OrchestrationOnline

ORCHESTRATION TIP: NEVER USE “a1” EVER!
NEVER use the marking “a1” to indicate a single player at woodwind or brass entrances. ALWAYS indicate which player by the number of their seat: “1.,” “2.,” and so on.

Your orchestration tutor (me) has officially "spit the dummy!*" After a few perplexing years of seeing "a1" crop up in dozens if not hundreds of scores, and mentioning it in quite a few videos as something NOT to do, I've made the issue into its own video tip. So here is my rant on the topic. Apologies to anyone who's used it by mistake in the past - this isn't a personal attack, but a VERY strong warning. "a1" won't cut it in a professionally prepared full concert score. Say which player you want to play, it's as simple as that.

This tip also touches on some general advice for marking entrances: like the true meaning of the term "a2," where to use it, and how "solo" ALSO doesn't mean "just use the 1st chair player." And of course, the worst approach of all (in both life and in indicating players) is to simply do nothing at all. I hope we're all better than that - or at least willing to edit ourselves in every needful sense. I'll touch on some of these issues again in a more systematic way in Chapter 6: Woodwind & Brass Entrances of my upcoming Proofing Orchestral Scores series.

*a Commonwealth term meaning to lose one's composure like a baby who's spat out their pacifier to facilitate loud, forceful vocal histrionics one never would imagine from such tiny lungs.

https://youtu.be/E9PlZHS4hf4

6 hours ago | [YT] | 7

OrchestrationOnline

PROOFING ORCHESTRAL SCORES: INTRO
Finally! The introduction to my projected series on proofing your orchestral scores has arrived! This video represents a quick overview of my upcoming intensive, 6-part series on proofing your orchestral scores; covering wind & brass entrances; string section changes; slurs & phrasing; dynamics; pitches & durations; and of course, the overall structure and layout of your work. Here, I talk about how each step follows one another, and how they all fit together as a kind of process that will get your score ready to show around to an orchestration coach like me, or to a conductor/artistic director.
Hopefully, if my schedule is kind to me in June, the first official chapter will drop in a few weeks. Watch for Step 1: Pitches & Durations (also beams, articulation, and lyrics) - meanwhile, more video tips and analysis will be coming soon. Thanks all, the channel is starting to come back for real now.
https://youtu.be/JTx0vbfi5DY

1 week ago | [YT] | 22

OrchestrationOnline

Morning Coffee 1. Memory, Imagination & Obsessiveness
Please share a coffee with me this morning here in New Zealand as I talk about torch songs, Beethoven symphonies, being a 5-year-old who could work a turntable, and other ephemera. Along the way, I discuss how the memory of musical sounds, when stimulated by the imagination, can be one of your most powerful tools as a composer and orchestrator.

This is a premium featured video series planned for exclusive release to my Buy Me A Coffee supporters, which I'm making public for the next few months. Hope you enjoy, I have a bunch of topics I'd like to chat about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Epu2...

1 week ago | [YT] | 6

OrchestrationOnline

UPDATES: New Tips, New Book Title, and More
TLDW:
• Regular channel releases resume. Thanks to all for your patience during my relapse.
• 2 new text tips on the orchestrationonline dot com website (a 3rd on Patreon).
• The channel now has a Buy Me a Coffee account, for those who've asked.
• My next book's name has been changed to 100 DEEP DIVE Orchestration Tips.
• A new series on Proofing Orchestral Scores is starting in a week or two.
https://youtu.be/noe8F8KI9_0

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 19

OrchestrationOnline

HAPPY APRIL 1ST!
A collection of some of my strangest conversations about my music, all boiled down to one imaginary interview. Yes, I was really asked all of these questions by various arts journalists and audience members. The names and situations have been changed to protect the innocent (me). This was a frequently-shared post back in the early days of the community, but a lot of new viewers haven't seen it yet, so here it is with my blessings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGy-W...

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 17

OrchestrationOnline

PERCUSSION SCORING EVENT STARTS SOON!

