Orchestration Masterclass, Part 2: Brass, Voice, & Guitar

1. Introduction: All right everyone, welcome to orchestration part two. In this class we're going to pick up where we left off. The first-class. We worked on reading scores, dealing with scores, parts, general working with an orchestra, and then we do a deep into strings and then deep into winds. In this class, we're going to start off by going deep into bras. We're gonna talk about how brass instruments work. And then we're gonna go into each instrument in the brass family. We're gonna start with the horns or the French horns, trumpets, trombones, tubas. And then we're going to work on special techniques of all of them, mutes. Couple other weird things that they can do. If you want them to. Then we're gonna go into percussion. We're gonna talk about pitched in and pitched percussion. The weird case of the timpani roll strokes, mallet, boeing. Yes, you can go percussion and weird notation things and eventually working with a drum kit within an orchestra. Then we'll talk about the voice. We'll talk about the voice both in relationship to working in an orchestra and working in acquire. Notation, symbols, lyrics, breathing. And then we'll also talk about each individual instrument, so to speak. So the soprano, alto, tenor, bass, and all of the ranges that are in-between those. Then the category of everything else. We're going to talk about. Guitars, other fretted instruments, the harp, which is very difficult to write for. The piano, the accordion. Some general thoughts on how writing for anything it works. We're gonna wrap up the instrumentation portion in this chunk. So we're gonna get through all of the orchestra instruments plus a couple more. This will clear the path for us to jump heavy into orchestration in part three. So let's dive in and let's learn how all of these instruments work. 2. The Format of this class: All right, so the format of this class is gonna be basically the same as the first one if you took that. But what we're gonna do is we're really going to focus on instrumentation in this class, which is a fancy way to say all the instruments of the orchestra and some instruments that are not normally in the orchestra. So we're going to start with the brass. And what we're gonna do is basically divide this into three parts. We're going to talk about unique things to think about with the brass. Things like how brass instruments work, dynamic issues, breathing, some articulations, stuff like that. And then we're gonna go into each brass instrument and talk about the range and anything peculiar about those instruments. Then the third part of the brass section is special techniques using mutes or anything like that. All of the different sections are basically going to follow those three things. We're gonna do, percussion and voice and credit instruments and things like that. The reason I've set it up this way is so that you can use this as a reference later. You can come back and say, Okay, okay, what do I need to know about? About the trombone? And you can go just to the trombone one, or you can watch the brass stuff at the beginning or the brass stuff at the end. If you want to do something weird with the trombone, hopefully this will make good logical sense and you can come back to it and use it as a reference in the future. But I highly suggest watching it all the way beginning to end. First, just to familiarize yourself with how everything works and the kind of big picture. Cool. Okay, cool. 3. Previously in Orchestration!: I watch way too much law and order, so it makes me really excited to be able to go. Previously on orchestration. I just wanted to kind of remind us where we're at in the first chunk, which I hope you watched. But in the first class we did, talked about the scores, making scores parts instrumental parts, transposition and how I also love transposition. Don't love transposition. We're gonna deal with more transposition here in this class. Then we talked about the strings. Everything we need to know about strings is back there in the first class. And the woodwinds and all the different woodwinds. That was everything in the first-class. So if you're looking to reference older things, jump back up to those. But let's dive right in now and get to the brass. Cool. Here we go. 4. How These Work: Okay, The brass, brass instruments, primarily what we're talking about here is trombone, trumpet, tuba, horn, or French horn, sometimes euphonium. These other ones in this picture are less common cornet, fluid, will horn, natural trumpet. You do see that in some kind of older classical music. But primarily trumpets, trombones, horns and tuba are our main instruments. So let's talk about how these make their sound. So all of these have a mouthpiece. I don't have I don't have any brass instruments, apparently. I can't demonstrate this. I'm going to demonstrate the mouthpiece on a roll of tape. The mouthpiece, the part you blow into. Different for all instruments. For the higher instruments, it's smaller and for the larger ones, it's bigger. The hole, and this is probably relatable to a tuba. It's probably, it's too big, but it's in that ballpark. So the way these actually makes sound not, might not be the way you think. The player doesn't just put the mouthpiece to their mouth and blow. That's not how it works. They have to actually buzz. So they kind of buzz like with their lips together, like kind of like that. That produces a fair amount of the tone. And the instrument itself amplifies the tone. That's what a lot of the tubing does. It also helps kind of shape the pitch of the tone. The instrument provides a lot of the tone also, but some of it comes directly from the armature. That's the way mature means the way your lips connect to the mouthpiece that produces some of the tone. Now one thing that's especially tricky about brass instruments may have noticed that if you look at like a trumpet, let's look, let's see if we can zoom in on this trumpet a little bit here. Three valves. Does that mean It can only play three notes? No. It can play several octaves. If notes can play chromatic, you'll play all the notes in those octaves. So how do we achieve that with just three valves? Well, a couple of ways. First, if you think about all the possible combinations of those three valves, including all three down in all three up. There's more options there. Another thing is that there's kind of most modern trumpets, It's kind of a hidden fourth valve. And it's this ring right here. They hold the trumpet like