The Orchestration Method that ALWAYS Works

in this video we'll show you how to take a simple Melody like this [Music] and turn it into this [Music] four-part writing or Chorale style writing is one of those things you might learn about in music school but can feel very removed from real music that's because many schools and textbooks fail to connect four-part writing with orchestration I've invited Elaine Moran from scoreclub.net to join me to show you how this academic seaming technique can actually lead to very clear and effective orchestral writing so the goal of using Chorale writing or four-part writing as the the foundation for writing for orchestra is that everything really is structure it has a place and lives together really well and removes a lot of this kind of like just picking away at notes trying to make everything fit where everything fits perfectly well when you're using satb writing so here's the tune thank you so after we have the main Melody written then the next step is to harmonize to find the chords for them and that's done just first off by maybe playing around on the piano and getting getting a sense of the harmonies and then writing it out in four-part style at this point I want to remind you that our goal for this video is to show you what you can do with four-part writing but not the steps for harmonizing a Melody so if you want to know how to do that hang tight because we'll talk about that again a bit later so this is where the fun begins because we can just start orchestrating straight from the four-part writing here we can just assign violin one violin two Viola cello just like it is and the orchestration is going to sound great because the voicings are good and this works at various tempos various Dynamics from slow to fast to soft aloud so if you've ever not really been sure what you're supposed to do with violin 2 and Viola this is a good technique a good process for figuring out you know what can those parts be doing we tend to think it needs to be very complicated but orchestration at its core is just good writing it's not about fancy doublings so a good next step in developing the structure this satb structure is to use octave doublings so very standard one is to just double the cello and octave lower with a double bass foreign so the next step would be to take the octave doubling ID and double the top line on the top three voices but the Top Line only an octave above so this is a very standard technique really expands that melodic line so you're not adding a fifth part yeah that's right that's a good point really it's just the same part but made bigger so now we need to rethink the string voicing so here's an option and there's many options obviously but this one we have a violin one division two divisi and they combine on the D above middle C so that there's more players on that note to give it more body and volume so using this basic actb structure we can just now add some brass using some standard voicings so here we would have the top three voices using Trumpets the lower voice of the trumpets strengthened with the French horn and trombones and tuba obviously on the lower notes and also you can see in measure three and four I added an octave doubling now with the French horn to the Top Lane so now we have the melody in the high part of the phrase getting even more of an octave Dublin getting a bigger voice so it joins in now with the melodic line but it also here would continue with the a it has a nice line there actually [Music] and the last thing is how to add the winds and we'll keep it very simple just going down in score order we're not going to put any Piccolo just doubling the melodic line and inner voices so flute oboe clarinet on the inner voices and of course bassoon's doubling at the bottom back I think one of the key points and one of the things that I hope people take away from this is other than where you decided to double the melody for just that one part everything has been on the page for a long time you're not really adding notes even though you're adding brass and you're adding Woodwinds where you're just using the music that that you've already come up with and not having to kind of reinvent the wheel every time you want to add a new instrument right and also that these are fairly standard approaches to the writing you know where like you said not Reinventing the wheel also means using things that we know works so with something like this this is 2D writing at this point and every section is going to be balanced on its own but how does it all balance together well in this case brass especially at this volume is always going to be super loud but remember a dynamic marking is not a volume control it's an attitude and if they know and the conductor design that they're not really the lead then it's fortissimo is going to be an attitude and they're going to back off to make sure that whatever needs to be heard is going to be heard in this case however there's a lot of things that are already built in and we can see if we look at the main D above middle C there at the top at the beginning of the measure it's got violin 2 violin one trumpet and oboe so already that line has got the support that it needs to really come out and then it's got the octave on top with a silvery flute and the high strings that's going to come out and be nice and clear and the bass is doubled in octave so right there those two elements are strengthened through that writing and as you're adding each section you seem to be taking care that each section is complete on its own yes those are all going to be balanced within themselves yes this is not always necessary depending right because you might just want to have the melodic line be just the