Articles

Welcome to my next little tutorial. This time I will talk a little bit about rhythmical aspects to be considered when writing for (real) orchestra, as – not surprisingly – not everything that grooves in your mind or sequencer will come out as you want it when you’re dealing with an orchestra. First of all, why talk about this issue at all? Since filmmusic came up, it has always been a medium which melts together many if not all musical styles. Nowadays there is hardly any action score which doesn’t have drum-loops or percussive patterns underneath, there is no Bond movie without Swing elements, there is hardly any epic trailer music in regular 4/4, and – to sum it up – there is hardly any score which doesn’t use influences...

Welcome to the second part of the tutorial about my little piece “The Last Survivor”. If you want to read the first part of this tutorial, head over to Making of “The Last Survivor” – Part I The score sheet for this track as PDF is available HERE Bar 20 – 27 Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Composition: The most important role of these few bars is to prepare for the middle, softer part of this piece to give it a logical yet not too expectable entrance. I decided to do a strong dominantic buildup there once more followed by a short “free” quasi effect-driven passage which...

Welcome to my next little tutorial. Due to the many questions I received concering my short orchestral action piece “The Last Survivor”, I decided to share a little insight into this little track. This track has the only purpose to fill up my showreel with a few action styles but had the limitation of not being much longer than 90 seconds. So I decided to go for a somewhat “Suite”-like appraoch, trying to fit in as many styles in there as possible. The result is a pretty “active” piece with lots of small parts which of course is not ideal for such a piece but it was a deliberate decision I made to make the most effective use of the time I had. You can have a listen to the whole piece here: Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required...

Welcome to my second tutorial. This time I will talk a bit about the orchestra itself, especially certain practical issues to keep in mind when you write for an orchestra. So you decided you want to write for an orchestra, maybe even a real orchestra, but at least you want to write for something that sounds like orchestra – a sample library, and you also want it to actually sound like an orchestra. It’s not like you need a lot of knowledge about an orchestra to write for samples, you just do what sounds good, but in order to get a convincing result, you might want to handle those samples as if you were writing for orchestra. If you want to write for a real orchestra, you of course HAVE to stick to certain rules and things in order to make it work at...

Welcome to my first tutorial. Due to the many emails and messages I get, asking for certain things, I decided to start this little tutorial section on my webpage in which I will publish tutorials dealing with issues concering composition, orchestration and specifically writing music for movies. I will focus on purely musical issues in these tutorials which don’t require needing any special software skills etc. as there are still enough technical tutorials around online. The first tutorial deals with the harmonic series from a musical and compositional point of view. There are tons of information on this issue available dealing with the acoustic phenomenon of this issue but I’ll try and focus on the things, the harmonic series can do for you in your...