this. They're playing their fingers like this. And then their pinky is in that little ring and they can stick that out. And that extends the tubing little bit. And that kind of opens up a new, new series of combinations of notes for when that's open, so they can get more. However, that's still not enough. The rest of the time, what they have to do. And this is true of all brass instruments. They have to use their own brochure, the way their lips are pushing air through their mouthpiece. To delicately find the right overtone. If you think, think about the overtone series, remember, if you've looked at the overtone series before, I kinda goes, there's a pattern to it. It goes the fundamental note. And then the next one up the overtone series as an octave. And then the next step that is a fifth, then goes on and on and on from there. Let's say I'm on a trumpet and I wanted to play the note G. I could finger the note G, that's fine. Or I could finger the note C and then adjust my lips to play the second partial, or sorry, the third partial of that because that would be an octave and a fifth above it, so it'd be a much higher G. Brass players have to maneuver this. And I reason I bring that up is because sometimes if you give them a high note, autumn nowhere, and you just say, Here's a high B flat on a trumpet, it's reasonably high note on a trumpet. No context, just bam, nail. It can be a little dangerous. But if you give them a scale going up to that B flat, much, much less dangerous. So it makes sense because they're amateur, can adjust to get that note. But when they just have to grab a high note out of nowhere, it can be difficult. That's where you get what we call fracked notes. Where you here maybe a node and then the right note. That it's a problem on brass instruments. Professional players can do it for sure, but it's worthwhile to understand that idea of using their lips to delicately find those upper partials. Because that's really hard. I never really played a brass instrument. I have goofed around on a trumpet and then trombone before, but not having ever really studied one. I find it amazing almost that they can do that. They can find those. But they can. That is the sound making mechanism of the brass. 5. Dynamics in Brass: Let's talk a little bit about dynamics with the brass. Brass are loud. They can get real loud. That can be loudest thing in the orchestra very easily. They can do some quiet stuff. But think about their dynamics as being, think about their loud range as being louder than the rest of the orchestra. If you write something where the violence and clarinets, trumpets are all playing the same note. They're all marked fortissimo. We're going to hear the trumpets. We're not going to hear those clarinets at all. And probably hear some of the timbre of the strings, but not very much. So these can be really loud. Now you can write a delicate quiet solo for the horn, or the trumpet, or the trombone, or even the tuba. Those are all okay. But just know that if you write mezzo-forte, the whole brass section, thinking this is going to blend into a cord. They're gonna be louder than everything else. Probably a good conductor, what kind of work to balance that? But bras get loud. Another thing about the brass is that they can do quiet, delicate stuff, but not too quiet. It just takes a certain amount of air to make a sound on these things. If they withhold the air and do really think about how little air you can push through your mouth and still make your lips buzz. Like it takes a certain amount of air for them to buzz. You can't write like one of the things I like to write for all instruments, if I can, is a Neandertal crescendo. I write this all over the place. In fact, I close the piece I'm currently working on, but I'll pull it up later. The antique crescendo is when you write lowercase n on a note or a 0, sometimes there's a couple of different ways to notate this. It's not a really standard way to notate this. Then a crescendo up till like let's say mezzo forte. What that means is to start at nothing and crescendo into the note. So just swoop up from nothing. I love that sound. I write it all the time. You can write that for strings. You can write that for most wins. The double reads are less good at it. You cannot write that for brass, it just doesn't work. You will hear their entrance because they they have to have a certain amount of air. So you kind of have to start them out like a pianissimo, at least for them to be producing sound. Otherwise you're gonna hear that sound kind of click on it some random spot. It's no good. They can't get super delicately quiet. They need a certain amount of air. 6. Long notes and Breathing: The RAS need to breathe more so than the winds. Just remember, it takes more air. The bigger the instrument, the more air it takes. You can ask a trumpet to hold a note longer than you can ask a tuba to hold a note. The tuba is going to need more air. It's going to need just more massive amounts of air moving out of that human to make that sound. They're going to run out of air. Now that doesn't mean that they can't play long notes. They can play along notes. But depending on the tempo, a bar, two bars, three bars. You don't want to have the tubas sustained a note for 32 bars. Not going to work. You're going to kill him. Trumpets can't sustain a note that long either without breathing, but they can make it a little bit longer. Depending on the note. If it's a really high note, they can't. High notes, take more breath. The low notes, they just have to push more air through to get those high notes to come out. So be mindful of that with brass for me when in doubt, I give them rests. If I don't have something important for them to do, I let them rest because I want to be able to use them too. I want them to have a full set of lungs when I need them. I think that's it. Just remember they need to breathe more than the winds do. 7. Articulations: So when you're thinking about rhythms for the brass, you can think about try doing the syllables, saying the syllables. Target, target, Takata, like that. That's what their tongue has to do to produce quicker rhythms. What your tongue is doing to go ta gotta, I gotta tuck it a tag. Took it at targeted Takeda. That's how that's one of the ways that they produce faster rhythms. It's a lot like what we talked about and winds, they use their tongue to kind of stop the valve, stopped the flow of air and produce rhythms. You don't really need to think about this with brass. Not very much with winds