Stepping into Orchestration Arrangment

[Infenro]

For any of you out there who are experienced in making orchestral arrangements, what would you recommend to start learning how to properly arrange a piece?

I personally have been making ambient dance type music for a long time, but I think it would make me the right kind of uncomfortable to learn something on the opposite end of the spectrum. Soundtracks and classical pieces always have dynamic compositions, where so far I've made very patterned music.

So far when I make anything "orchestral" (namely I am using string samples and such), it just comes across as blocky and doesn't really feel right.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[Nabeel Ansari]

To understand orchestral writing, there are several topics you need to learn first in order to write good, functional instrument parts (and then how to make it less "blocky" by considering forms).

Instrumentation is the biggest one. Instrumentation is literally how you communicate in music. Every timbre, instrument doubling, range, articulation choice, etc. creates a different result in orchestral writing.

and pick it apart; even better if you can read scores for them.

This book will teach you everything about instrumentation. http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Orchestration-Dover-Books-Music/dp/0486212661

Harmony is important. What *is* an inversion, and why is it important? What chords "go to" each other? What is the harmonic structure of a melody?

If you understand harmony, you can then think more macroscopically about your music like a timeline. In classical music, the half point of a melody would use a V chord (so, G major in the key or C major or Minor). This can allow you to write dynamics properly, such as dramatic tensions on tension chords or soft releases on resolution chords (or dramatic fanfares on resolution chords). The list goes on, but you can't learn all of them from books; you gotta analyze the music you like and see how it works, harmonically.

Texture is the most important thing in any music in the history of ever. Texture describes the density and movement of music. In orchestral writing, you have every opportunity to go big and super dense (you have like 20 instrument families).

But how do you go from big to small? How do you go from small to big? What *is* small texture, or big texture? How do I make it so the orchestra isn't just a jumbled mess of indistinct notes?

This leads to counterpoint, probably the greatest invention in music history alongside our current tuning system. Counterpoint, in essence, describes how two different musical ideas can sound apart when they are played at the same time. Dense texture has many contrapuntal lines (lines obeying counterpoint), and thus, many different musical ideas happening simultaneously, which gives us the impression of a full, big sound. To put it crudely, you can have every instrument in the world playing a single note, but it won't sound big. It'll just sound loud.

You can find books on all of these topics, but the most important thing is that you'll never get anywhere if you don't go and break down orchestral music that you like. Nothing can teach you how to write music. It can only teach you how to look at it; you have to teach yourself how to write.

Finally, to get rid of your block forms, this will happen when you understand how harmony can define a form, and create non-even forms and such. Listen to a dynamic composition and mark where the melody starts, and ends, and then how many measures of "rest"/space before the next one. If you find instrument lines that come in at uneven measure times, then sit back and think "why is he writing this line at this specific point in time?". Consider the answer maybe that it's a specific part of the melody he wants to emphasize, or it's coming in when a strange chord occurs, or something like that. Other times, it's just for variety. Don't start everything at the beginning of the measure!

Arrangement is about taking musical ideas, dressing them up, exposing them, exploiting them, reinforcing them, etc. Think about your music in those terms. Do *not* think about your music in terms of measure counts, minutes long, etc. A musical idea arranged a certain way will take as long as it needs, whether short or long, even or uneven form.

Edited April 15, 2015 by Neblix

[Infenro]

This was immensely helpful, thank you very much!

I know this is a bit of a silly question, but how possible do you think it is to learn to do arrangements well simply from reading and understanding?

One of my favorite things to do is read books everyday so I'll get started immediately on the principles of orchestration. I already know some of the most basic music theory, but still very basic. I only know enough to make some songs works to a decent degree, namely dance.

[timaeus222]

This was immensely helpful, thank you very much!

I know this is a bit of a silly question, but how possible do you think it is to learn to do arrangements well simply from reading and understanding?

One of my favorite things to do is read books everyday so I'll get started immediately on the principles of orchestration. I already know some of the most basic music theory, but still very basic. I only know enough to make some songs works to a decent degree, namely dance.

To really be able to do it well, you have to put it into practice. While you actually do something physically, sometimes you make connections you wouldn't normally have figured out just from reading and theorizing about it. You can read, sure, but move forward from that too.

Edited April 15, 2015 by timaeus222

[Nabeel Ansari]

Along with practice, like Timaeus said, listening is just as if not more important.

Your ear is the foundation of your art. It tells you how to make your decisions. Your art suffers if your ear is immature or inconclusive. In order to develop your ear, you need to listen to music *deliberately*. Don't just enjoy it, but break it down in your head. What are the instruments? What's the harmony? Is it energetic? Fast? Slow?

Is it inconclusive? Does it meander? Is it compelling? Or is it boring?

