disappointed by the end results for example so I hope this film helps to allay any fears that you may be harboring about the idea of creating orchestral music and to offer you a quick guide to electronic orchestration day one now as I said I'm self-taught so I've arrived a lot of conclusions not through reading books and going to school but by programming orchestral samples and working with orchestras in a very broad and calluses sense I feel that music kind of performs three functions or operates in three different ways one is with an ensemble like as a chorus or as a pad if you will so rich thick chords the other as a melody line and that can be a top line that can be a cello line that can be an answering phrase in one of the instruments in the middle and the other is to form an accompaniment and what's convenient about this rather kind of naive view of music is that orchestral samples also operate in three slightly different ways that kind of matches these three operational modes if you will I'm going to start this composition and just by demonstrating that playing orchestral samples isn't really any different from playing a synth there's just a couple of extra bits you have to consider to get the best out of them I've got a tempo selected I've got a piece in my head and it's as with most of my music it starts with a piano piece so I'm just going to lay that down it's the ólafur Arnalds felts piano which i think is quite an inspiring sound what I like about inspiring sounds is that you don't have to kind of over compose not too many notes [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] let's quantize that because I'm actually gonna remove this piano at some point I want this to be a totally orchestral piece so let's start with the strings I think it's important to point out that this isn't a logic tutorial this you know this is basic very very basic kind of concepts that will work in any DAW or digital audio workstation I'm using contacts with a bunch of Spitfire samples but again any strings will do in fact I'll link below this thing called labs strings which are actually free good to try stuff out on but I'm basically going to concentrate on a library called Albion one which Spitfire makes and it's very much an entry point to really lush big epic sounding scores it's also recorded in what's called known as ensembles now in an orchestra you tend to have different sections so for example you've got first violins second violins violas cellos basses what we've done here is just recorded it as once it just very much works like a synth but it sounds like an orchestra I'll get onto the woodwinds and brass in a minute so I'm just gonna pull these strings in so along the bottom are what we call articulations these are playing Styles violins don't inherently sound very nice when you play them so you've got to do all sorts of things to make them sound sonorous and beautiful and all of these different kind of hacks of the instrument are represented in stars whether they be shorts or plucked or playing with vibrato they have these little mute things that go on that make it sound really silky and what I'm going to go to is this one here it says consort that is a muted sound it has a lovely silky sound very popular in modern film schools these days this is basically a long articulation which is what we use for kind of the choral Patti stuff and the thing that's unique about a violin is they can play notes infinitely all they do is they just keep bowing keep that finger down - to form which note they're playing and they just can bow for as long as you like unlike the piano where the the notes die out and unlike winds and brass where they actually have to take a breath so that's worth bearing in mind one of the routes to successful orchestral programming is to really understand how the instruments on how the orchestra works and these there's some very basic principles but basically certainly with strings you basically have five voices so you have your firsts your second violins violas cellos and basses if you start writing like loads of cluster chords like [Music] but I think it's quite good to try and limit the number of voices you have with strings and with big strings big wide gaps work really well so let's program this in now I'm using this little thing here which is made by pallet gear incredibly expensive what it does you can get much cheaper alternatives so what I'm using here is expression which is just basically volume it's and the way I say is it's we're balancing one instrument against another and this is dynamic control so this crossfades between all of the different kind of loudness --is that we've recorded with the strings to give you those here all-important tom brawl differences as well as an increase in volume so if we just have a listen so you can hear the sonic difference but also maybe feel on a human level the kind of greater intensity the further you go up so what I tend to do is I either record with both hands and then put this kind of information in afterwards because this is what is going to help you shape it in a very kind of musical and human sense or I just do one hand at a time and record it simultaneously I'm gonna do the latter in this case so here we go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] when I first started writing orchestral music I really felt that you know I should try and make every voice a different note and what you find is certainly where basis is concerned is they tend to track the cellos in octave so just like I played on the piano earlier it's just going to be boring old octaves but they do sound great also just going to turn down the piano there it's just really a guide so I really want you to just to hear what I'm doing with the strings so let's go in with these cellos and basses again it's all recorded together so just think of it as low strings basically [Music] [Music] okay so that's the kind of paddy stuff done there now what about using strings as an accompaniment there's this kind of intro section here I am going to be cutting out the piano now the difficulty with strings playing a piano part is pianos they they have a kind of a big percussive start and then they decay out so that kind of dun dun dun dun sound isn't gonna sound so great with strings because they don't really play that kind of shape they don't have that ringing tone especially with the sustain pedal down so I'm gonna come up with something that's just a bit more stringy I'm gonna use something called an ostinato which just basically means it's a kind of a repeating very simple rhythmic pattern so let's just boot up another RBM one and I'm gonna go to this so these short notes they kind of fall into this accompanying kind of operation mode and these don't use that dynamic controller to switch between the different levels of note they use velocity so [Music] no added reverb is just the sound of the samples we record it in a really nice big room so no need to add reverb if you don't want to [Music] [Music] okay now you can see what I'm kind of doing is I'm simulating very much the pattern that I was doing with this fader but with velocity and you'll find with orchestral music it tends to come in these these waves if you just were to write some notes on on a page for musicians to play without any phrase marking they would naturally play in these kind of way so that's the kind of middle accompany part and now also we had some bass notes in the piano so I'm gonna actually just switch to something called a pizza carto which is plucked for the cellos and basses and you'll hear with the room that we've recorded in it really rings out it's really quite lovely [Music] [Music] now remember I want to take out the piano so what what's happening is we're losing the momentum as the strings take over now this is when you can use the different sections of the orchestra to kind of take over and as you'll see later on what's great about