either. They're good at doing quick complicated rhythms. The higher brass more than the lower brass. Things like the trumpets. They're really used to doing like daga, daga, daga, daga, daga, daga, daga, daga. These quick things. That's like standard repertoire stuff. The euphonium, the tuba. Not so much, but not for the reason that you might think. I don't tend to write fast, complicated rhythms for those low brass instruments. But it's not because they couldn't do it with their mouth. I mean, the mechanism there is pretty much the same. It's the valves. Trumpet valves, you go like this. Tuba valves. Take your whole finger. If you've got a change notes on that, that it's hard. They're big big valves and it can be loud to actually you can hear them called concurrent client sometimes. But if it's a steady note, if it's just all the same note going dig into data, then you can do it in a tuba. Trombones, the same thing they have this slide they have to deal with. So if they're moving really fast, they might have to go from here to here, they're going to have a seizure. But if they're on the same note to get into, they can handle that. Okay, So you don't really have to think about rhythms too much. Unless you're doing something where they have to run, like do some chromatic line through some really fast complicated rhythms. I would avoid that. But otherwise, they can handle rhythm, rhythmic complexity fairly easily. 8. Transposition!: Transposition, my favorite thing. The good news is that, well, the bad news is that all the brass instruments are transposing instruments. The good news is it's slightly easier. They're all in b flat, with the exception of the French horn or the horn, which is an F, and sometimes G, changes. One of many things I like about the horn. Anyway, more on that later. But trombones, trumpet, tuba, these are all in F, sorry, in B flat. I think the natural trumpet might be in C because it's kind of irrelevant. The natural trumpet is something you won't see very often. It's basically, it's a trumpet with no valves. And so they get all the notes by going through those overtones series. As a bugle, bugle is basically a natural trumpet. You would only really use them for a very periods specific thing. You want. The sound of a natural trumpet because you're emulating the 1600s or something. I don't know. One natural trumpets, we're in fashion. But if you were doing something that had a visual component that was hearkening to the military or something like that. You might use a natural trumpet or just a straight-up bugle, which I think is a little bit smaller. But in general, don't use natural trumpet. Moving on. 9. The Horns: Range and Sound: Okay, because I've been teasing it for awhile now. Let's start with the horns. First of all, let's talk about the names of these things. The French horn. There's arguably nothing french about it. I don't remember where the term French comes from. But in modern orchestral lingo, we tend to just call these the horn. That's why I keep saying horn and then correcting myself in saying French horn to me. And I don't know if this is accurate. But to me, when someone says the French horn, I think of a student player. I think of like high-school performer, high-school student. When I hear the word horn, I think of this same instrument, but a professional player, I don't know why that is. I think that's just my ingrained snobbery coming out. But you can call these French horn or you can call them horn. That's fine. I think the more professional term is Horn. However, the joke in the biz is the actual pronunciation of this instrument is your joke that we have. But often that's how they sound to me. That overtone thing where they try to hit a note and then don't quite get it. So it's it's like a high note and falls down to fracked note. Before I go into my disdain for the horn, Let's just talk about the normal stuff that we should talk about. The horn is an F. They have a little switch somewhere that moves them to being in G sometimes. I don't really understand how that works, but it's nothing you have to think about. If they do that, they transpose on their own in their head. You don't have to transpose anything other than f. Written range, f up to see. They are used to reading bass clef and treble clef because they have a wide range. I'll say more about that later. Sounding all the way down to this B flat and up to this concert F. Here's another diagram. But they're saying is the safe range. Is this f, which is an octave higher than the f we saw in the previous diagram. Up to this G. That's what this chart considers to be the safe range. This range which is an octave down from here, is the full range. Up to this, see, the full professional range of the instrument. The horn has a very tight sound to it. It has the sound of it's almost like it's constantly being strangled. Let's hear something really quite beautiful sound there. This horn player, we just heard. Horn player for whatever orchestra. This is one of the top horn players in the world. Probably sounds really beautiful. But it has the tone that I'm trying to explain is it feels like saying it's a strangled tone is the best way I can describe it. A lot of people are really drawn to the horn because they hear the horn in these big brass moments used in film scores. Those are cool. Those really kind of connect us to Holst. Really I think is where we credit that sound coming from. And there was a lot of cool stuff happening at that time. There's just better ways to do it now. Sorry. I need to stop dragging on the horn so much. I'm going to devote one whole video is gonna be the next video. And I'm just going to talk about why the horn bothers me so much. If you don't want to hear me rant about the horn, skip over the next video. How about that? Let's go into that. 10. A Note About the Horns: Okay, So here's the thing. The horn, with all due respect. The horn is an extremely difficult instrument to play. It is so delicate. What you have to do with your mouth in the amateur, it's very complicated. The tubing is crazy. I just think it's not an instrument that was designed very well. Like I do. This is not a popular opinion and please don't take this outside of this class. It's just between you and me. It doesn't sound Gorgeous. Yes, it does. When we hear it in the context of the best, one of the best players in the world playing it. Yes. But by itself, it's just not an extremely, it's not a great sound to me. If you put a whole section of horns together, you can get a nice thick