strings and then the chords be in the brass so that's obviously they support each other but in this example everything is balanced so now we've orchestrated the basic Corral let's again push towards that idea of turning it into real music and start to enhance it by changing the Rhythm and adding percussion the first thing we're going to do is Alter the bass line slightly with just a little bit of rhythmic displacement on the first note of the measure and you can see here at the start of measure one and of measure three we have a bit of a less light change in the Rhythm which also I think helps to emphasize that downward leap toward the third beat [Music] and the next thing we can do a little bit of variation in the Rhythm in the top part even repeating some notes on top of that so here I added some extra notes in the melodic line repeating the chords exactly as they are to give a little bit of extra melodic interest but without altering the satb structure at all right so I think part of the disconnect for some people who have studied four-part Chorale writing is that it feels so vanilla and in a lot of ways it doesn't have to be you could just be treating that as the scaffolding yeah it's just you know I mean rimsky-korsakov did say that satb writing Chorale writing is the essence of orchestral writing and I think he's right it's really just understanding your voicings that's what it comes down to voicing things properly and then having everything connect that's what the goal is one thing I really like here is how this emphasizes that third beat and it really becomes an accent on that third beat so that works very well I think yeah you get the power of that low note even more yeah just traumatic right yeah um so that sort of thing and after this we can just follow very similar steps let's start with the brass this time using exactly the same voicings as we had before even if we have those changes in the Rhythm and so now our next step after doing the brass would be to put some violins and in this case I'm focusing on the melodic line with violin one and violin 2 full section and the viola doubling the French horns and letting the a there just be with a trumpet it'll be fine and then the next step is to add the woodwinds exactly the same setup as we had before so after we have all of our melodic instruments in it's time to add some percussion and the percussion here is not going to be just random notes it's going to fit in with the way things are structured and how we go down to the third beat we're going to emphasize that arrival on the third beat with timpani and a cymbal crash [Music] foreign [Music] so in a moment we're going to crank it up another notch but I just want to mention that I've taken a lot of Elaine's courses on score Club over the years and they are truly outstanding Elaine has had a major impact on my writing and my skills as a composer and orchestrator in particular you should start with the course essential composer training Foundation where you learn how to harmonize a Melody the way you see it done here I have an affiliate Link in the description if you want to help support the channel alright let's get back to the music so yes one of the possibilities with Fort Bard riding is to explode it into arpeggiated lines and we can do this in many different ways and in this case we'll take the alto and tenor parts and we're going to arpeggiate those which would turn out something like this so in this case we're using eighth notes which means that when there's parts that are like in measure two that don't give a stem to arpeggio we just follow the inner voices but then continue with the arpeggiated line or development of the inner lines when there's longer held notes the beauty of this approach by the way of exploding or taking the inner voices and making these types of running lines is that you know that they fit with your melodic line and then we can do a bit of a standard move and double each note which means that this would most likely be in the strings now because we use octaves often how about doing an octave doubling of everything including that inner line now so that it's actually also an octave higher and that's certainly possible but it creates some difficulties when it comes to Clarity in the strings so in this case there could be the potential of doing an overdub or striping of that one in the studio and after that we can continue using all of our same Parts same as before with the brass and the winds and also the percussion our goal was to show this is four part writing all is done with four-part writing this can be done very quickly right you're using kind of standard things it doesn't detract from your creativity but this works you're using stuff that works and then this easily then gets transferred to full score and you know why everything is there you're not going line by line trying to input fancy stuff so looking at this everything for the orchestra is there on that short score using satb writing everything fits together everything supports the melody this can be a very quick way of sketching of making some notes of capturing the essence of your writing and then putting it into the doll can be very quick and then with a lot of clarity of how you're designing the music [Music] again for more from Elaine check out the link to score Club in the description thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Ryan Leach

Views: 320,448

Keywords: music composition, film scoring, film composer, how to write music, film music composer, how to write film music, how to write video game music, how to be a composer, how to compose music, compose music, how to score a film

Id: 3KWYbmwMxWk

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023