Jul 27, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Dynamic Shaping of Long Notes Hardly any musician in an orchestra will play a long note with a static dynamic as samples do. Even if you don’t write in any dynamics or hairpins, the musicians will shape sustaining notes dynamically on their own. It’s usually very...
Jul 26, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Technical
Recording musicians separately Whenever you record an instrument or a section separate from the rest of the orchestra/line-up, never just record them to click and nothing else. Musicians hate playing something without hearing or knowing the context that they’re in...
Jul 25, 2018 | Composition, Daily Film Scoring Bits
Composing Backwards One strategy of finding a plausible way to a specific chord or to a key change is to work backwards from the target chord. This works particularly well if the music that you’re writing is mainly cadential harmony as you can simply look at your...
Jul 24, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Film Scoring, Working Together
Misleading Briefs by Clients One of the most annoying things are misleading briefs by clients. It’s not too uncommon to get a temp track or a comment by a client that completely sets you on the wrong track of what they actually want. One classic is the temp track...
Jul 23, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, General
Black sheep in the business Never trust any spectacular business promises by someone in the business who you don’t know. Unfortunately there are a lot of black sheep in the media world trying to especially talk inexperienced people into working on something under...
Jul 20, 2018 | Daily Film Scoring Bits, Orchestration
Organ effect problems One of the most common problems of inexperienced orchestrators is the “organ-effect”, which happens when you double too many instruments in a middle register with relatively long notes. At a certain point, the transparency gets lost and the whole...