chord. But it's unreliable. Like so many times. I've written orchestra pieces where there's this big moment and then the horn comes in and just go. And it hits the big climactic sound. And instead of that big moment with that back, what I get is the big moment and then it ruins it. That's not because I had a bad player, it's because the thing is so difficult. It's so difficult to play reliably. I have lost my trust in it. So when we go to this range, what they call a safe range here, this F to G. The reason I kind of chuckle a little bit when I was explaining that, because to me, to me, the safe range of the horn is this D bottom of the treble clef staff to about this, be like less than an octave. I know that's terrible, but that's really where I'm pretty comfortable writing for the horn to do stuff in that range because they're didn't likelihood of them just like fracking the note is really low, but they're still entirely possible. I write for horns with an extremely conservative range, um, and we'd love to write for tennis tax phones instead. Basically. Again, this is not normal orchestration lingo. This is pure opinion editorial. I'm going to stop now and say nice things about the horns for the rest of this class, for everyone who skip this video, this will be our little secret. I've known some great horn players in my life. They're good people. They practice hard because they play an impossible instrument. Sorry, horns, you're not my favorite. 11. The Types of Trumpets: Okay, let's move on to the trumpet, where I had nothing but nice things to say. To start the different kinds of trumpets. The most standard is the B flat trumpet. If you just say trumpet, you're gonna get this one. The B flat trumpet. Also becoming quite standard is the C trumpet. It's got a little bit longer bell, It's got a little bit different tone. It's quite subtle. It's kind of like a brighter sound a little bit. But it's written in C. Just great for people like me. Is this thing called the pocket trumpet, which is kind of a squished trumpet. Frugal horn. Those of you who are at over a certain age will remember a guy named Chuck Mangione. He made the flu will horn famous. It's kind of like a big trumpet. It's really creamy sound to it. It's actually really quite delightful. It's a little bit lower Sound kind of fills the same, a similar range as the horns, French horns, if you will. Not standard in an orchestra. But I have seen them in orchestras before. This P Java, I don't know what this says. This looks like a toy. This is a plastic trumpet. Maybe. I've seen a couple of these plastic brass instruments coming out lately. They're kind of cool because they're cheap and they're great for beginners without the big investment. I actually mentioned these now that I think about it to a good friend of mine who is a trumpet player. What do you think these plastic instruments? And he said, The Great, You're not going to walk out on stage and an orchestra with them, but for people learning how to play at an affordable price. Quite good. Anyway, we're not going to deal with those. There is a D trumpet, trumpet in the key of D. Little bit brighter still. There's the piccolo trumpet. This really high. You hear these in fan fairs and stuff like that. Very high pitched trumpet. There's a bugle which we talked about. No valves. In orchestra. Standard orchestra. You are probably going to write for the B flat trumpet. You may write for the C trumpet if you'd like. Most professional trumpet players have a special little bag that they carry around that has both a B flat and a C trumpet in it. You can write for either one just fine. And they will most likely have both on hand. In fact, next time you go to the orchestra and orchestra concert, find the trumpets. Look for them. You may see right next to the trumpet player a little stand with another trumpet. That's either there'll be flat or C, depending on which one they're currently playing. Oftentimes they have it right next to them on a little stand. So they have both at the ready all the time. Those are different types of trumpets. You can expect these to any of the other kind. You're going to have to do something special and ask and request that they be used. 12. The Trumpet: Range and Sound: Okay, so the range of the trumpet, low F sharp up to this scene. This scene is kind of a famous note on the trumpet. The high C. This is kind of like if you imagine in your head, the sound of a trumpet playing a high note, just like a screener, just like you here at the end of the intro of Saturday Night Live. That's probably a high C. That's like these screaming note. Now a professional player can squeak out a couple more notes. But they are not reliable. This high C is for all practical purposes, the top range that you want to think about. And you want to also think about that note as being not easy to get. So if you're going to give them that note, approach it by a scale, that'll help them get that note. And expect that note to be screaming loud. No matter what. Don't write a high C at pianissimo. That's not possible. This is our written range, also, the range of the sea trumpet. So here is the sounding range of the B flat trumpet. This is gonna be the written range of all three, the c, B flat, and D. But this is going to be the sounding range of the B flat and the sounding range of the D trumpet, so slightly different. The D trumpet, I think I said in the last video, the D trumpet is not as standard as the sea trumpet. You can expect to be flattened C, I don't think you can expect a player just to have a seat trump, or a D trumpet laying around. It's a little more rare. Dynamics. Like I said, the top range, screaming loud, they can only get that note by scream in it. The low range, a little shaky. Trying to imagine. If you're giving them notes way down here. I'm thinking longer sustained notes can be okay, not too long, so you need to breathe. But if you're giving them faster passages and stuff, I'd stay away from the extreme low-end. I keep them up on around C to G above the staff. Once you get above that, you've really got to ramp them up there or give them a lot of volume. But otherwise, trumpets can be pretty versatile. I don't think there's anything out of the ordinary or special you need to think about with these. Cool, Let's move on. 13. The Types of Trombones: Let's talk about the trombone. Trombone actually works a lot like the other brass instruments. It's got a very different looking mechanism. But the principle is still the same. In something like a trumpet. The