the orchestra it has so much color and dynamic you can turn quite a repetitive and boring piano piece into something that really feels like it's changing even when compositionally it isn't so I'm going to switch to some woodwinds to help with the accompaniment for this next section so this is our winds acting as an accompaniment [Music] [Music] but the things that would winds are particularly great at is melodic lines particularly top line so what I'm gonna do is use the third category of sample a legato patch to create these very realistic sounding top lines particularly for the intro over here now the thing about legato samples is they work similar to pads in the sense that you need to use your expression and dynamics to go through the different like Tom broad changes as they get louder and quieter but they're monophonic they only play one note at a time just like if you were singing you can only sing one note at a time and this is where I think it's really important also to try and empathize with what the instruments can do it doesn't require a huge amount of study you just have to understand that unlike strings with their rebo woodwinds require breath coming out and into the instrument in order to sound and therefore they need to take a breath from time to time so again to achieve realistic results you have to imagine I think it's quite good sometimes to actually blow out as you're playing the woodwind parts and this empathy is important because eventually I'm certain you'll be working with live musicians of your own you don't want to give them a piece of music for them to go well where do I take my breath so not only does it help with the realism of the orchestral programming that kind of discipline will help you when you actually start working with live musicians so if you see here what we need to do with lagartos is join the notes up and what's really clever about the samples is they work out what interval you're playing and they insert the kind of transition between the two notes they're slightly more laggy than the other slightly more standard synth sound elections [Music] good thing about woodwind players is they can probably blow out longer than we can but I think it's very good exercise to blow as you're doing going okay this is gonna start getting a bit tight take a little note here and what I'm gonna do is create what's called counterpoint which is just like Question and Answer in the low woodwinds which is going to be exactly the same line and you'll see this will help go over that the breath they're taking so they're working in concert with each other someone's taking a breath someone else is playing [Music] so I'm taking out the piano and I really want the orchestra to take this composition on so what I'm simply gonna do is duplicate that across there and just make some changes very simply here I'm gonna transpose that up an octave and remembering you know at the moment I'm only playing two notes in my right hand so basically the first and second and violas are kind of divvying up these two notes so what I want to do here very very common is for the first violins to play an octave above the second violins so all I'm going to do is simply duplicate that top line there poor violas they do get to play the more boring parts and I think what I'll also do is add in the woodwind lagartos at the top [Music] great stuff let's just add a bit to this middle accompanying section [Music] great so starting to sound really dramatic now there's a bit of a kind of gap between the high strings and the low strings we've lost a bit of our lovely body and weight and this is what brass our excellent form how I love using brass is to provide the chocolatey middle so let's pull up some brass then it's going to do some housework and let's go to brass and in this room air Studios the hall that we record it in the brass just sounds mental so I'm using the mid-long let's just see if that's the right register now when brass gets very very loud it becomes very kind of brassy has that slightly when safe RT quality's unfair but it's very rasping I'm insert this bit so I'm gonna artificially boost this so they stay kind of very horn-like and kind of sophisticated sounding so let's have a listen to adding those in there [Music] [Applause] [Music] a little bit of quantize on there and let's feed in this modulation got to be really careful to get too brassy might like kind of open up the brass a little bit right at the end but I've just got to keep this warm moving chocolaty kind of feel expression all the way up [Music] and just one final thing at the very end there just a little refrain [Music] so many colors from the same instruments let's just have a little tidy up here can see that squiggly boggling so let's just smooth that out and I'm just gonna draw some more natural stuff in and there we go that's kind of it it really is as simple as that it's just playing a sense using your expression imagining that you're the musician and just you know bearing in mind there's five voices in the strings don't overload it with notes that when you're using accompaniments short notes make sure you use the kind of the velocity to really make things sound human and when you're using the gatos just one note at a time join the notes up so the Swamper knows which transitions to put in between the notes now this kind of stuff usually would take me an afternoon to do I'll go in there and I'll do all sorts of tidying up and you know making sure the velocities are just what I want I may move say the lagartos I may give them like a negative delay so they're just a little bit more in time because as I say they're quite laggy as a final note you know this idea of empathizing with the instruments I'm actually gonna recommend a couple of books someone said to me books what are those they're like kind of websites made out of paper unfortunately the internet really hasn't got up to speed yet on just a basic kind of reference model of what each instrument does so there's two books which are brilliant and by either either depending which I don't know buy either or either I have both now they're not to read they're just as I have just sitting in your studio and they're just really handy this Samuel adder that Adler you can see it don't use it often these days and it's got great reference sections so basically it's just basically done by each instruments so if you're writing for a clarinet say for the first time it's just worth just giving it's literally like two pages gives you an idea of the ranges what they like doing what they don't like doing and you know bear in mind that they have to take a breath from time to time the most important tool you have is not your theoretical knowledge in fact the lack of theoretical knowledge can help you sculpt a style that is unique to you the most important tool you possess is these and your taste your aesthetic your loves of music that you've listened to all of your life which will form your own personal heritage follow that bliss follow what you believe to be good what stimulates you don't try to be someone else be yourself and whatever you do never ever fear orchestral music anyone can make it thanks as always for watching if you've liked this tutorial day one I could possibly do a day two so let me know in the comments below if you'd like me to do another one and I'll happily oblige so just let's run it down as is if you like what I've done hit like if you haven't subscribed yet loads of exciting stuff coming up and if you hit the little bell bottom that will notify you the next time we put a video up see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 800,239

Rating: 4.9609876 out of 5

Keywords: Spitfire Audio, Albion ONE, Orchestral Programming, Sample Library, Composer

Id: wtwQMlB1Gus

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Pantzzzzless]

This was absolutely fantastic.

[u/noodhoog]

Really enjoyed this, thanks for posting it!