Orchestration: Task 2

This weeks task was to compose a short arrangement with the chords Em, C, G, D. I stuck with this chord progression as it is a commonly used sequence. The trick this time was to create cool voicings and accents with each instrument.

To start, I referred back to Junkie XL's compositions for Fury Road. He states to create nice harmonies, you need to play the root note and the melody you come up with. To keep the track interesting, you need to have variation in all sections of the orchestra, including the bass. However for this example I kept the bass simple, to show off the little accents. I started off with the bass and cello, drawing out the chords.

Next I added violas. They play inverted chords. To continue to make the realistic sound, I tried to emulate what a real player would do bowing the viola, and I made it look something like this;

Viola Pitch Bend with added tremolo; Pejrolo and DeRosa

I doubled this up and did a different pitch bend with the Violins

Violin Pitch Bend

I discovered something in the Berlin Strings pack that I planned to do initially. Labled as 1/16th Violins, it is a 1/16th repetitive note played at different velocities. This was something I found in a lot of trailers for movies.

Inception trailer with 1/16th notes

While whiting the MIDI, I discovered that it would go out of time and would sound unnatural to the listener, so I had to change the patch slightly. I had to set the first set of strings to 84BPM and the next to 85BPM to get the desired result. (The project is set to 85BPM)

1/16th Violins with offtempo BPM

I then had to separate them onto different channels so they would fade in and out of each other. Almost like having a Violin 1 and 2 section that could play perfectly when transitioning.

Separated Violin Sections

Next, I added Staccato Violins to emphasise the 1/16th notes, but give them a different accent, as if there were more players in my violin. I patched 2 different sounds to make this orchestra bigger! Going back to the Task 1 video (at 9 minutes) that Junkie XL shows us, he says to give a sadder expression, he doubles the staccatos in the cellos, so that is exactly what I did. However in his Cinematic Orchestra pack, he is able to play multiple notes at the same time, with different accents on the same patch. So to enable myself to write it, I added a staccato patch in my cellos to give the same "sad" sound Junkie XL had written for Furiosa. The end result is this.

I think next time I will leave out the tremolo and use a regular patch for when instruments play on their own. To me it sounds unnatural and doesn't seem to work on it's own.

Orchestration: Task 1

So we have a new project on our hands! It's Orchestration!

Today we were given the task to recreate the Skyfall Theme written for the James Bond films. The task was also to allow us to start drawing up a template that we can use for future projects. To find some inspiration, I started with Junkie XL's YouTube guide to composing for Mad Max: Fury Road.

He mentions that he uses Cinematic Strings (6:50) and sometimes uses Berlin Strings, but prefers the quality of Cinematic Strings. I decided to venture off and find one of these. In the end I settled for Berlin Strings. One thing I noticed in the video was that he is using a small mixer to control the volume and other parameters in real time. In doing so this would naturally give it that human quality. I decided I would try my best to humanise the Skyfall melody in this way.

I played all of the string sections in, to control volume and tone of the strings when they are initially hit. I had to use several different patches for the same instruments as I needed to get different qualities out of each section. The piano was drawn in with the score that we were given. After I played all the string sections, I decided to play in the MIDI controls, such as pitch bend, volume and change velocities slightly (my keyboard doesn't have velocity range). This is mentioned in Pejrolo and DeRosa's book for arrangements for MIDI orchestras.