size of the tubing changes depending on which valves you have down it. Let's different air go through different tubes. And that effectively lengthens the tube because if you have all the valves closed, then the sound goes out one path. But if you have them open in certain combinations, it goes around another path. It takes longer tubing and thus helps you produce the pitch that you're looking for. In a trombone. That concept is just much more visual. The length of the tubing moves with your arm. You play it like this by making the tube longer and shorter. Now, that idea of finding the partials with your lips is still true. In fact, you've probably seen this happen. You might have seen someone on a trombone play a, play a low note by pulling their arm all the way out. Then pulling it all the way in and going. And playing an even lower note. That's because of the position they have to be in. And combined with the ambush or the way they're positioning their mouth is what actually produces a note. Sometimes the lowest note is not always all the way out. Different kinds of Trombones, there are two common trombones that we find in the orchestra. There's the tenor trombone and the tenor trombone is the most common. And if you just said trombone, what you're getting is the tenor trombone. Now you might be used to one that looks like this. If you saw a trombone in a concert band or your high school or wherever. This is the type of Trombone you might be used to seeing. I think more common for a professional musician is one that looks like this. It's got a bit more tubing here. This is still a tenor trombone. It's the same instrument. It's just got an extra little trigger. Basically they call it an F trigger. It's right there, you use it. So if you play it like this, it's gonna be on your thumb that's holding the instrument. So it's right there. And it's basically just a thing you can hold down that's going to reroute air through this extra tubing and lets you get a couple extra notes, lower. It lets you go down to F. That's why we call it an F trigger. I'll show you that when we talk about the range in just a second. Now with either way, when you're writing, you would just write for trombone. And if the player wants to play it on this trombone without an F trigger or this trombone, that's not really your concern. If you write down to F, then they're going to need to use this kind of a trombone, pretty safe to do in a professional orchestra. The third kind of trombone is a bass trombone. This has two triggers, and F trigger and a G trigger. So just kind of more options for them to have. And I believe it's an octave lower. We'll look at the range of disseminate. You can specify bass, trombone, or orchestra. It's not standard. But it's not that weird. I think. It may be a common doubling. I'd have to look that one up for sure. If you can ask a trombone player to double on bass trombone. I don't typically do it. I would write for the forces of two trombones. Well, let's look at a score. Yeah, now that memory is coming back to me. This piece, this is one of my pieces I wrote for three trombones, and I believe the third trombone. It is common for them to also double on bass trombone. You can ask your third player to play bass trombone. Similar sound and everything and the bass trombone is just lower. Look at the ranges in a second. Those are the different types of Trombones. There are more, of course, like all instruments, there are a ton of variations on them. There's an alto, trombone and some other ones, but they're not standard. And the orchestra rep. 14. The Trombone: Range and Sound: Okay, so before we talk about the range, Let's really quickly talk about the transposition of the trombone because it's actually a little complicated, more complicated than most transpositions. It's the same amount of complicated as other transpositions. But there's maybe misspoke earlier when I said that it's a B flat instrument like all the other brass. Because I was just looking that up because that felt kind of weird to say that it's a B flat instrument because a lot of bass clef instruments are C, and it is always written in bass clef. I looked it up and it turns out that in some music, particularly, I read something about British Concert Band music and some other Concert Band music. But I think it might be a British tradition to write it as a transposing instrument in B-flat. Lot of literature is also just written for it in C concert pitch. From what I can gather, it's fundamental pitch is a B flat, and so a lot of people treat it as a B flat instrument. But in a lot of modern music, we write it in C. This is very confusing to me. It has me wondering, should I write it as a transposing instrument or write it in C? My inclination is gonna be to write it and see, because I would prefer to write everything in concert pitch because I'm bad at transposing, but I also want to do it right. As far as I can tell. In modern music, we're writing for trombone in concert pitch in C. So let's look at the range. The range, and this is concert pitch. The normal range here. E up to this B flat, professional player, squeak out a couple of notes. And then players with this trigger can get down to the sea or down to this F. The pedal range I think is a lift thing. It's a different way of playing. But the F trigger, combined with doing some mature changes, can get you down to this F. If you're working with someone who has the F trigger, which is safe to assume that you are. You can get down to this F. Now you're gonna write in bass clef, I think trombones. You can go into alto clef. I think. If you were going to stay up in this range for an extended period of time, you might switch over to alto clef to avoid a whole bunch of ledger lines. But I don't think treble clef. I would, again, I might want to double-check that with the orchestra, see what they prefer. But, um, I seem to remember getting yelled at by a trombone player for going into treble clef when in doubt, stick to bass clef trombone. The range of the bass trombone is roughly the same as if you had the F trigger. You don't, you don't gain a lot of range by switching to the bass trombone, but you get a lot more confidence in this low pedal area. Whereas here, with these puddle range, you have fairly thin sounding notes. You don't have the oomph of it. With a bass trombone, you get a really solid sound in that range. So tenor trombone, with the triggers roughly the same range, at least on the low end as the bass trombone. But the bass trombone, if you're gonna do a lot of stuff down there, you want the bass trombone to really give it the power. Let's hear something. This is an alto trombones. What's gonna be a little bit higher? Same tone of a trombone. It's got that kind of fuzziness that we know from all our brass instruments. It's very similar actually to the horn sound, except maybe more reliable. I don't know, I shouldn't say that. But it is up in the higher range of the trombones, very similar to the horn. But electron bones, they're fun to work with. A relatively solid, again, a difficult instrument to play, not easy but good trombone player can be, can be really amazing sound. 