Daily Film scoring bits
Welcome to the Daily Film Scoring Bits. On this page I post little tips, tricks and advices about film scoring in general but also more specific topics like orchestration, composition, working relationships, business advices etc.
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Keeping Up Rhythmical Momentum
One thing many learning composers/orchestrators struggle with in orchestral music is to keep up a rhythmical momentum without relying on a drum kit…
Orchestration Standard Rules
One of the biggest misconceptions about orchestration is that people who just start to learn it think there is a definite set of rules to follow like “If situation x…
Classical Musicians and Click Tracks
Don’t expect every musician to be able to record with click tracks. Classical musicians who don’t do a lot of film work often have big problems…
Tonic Chord Overuse
Have an eye out for how quickly you return to the tonic chord. Almost in every case, returning back to to the tonic chord feels like “closing off”…
Transporting New Information With Music
The ideal function of film music is to add something to a scene that isn’t already transported by the pictures. Film scores that solely focus on doubling or…
Calculating Your Own Fee
Many composers who just start out in the field are often unsure about how much money to ask for a job before they are hired fearing that if they ask for too much they will lose the job. Also, the insecurity often comes from…
Over-Orchestration
Even though you have a lot of instruments at your fingertips when writing for orchestra, that doesn’t mean they have to be all in use all the time. A lot of inexperienced composers and orchestrators often…
Project Archiving
After you have finished a project, put some effort into archiving it properly. Just because you know now that all final project files are in an obscurely named folder deep down in the folder structure doesn’t mean…
Atonality in Film Scoring
Atonality can be a great colour when writing music for films and can create a unsettling, almost painful feeling. However, as it is already extremely demanding to “understand” the structure of this …
Dramatic Links Beyond Leitmotifs
There are many more possibilities when scoring a film (or rather when writing music at all) to create dramatic connections. Every single musical element can serve the purpose of connecting cues…
Relying on Only a Few Clients
Always take care to have a wide range of customers. When you are in a comfortable position of getting a steady flow of projects and therefore income from a few customers, you might not see the…
“Real Orchestra” Problems
Coming from a sampling background, many young composers are surprised about what main problems usually arise in “real orchestra” recordings that are practically non-existent in the sample world. When recording a real ensemble,…
Mock-Up Weaknesses
If you can not mock-up an instrument convincingly in a piece (that eventually will end up without recording of real instruments in a score) due to the lack of decent libraries or just out of the fact that this instrument can not be simulated convincingly, you should rather leave…
Diminished Chord Function
Diminished chords usually serve the function of a dominant seventh chord, usually targeting to a chord a with a root a semitone higher. For instance the chord C#dim (C#-E-G) wants to resolve to a D or Dm.
The reason for that is that the structure of the C#dim is actually…