Bow Tremolo Stamina

Bow Tremolo Stamina While bow tremolos on the strings create a great shimmering or a very climactic effect, make sure to not write too long passages in tremolo. Especially on loud dynamics, this technique becomes quite exhausting and eventually the muscles of your...

Vibrato

Vibrato The amount and intensity of vibrato as a default playing style is highly depending on the instrument and also location of the orchestra. While string players naturally add vibrato to longer notes, brass players only play with slight vibrato when they have an...

Dialogue Scoring

Dialogue Scoring Avoid anything that draws too much attention on itself when you’re scoring dialogue. This applies especially for instrumental solos but also for uncommon playing techniques or strange registers. Dialogue score usually needs to be as un-obtrusive as...

“Col Legno” on Strings

“Col Legno” on Strings A quite interesting sounding and more commonly used special playing technique on string instruments is the so called “col legno”, which translated means “with the wood”. Probably one of the most well known use of it is the beginning...

Harp – Interlocking Hands

Harp – Interlocking Hands Unfortunately, the Harp is not covered in great detail in many orchestration books, leading learning composers and orchestrator to believe that there are not much differences between writing for Harp and Piano. One of these differences...