15. The Types of Tubas: Okay, Let's talk tuba. The lowest part of the brass section. There's a whole bunch of different kinds of tubas. There's the base tuba, contra bass, tuba, the euphonium, frugal horn, Wagner, tuba, or super cool. The Helicon tuba. Marching tubas. This is maybe what you might picture when you think of a tuba, baritone horn, and a couple other weird ones. Okay, So here's what you need to know. The sousaphone, this type of tuba, or the marching tuba sousaphone. I think those are the same. Those are not really going to see in an orchestra. You might see those band, you'll definitely see those in marching band, but those are not typically found in orchestras. If you see this kind of big bell sticking out like that, you might be looking at a Wagner tuba. Wagner tubas stick out a little bit because they had the horn that goes up towards the top. These are very specific. You don't want to write for Wagner tubas. These were written for a lot Bye Wagner. They were popular for a minute and his time, there are a lot of orchestras have a set of Wagner tubas and they're pretty much pulled out to play some of the big Wagner symphonies. They're not something that you can write for. The kind of sound like a cross between a horn and a tuba. Like a really low horn. There. Cool. They've got some power, they've got some grit to them. They're kind of cool looking. But you don't want to write for those. Typically, if you're writing for orchestra, tuba, you are writing for a base, tuba. Base, tubas are big that tubas, they sit in your lap. They tick, typically have four valves and they weigh like 30 to 40 pounds. Sorry, quite heavy. They're not the most dexterous instruments in the world. So they take, because like I said before, because they have these really big valves. Even a pro player, It's like that. We'll watch a pro player negotiate those in just a second. Base. Tuba is what you're working with when you write tuba. In a score. 16. The Tuba: Range and Sound: Now the range of the two, but for the transposition of the tuba, kind of a similar dear deal as trombones. You can see here note that although euphonium and base tuba are pitched in B flat, they are notated and C at the desired pitch. So we write them in counter pitch. They're saying they're basically B-flat instruments, but we notate them at concert pitch. Contour pitch, range, basically this all the way up to this showing me a D, but it says here, typically we only refer them a bass clef. But if you really need to scream for a long period of time, you can switch over to tenor clef. Let's hear someone now. This is a concerto for base tuba. A tuba concerto by Ralph on William Vaughan Williams. Keep in mind what you're gonna hear here is a virtuoso player. If you can hear that, even though the tuba has his big, strong low-end and that's what we know it for. It does have a really beautiful sound up in the mid-range, upper, higher range of the instrument. There's some really nice notes there. You can also hear like on, even on the 16th note passages in this excerpt, you can almost hear a strain to get the instrument to go that fast. It's not even the player, it's the valves. You can hear this bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. This is probably one of the best players in the world that we're hearing. So those quick passages are tricky. But these melodic lines like this really nice. Give, give the player some love in your music and you'll have a friend for life. 17. Mutes: Okay, Let's talk about mutes. We talked about string mutes, how they had little piece of rubber they can put on the string to kind of dampen it. We talked about how the winds rarely use mutes because the sound comes out from all directions of the instrument. So putting a mute and the end of it or in the bell, tends to not do very much. Brass instruments. Almost all the sound comes out of the bell, so mutes very effective and very common. You may have seen, like in jazz people using a plunger mute, which is literally a plunger. There are a lot of different kinds of mutes and they work on all the brass instruments. Yes. There's a bunch of different kind of thing. We can put an, a trumpet, the tuba, you'll often see the tube was putting in a mute by grabbing this big, huge thing and putting it over to get into the top of the tuba. They have a few different kinds of mutes. The horns do have mutes, but they work a little bit differently because of the way they hold the instrument. Their hand is already in the bell. So they do have some stuff. They can kinda stuff up in the bell, or they can do some things with their hand to kind of stop the sound to create a mute. Their mute options are slightly different, but they do have some trombones have mutes that they can put on the end. So I thought I'd just show you a couple of those different sounds for the mutes. The way you would call for this and the scores, you just write the name of the mute, you'd say with mute and say the kind of mute if you can. Then of course you need to give them a little bit to put a mute in, a little bit of time to put the mute in and to take it out. Trumpet players can put in and take out a mute pretty fast. Like a bar. Trombone players, it takes a little bit more time, so I got to pick it up off the floor. It's bigger. They got to reach out. I got to make sure it's in there secure so it doesn't go flying away. That can take a couple of bars. Tuba takes a significant amount of time to pick up this thing, put it in, and then they take it out. So you gotta give them time to put in a mute and take it out. We have a straight mute. That's kind of maybe that's what you picture when you think of a mute for a trumpet. It's got this cork and assai. They almost all have that, that just helps it stick in. And it kinda just funnels the sound into a much thinner Bezier sound. Cup, mute. You can almost imagine that it's putting a, a cup like a coffee