Film Orchestration - Part 1: Introduction

When I was about 16 years old, I bought an expensive >1000 page encyclopedia about Instrumentation and Orchestration from several months worth of my pocket money. I read that whole thing in just a few weeks as I wanted to figure out how to get this film music sound that I was so obsessed about.

I was relatively sure that I just needed to read this thing as a sort of "film music manual" and I would be able to write like John Williams, because what could be so difficult about it? Decide who's gonna play what, write it in the correct range, done!

Needless to say, I fell into a deep deep rabbit hole. In fact when I was finished with the book, I felt completely intimidated by what I just read, being overwhelmed by the details of the decisions made in the score examples by famous works from the literature, and being overwhelmed by the technical possibilities and limitations of each and every instrument.

Gladly, in my youthful naivety, I was motivated and dedicated enough to still wanting to figure all this out and orchestration has become one of my passions ever since. I just love the endless possibilities of a relatively finite set of colours that are available in the orchestra. I bought more books, attended every orchestration and instrumentation class in university (even the ones that I didn't need to attend) and studied every score sheet that I could get my hands on.

And very often, I thought to myself: "Yeah okay, that is nice how Mozart has done that but that doesn't sound like that film music stuff that I love, how do I do that?" And with every new book that I got on the subject, the score examples always were more or less the same.

Only when I got access to the first few score sheets of film scores, I realized a few fundamental things about them. The biggest one was that the orchestration is relatively identical to what I've learned in the books, but the musical language and the use of certain devices were different. Also there were some orchestration devices in there that seemed to define "that Hollywood sound" because I saw them over and over again.

Over the years, working in the industry, studying more and more film scores, I kind of got the hang of what we would consider "film orchestration". I figured out more and more of these devices that create that Hollywood sound, both from the composition side of things but also from the orchestration standpoint. This is still an ongoing process as at my current state I still feel that one can study orchestration for more than a lifetime and when talking to seasoned veteran orchestrators, I get the same impression that they still feel like in a candy store still discovering new exciting flavours.

When I started this Patreon about 1.5 years ago, I decided that at one point I want to address this mythical "Film/Media Orchestration" as comprehensively as possible in this format. While about 95% of "film orchestration" is "regular orchestration", there are some things that one can clearly attribute to that film music sound. So finally, here we are.

This series will have A LOT of parts, so let me maybe explain what I want to do here. I personally feel that it is very tricky to separate composition from orchestration. When I write a line, I most of the time have an instrument in mind and that again influences how I write that line, so whenever necessary, I will cross over to some composition devices even in this series in order to give a comprehensive understanding of that whole "film music sound."

I consciously want to avoid to simply recapitulate what you can read in any book on orchestration so don't expect instrument range charts or explanations on violin fingerings or double stops. I might touch on such subjects when necessary to bring a point across but the focus will lie more on the things that are not mentioned in orchestration texts. So the starting point for this series should be that you know fundamentals about orchestration. There are a lot of books available on that subject, a good overview text is Samuel Adler's Study of Orchestration.

I want to put a special focus on things that are relevant for film (or media) scoring which I didn't see in any of the books and which I have learned only from figuring it out myself or simply gathering experience in it. For instance, I want to dedicate quite some time to "hybrid orchestration" - e.g. how to orchestrate against a wall of "epic percussion" or several layers of synths, but also how to orchestrate things like "pop strings" or "jazzy hybrids" or even as far as orchestrating for Big Band to get to the sound of "The Incredibles" etc.

Another focus should be on instruments that are often completely ignored by standard orchestration books or mentioned in three sentences but that are super common in film scoring. Try finding comprehensive material on Cimbasso or Contrabass Clarinet and you know what I mean.

Moreso, I want to focus on orchestration things that are relevant in scoring session situations, things like: "How to orchestrate when you record in a small studio?", "How to orchestrate when you only can afford a small orchestra?", "How to orchestrate when session time is short?" or the very common layering of different passes of the same sections (e.g. recording string shorts in one pass and string long notes in another to layer in the mix), what to do with choir etc.

I want to focus on both, the score sheet world and the DAW world and while some things will apply more to one or the other, I will try to keep these things as balanced as possible.

We will cross alot into arrangement territory, composition, voicings and will also see some overlap of posts that I have already written (e.g. the orchestral voicings series) but we will try to attack these subjects from a different angle in this series.

Also, I want to take the technical possibilites into account, like layering real players with samples, recording in Multichannel formats, Striping, different mixing philosophies etc. because all that of course should have an influence on how you orchestrate the music.

So basically, all the things that are not written in the orchestration standard texts should be discussed here and just by listing these points above, you probably get the idea how deep THIS rabbit hole is, so it's probably gonna take us some time to cover all the grounds. I hope that when I'm done with it I don't need to go back to beginning to update it to the things that have changed since I wrote it.

As an outlook for the next few parts: I want to start with an overview of the orchestra including seating configurations, basic line-up considerations and particular things that are relevant when recording orchestras in the studio as opposed to writing for a concert performance. From there we will progress to the sections of the orchestra and from there to the individual instruments. As mentioned above, I don't want to talk too much about the well known things about the instruments but more about what is not talked about with a big focus on practicality and the "real world". And for me, this is a huge thing. 

For instance, I was reading a lot of books where I have the feeling that the author got incredibly lost in theoretical discussions that barely have any relevance in the real world. I remember reading several pages worth of discussions of how to balance a brass chord by requesting the players to use specific fingerings and partials while in the real world already the heterogenity of the different "personal" tone qualities of the players makes most of these considerations useless. 

So while I am fascinated by such intellectual theoretical considerations, in the real world we have different problems and deal with human beings and imperfections all the time so I'd like to dust off some of the common academic views on these subjects while I'm at it.

You can see, there is a lot ahead and I'm really excited to get going on this. If you have any specific wishes on things that you'd like me to cover (that I might not have considered), let me know in the comments below.

PS: Of course, all these things should also apply for "game orchestration" or literally orchestration for any audiovisual context with the target of getting "that sound".