Just a quick reminder that my talk with Jamie Wind Whitmarsh and Danyal Dhondy will begin in an hour (at 12:00 noon P.D.T.). We'll be looking over a score-in-progress by Danyal, with guidance and suggestions from Jamie, who'll take us through the process of assigning and changing over players in a percussion section. If you want to prepare, and you own a copy of 100 Orchestration Tips, I recommend reviewing chapter 51: Percussion Scoring & Parts Layout, from which I've screencapped a diagram including a possible page layout. Hope to see you there! Link to the event: youtube.com/live/qlR831qx1T4?feature=share

2 months ago | [YT] | 69

OrchestrationOnline

PERCUSSION SCORING: PLAYER DISTRIBUTION/CHANGES
Please join me for a discussion between percussionist/composer/conductor Jamie Whitmarsh and film/concert composer Danyal Dhondy. What are best practices for assigning different percussion parts in a score, not to mention changing between such instruments? We'll take a look at Danyal's work-in-progress, discuss the practicality of concert percussion stage layouts, and compare how the repertoire makes certain demands on percussionists. What are the most workable scores in the opinion of the professional players? We'll find out this weekend. Hope to see you there!
youtube.com/live/qlR831qx1T4?feature=share

2 months ago | [YT] | 43

OrchestrationOnline

CARMINA BURANA XIII. EGO SUM ABBAS CUCANIENSIS
After the dedicated hedonist and the roasted swan comes...the comedic supervillain! In this case, a gambling monk who literally wins the pants off his unwary fellow taverngoers, and leaves them crying out against the cruelties of fate. This standout baritone solo provides a lesson in scoring the upper vocal register with effective, over-the-top dramatic excess - and also illustrates some juicy teamups with brass and percussion. Orff's use of polytonality helps the choir feel more like a soul-shout than precisely-pitched harmony - which leads to an overview of the key relationships of all four songs in this In Taberna section. Despite the somewhat random-sounding string of solos topped by an choral patter-song, there IS a definite harmonic scheme holding all the songs together around the pitch of A, as various modes and keys circle around its centre. It's a great warmup to the final act of this mini-opera-within-an-oratorio, In Taberna Quando Sumus (coming next month).
https://youtu.be/JfFkyrq6lDU

2 months ago | [YT] | 6

OrchestrationOnline

ORCHESTRATION TIPS PLAYLIST UPDATED!
The Orchestration Tips YouTube Playlist (linked below) has now been updated to reflect all video tips I've released over the past decade+. Some of these date back to the very early days of the channel, when I was releasing a text tip every day (and a video every week). But it's interesting that more than 1/3rd of the videos are previews from my next book 100 LAST Orchestration Tips, to be released later this year. And there are more on the way - I plan to drop at least 1 video preview per month until the book comes out. Watch for the next one in a couple weeks, and in the meantime dive into this playlist if you haven't watched some or all of these tips yet!

www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

2 months ago | [YT] | 164

OrchestrationOnline

2-OCTAVE WIND DUOS, PART 3: SINGLE-REED COMBINATIONS
Begun back in July of last year, then put on hold during the wrap-up of evaluations for the 2023 Orchestration Challenge, my series on 2-Octave Woodwind Unison Duos is now made complete with the third and last chapter, featuring Single-Reed Combinations. In other words, how do clarinet family members combine playing parallel tones and melodies two octaves apart? What are the best registers for dual instruments, and the timbral implications? And how does this apply to the clarinet combined with flute and bassoon? Though I go into pretty thorough detail here in this video, with excerpts from Stravinsky, Respighi, and Shostakovich, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of potential combinations - and so to a degree have orchestral concert composers. The band literature may provide even more compelling and varied combinations - but I'll leave it to our concert band arrangers and composers to explicate and explore. And with this, I feel like my orchestration tips have turned a bit of a corner. From here, the preparation for my book 100 Last Orchestration Tips' release is going to ramp up a bit, with more preview tips coming soon for the community, and more focus on my side as my book nears completion. Stand by, lots of new content coming to the channel and website this month!
https://youtu.be/I2R4EtygZ1Q

3 months ago | [YT] | 11