cup over the entire bell, like the edges come out. A Harmon mute has a little piece inside that makes it kind of extra buzzy. You think of these, when you think of jazz, a little bit more, plunger mute, It's literally a plunger. Thanks, cool. This is how you get that wah-wah effect. Bucket mute. It's like a bucket really muffled the sound. And a practice mute you probably don't want to use, although you could, this doesn't completely kill the sound, but makes it really, really quiet. So you can't really hear it. This is for if you want to practice your trumpet and you have roommates. So I felt this video that goes through playing a melody with a bunch of different needs just so we can hear what they sound like. So let's watch a little bit of this. Hi it. Okay, so you can see there's a lot of different tones you can get. I think the main takeaway here is to think about when you use a mute. If you decide to mute, use a mute. Don't think of it as a dynamic effect, as something that is only going to affect volume. But think of it as a timber effect, something that's going to affect the timber the way the instrument sounds. A lot of them will also affect volume, but they're bigger. Impact to me is on timber. You can adjust for volume. You can tell someone to play louder or quieter. The mute, the strength of the mutant is in the adjustment to the timbre. 18. Multiphonics: Okay, multiplex on brass instruments. Don't do multi phonics on brass instruments. Diet next video. I'll say a couple of other things. Is it possible to do multi-family some brass instruments? Probably. You never really see it. What you do see in not an orchestra music, but in solo, like virtuosic stuff. Sometimes you see these weird techniques where they play a note and then hum a different note. So it's gonna be really, really quiet because there's humming, but there are things like that that I've seen done really rare. Never. I shouldn't say never but hardly ever used in an orchestra. The way we looked at multifamily acts on saxophone. That doesn't really happened for brass instruments. In an orchestra setting. Definitely multi phonics and brass instruments out. Don't do that. Don't even try. 19. "Forces" in an Orchestra: We haven't really talked about the forces in a brass section of an orchestra. Like how many trumpets, how many trombones? I wanted to just address that quick. This can vary. You can have large forces or small forces and brass, just like winds, but this is the most common. For horns. I'll come back to that in a second. Three trumpets, maybe two trumpets to trombones. A bass trombone, or three trombones, 310 or trombones. Tuba. Interesting thing about the way the horns are laid out in an orchestra brass section. So for something like the trumpets, you might have, let's say we have three trumpets. You might have trumpet 123, where trumpet one is going to be your top trumpet player. You want them right? If there's gonna be any real high stuff, anything particularly exceptionally difficult, you give that to the first trumpet because they are going to be presumably your top trumpet player. 23 are gonna be very good trumpet players. But the hardest stuff you're going to put for trumpet one right there, the first chair for the horns, you do a little bit different thing. Definitely the most virtuosic stuff goes to the horn, number one. But we typically write four horns on two staves. We write two horns on the first day of in the score, not in the part and the part. Everybody gets their own staff, but everybody gets their own part actually. But in the score, you read it on two staves. You can do this two ways. You can write horn 12 on the top stave and 34 on the bottom stave. Or you can write horns, 13 on the top stave and 24 on the bottom stave. That's a common way to do it. The reason you do that is one in three are often considered your top players. Which is weird, not 1213. You can think of them as two groups of two, where you have Player One and two. Player one is better, then Player 34, player three is better. That's kind of roughly the way it goes. Now keeping in mind that's pretty arbitrary because all four players are gonna be very good players if they're playing in a professional orchestra. But the harder stuff goes to players 13. Usually. If you write parts 13 on a single staff, then that's basically your harder material staff. And then 24, that's your less hard materials staff. Or you can write 12 where your top-line is your harder stuff and your bottom line is you're less hard stuff. And then 34 are where your top-line is the hard stuff and their second line is the less hard stuff. Either way is okay. You just have to be sure to label them which one you're doing. I'm just looking at this score. And I wrote 1231234, which is surprising to me. I normally write 1324. But whatever Either way is fine. But it's just something to think about. The way we write horn. Forces are typically four horns, two or three trumpets, trombones, one bass trombone, or three trombones, and one tuba. 20. Pitched and NonPitched: Alright, let's move on to percussion. So the percussion section is virtually impossible to define because there's just so much that it can be percussionists, professional percussionists are trained with the, the art of adaptability. It's, yes, they are very good at playing the standard percussion instruments, but also it's very common in an orchestra music to say, I want someone to be able to hit live fish with a hammer. Don't do that. That's disgusting. But if you wanted to do that, you would give it to a percussionist. If you call for anything strange in the score. The precaution section is probably open to it. As long as it's not going to hurt themselves or their instruments or the people around them. They're usually down for a challenge. We can divide all the instruments that percussionists play. The common instruments that percussionists play, roughly along the lines of pitched and non pitched. So pitched would be things with a definite pitch. Xylophones, marimba has Glaucon, spiel, some bells, some gongs. There are, there are more. But those are things where you, where you notate a definite pitch, then there are non pitched things like symbols, triangles, tom-toms, ratchets, snare, drum, bass, drum, things like that, other drums. But then there are things with relative pitch. Things that are kind of pitched but not definitely pitched, things like Toms. If you look at these toms in this picture here, they are of different sizes. That means that the smaller ones are gonna be a higher