Orchestration: The Final Piece

I've been away for a while, but I've been working hard on my last piece for Orchestration. As mentioned in my previous post I decided to try remake the Ultra Instinct theme (Officially titled Clash of God) from the TV series Dragonball Super. It has turned out to be one of the biggest projects I have worked on in a while, attenuating to every detail of each orchestral instrument.  (Scroll right to the bottom for the piece)

The project spanned around 40 tracks, with multiple single instruments having multiple channels to get the correct tone for singular notes

Project with multiple tracks of the same instrument. Here you can see the attention to detail spent on 7 of the 40 tracks. I used some help from Pejrolo and DeRosa's book to help me arrange for each section.

Most of the MIDI was drawn in, with the exception of the main melody. I am not the best piano player in the world but I took some inspiration for this piece from Sunset Boulevard with the piano.

The piece mainly follows what I did with task 4, but I decided early on the module to add an extra section. I shopped around for idea's, especially with Pete Thomas' webpage

The suggestion of playing around with the motif interested me, so the brass section in the early parts of the song included this, right until the middle section where most of the orchestra drops out. The idea of moving the melody to other sections also helped span this idea about.

The middle section is quite strange. However I felt that the last section needed to evoke emotion, and keep tension building. Though I haven't produced the song to the original version (at 2:11), I do believe I have created a convincing orchestra piece. I have also added my own originality to the piece with the drum kit, which I believe represents early music from the Dragonball series itself.

As with the previous tasks, I edited the MIDI notes to the exact timing of where each not should be. Velocities were changed throughout to help give it that realisitic feel as well as the pedal on the piano chaning throughout each little note. Some instruments of the orchestra even had new channels opened to have a specific sound at one part of even one note to get the correct sound. The Brass was a bit easier to notate, as the Native Instruments Session Horns allowed me to change the type of sound on the same channel which I found very useful. One thing I picked up from from Pedro and DeRosa's book was to add tape saturation to the brass to make them pop a little bit more. I even went as far as searching on how to mix orchestral music.

The Violins and Violas had the biggest treatment of them all. I had layered multiple sticcato and sustained notes on top of each other, and each section had their own variation of this. I think I may have went a little overboard and not got the correct sticcato sound I was after (The intense sharp hits of the main melody for tension, as this piece is used during times of tension.) There is a Round Robin option on Berlin Strings which allowed me to have different versions of the same note being played and helped massively.

Anyway, here is the piece, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it. If I were to do anything better, I would re-mix this piece as I feel the bass cannot be heard as well as the other frequiences. This could also be a case of how I composed it as they maintain long similar notes throughout. I would also try having different libraries on the piece to get a feel of not having the a too similar sound.

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.