You come to be able to answer these questions only after developing your ear. Whether you learn formal theory or not is irrelevant (though formal theory allows for communication and discussion with others. Trying to talk about musical concepts with people who don't know theory can be a bit of a mess). You need to listen with the goal of understanding. That is how you develop taste. Then, once you have built your taste, practice according to your taste. Does your music reach your level of taste? Then keep doing it. Without taste, you become a slave to others for feedback to tell you if something is any good or not. You should be the one deciding. Once you are, practicing becomes something you can do in isolation.

And when you reach your taste? Boy, you haven't been listening to enough music. Listen to more, listen to new. Raise your taste, and then raise your skill. It's the endless cycle where there's only one direction to go, and it's up.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Neblix

[Infenro]

Thanks guys, yalls comments helped a ton!

Just so you know, I've looked a little bit more into harmony, and also found the sheet music for this song I choose for me to possibly arrange myself in FL Studios.

http://www.johnbarry.org.uk/sheetmusic/somewhere-in-time.pdf

It's actually a great song for looking at arrangements since its in a relatively simple key, and uses pretty basic chords to great effect. I noticed how he didn't use the dominant key until right before he went back to the tonic at almost every instance.

It also is helping me see how varied each instrument gets. The bass line in the song is played by a harp, yet it still gets across the chord without just straight blocky notes.

I'm already into reading the Principles of Orchestration, I really hope it helps.

[Nabeel Ansari]

It's actually a great song for looking at arrangements since its in a relatively simple key, and uses pretty basic chords to great effect. I noticed how he didn't use the dominant key until right before he went back to the tonic at almost every instance.

It also is helping me see how varied each instrument gets. The bass line in the song is played by a harp, yet it still gets across the chord without just straight blocky notes.

Look at this.

This is Bach's Prelude in C major (the underscore for "Ave Maria". Ave Maria is just a melody imposed over it.) It will teach you everything you need to know about basic functional harmony. Pay attention to the chord root movement (So C major has root C even if E is maybe voiced on the bottom, so C major to F major is root motion of up^ a fourth *regardless* of how the chord is stacked and ordered). It will also teach basic voice leading across broken chords.

An exercise you can do is to take all the notes in each broken chord pattern and write it as a stack of whole notes. For example, the first pattern goes "C E G C E" in order (and repeats), but instead write it as five simultaneous whole notes across the bar. Do that for every chord here, and then look at how each note moves linearly.

You should up with something like this:

For example, how the top note of one chord moves to the top note of the next chord. The middle of one to the middle of the other. Basically, treat them like 5 different people and examine how they move from note to note. To get you started, yes, the upper voices will move very smoothly, by either steps or small skips, while the lowest voice has no problem jumping around from time to time.

[Infenro]

Very very interesting, I never realized how you could break up a chord in that manner.

What would you recommend to better learn music theory? Any particular site or tutorials?

I usually just look up specific things as they occur to me, but I still am very shaky on more complex chords like sevenths, all the minors, etc. Scales are also still confusing past majors and basic minors. I pretty much know what I do from some videos I looked at a few years back, and learning a bit in my audio production class (its not my major, it was an extra class).

Regardless, thanks so much for this, its giving me a lot of ideas to learn more just by examining songs!

[Moseph]

I second the recommendation to read an orchestration book and would add that orchestral music doesn't necessarily have to be harmonically complicated to work well. Learning is always a good thing, of course, but there are plenty of successful orchestral composers who don't have a strong theory background.

In addition to open-ended arrangement projects that involve a lot of new note-writing, you may find it useful to do some straight-up orchestrating where you pick a piece of piano music (fully fleshed-out with all the notes written rather than with chord symbols) and then assign all of the notes to various instruments without writing any new notes or really changing anything beyond transposing to a given instrument's range. This would let you focus on the instruments themselves without having to deal with the arranging process at the same time, and it should help you get a better feel for how the instruments function within an ensemble -- especially if you do it in conjunction with reading an orchestration book.

Additionally, it might also be helpful to begin your actual arrangements as piano sketches so you can work out most of the note details before complicating things with all the nuances of instrument assignments.

The quickest, dirtiest piece of advice I can give on writing interesting harmonies is to write boring harmonies and then move the notes chromatically to fill in space between the boring harmonies. Then shift the beginnings/ends of some of the notes forward or backward to create new dissonances against the other notes (suspensions and anticipations, in technical terms). You'll get some interesting sounds, and starting with a framework of sensible but boring harmonies will ensure that the chromatic bits generally sound like they're going somewhere rather than just being arbitrarily strung together.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I second the recommendation to read an orchestration book and would add that orchestral music doesn't necessarily have to be harmonically complicated to work well. Learning is always a good thing, of course, but there are plenty of successful orchestral composers who don't have a strong theory background.

Yes, but I think the advice that listening to music you want to take inspiration from with a discriminating ear (including distinguishing how it harmonically works, whether you describe it formally or play with it on the piano) is always good advice.