pitch than the lower ones. These you would notate with a relative pitch. More on notation shortly. But we would still more or less classify these as unpatched. Not that, that matters a whole lot. It's just a way to think about percussion. Now when you're dealing with percussion, there is a lot to think about. Because we not only have to think about what they're hitting, but we also have to think about what they're hitting it with the mallet. We have to think about how many things they can do at once. You can ask a percussionist to do two things at once. But you may also have to think about how they get from the xylophone, which is way over here on the stage to the marimba, which is way over here on the stage. In an eighth note, there is a certain amount of choreography that you have to think about. It can be a little complicated to deal with all of this. So let's go into some of the basics now. Fair warning, I'm not going to cover everything about every percussion instrument. We're going to talk in broad terms about dealing with percussion. This is a case where it might help you to have an orchestration book that really lists every possible but a lot of percussion instruments and how you notate them. Because there are hundreds, really, there are a hundreds of different things you could do. But let's talk in big terms about how to deal with percussion. 21. Timpani & Forces: Okay, Let's talk about forces. You typically are going to have two or three percussionists. Now that doesn't mean two or three percussion instruments. Percussionists can double. The term doubling doesn't apply here because we can ask a percussionist to play a 100 different things in a piece, as long as we can set up a way for them to physically do that, move between the different instruments. But when you watch an orchestra performance, it's not uncommon to see the percussionist walking around, sometimes running around to get to the different spots. But you will have two different players, sometimes three different players, people. And they will typically set up what they need in a semicircle around them. Sometimes they will share instruments if they have to negotiate moving between them. Now, the timpani is a special case. You will probably have a timpani player that tympani player does not double on any other percussionists. Percussion instruments. You cannot have a timpani player and say for this one section, you haven't played in a 100 measures. So I want you to hit this OneNote on a triangle. You cannot do that. Maybe you can in an amateur orchestra, but in a professional orchestra, the timpani player plays the timpani and nothing else. If you see an, a score that you have for percussionist, but one of them is the timpani player. You have three percussionists. Makes sense. This is like a union rule. The timpani player cannot be asked to do anything other than play the timpani. It's weird. Even if they play one note in the entire piece, they cannot be asked to do anything other than that OneNote. So the timpani is a special case. When you're writing for tympani. You typically have four or five different drums. They are pitched and they can be retuned in a piece. If you have five different notes, you can use those five notes. But then if they have some measure of rests like a lot, they can retune one of the timpani or multiple of the timpani to a different note. They're quite good at this. You might have a note that is g and the timpani, and then they have 20 bars of rest. And now you need that one drum to now be an a that's doable. They can tune that. They can raise the pitch of that up to an a. It's on a pedal. That's how they retune them. Now the range that they can read to them and retune them is quite limited. I can't remember exactly, but it's only like an octave per drums. So you have to look at the size of the drums and the range of those jumps. I encourage you to look up the tuning range of the different timpani. Don't ask a Tiffany player to play the sides of the timpani. If you do, they're going to pull out an old tympani and do something weird with it. I have seen that happen and it causes quite a stir in the orchestra. The shells of the tympani are very fragile. They don't like hitting the sides of them. But most important thing, the timpani player can not be asked to do anything other than play the timpani. All the rest of the percussionist can run around like chickens with their heads cut off, doing a 100 different things. 22. Rolls and Strokes: I want to make mention of notating roles. In particular, the different kinds of strokes. For the most part, you don't have to think about how someone's going to stick something. Meaning if you say play this rhythm on a snare drum, they're gonna play that rhythm on the snare drum and they're going to do it how they need to do it. But do you think about if you ask someone to roll, what kind of role you want, this is important because it sounds very different. Typically when we think about a role, we are. If you imagine in your head like a snare drum roll, you're probably imagining a note with three lines going across the top of it. Let me show you. This is an open roll. Those are the three lines I'm talking about. That's gonna be that sound of a role. This is essentially a role written out with the sticking right and left. If you want the sound of a role, don't do this. This will sound more like distinct notes. One thing that I've found about the percussion section of an orchestra is that they are going to go to insane lengths to play exactly what you've notated. They pride themselves on, even if it's really bizarre, getting it exactly how you've notated it, make sure your notation is exactly what you want. I can tell a crazy story about doing this and maybe I will by the end of this section. But for now, we're gonna move on. This is a notation for a buzz role that's more like pushing your sticks into the head. It's a higher pitch. It's a different kind of role. Find a percussionist and ask them to play a buzz role for you. Here's another buzz role, but kind of more notated out. It's more of a buzz sound than a that makes sense. Single-step buzz, role, crushed Buzz. Those are all different kinds of buzz. These, these are not unique to percussion. You can write this kind of notation in any instrument, but since it's on the screen, maybe I'll talk about it. We call this feathered beaming. Any notation program can do it. It's a little tricky, but you can get a notation program to do that. What that means is to go with this one is, is to play, start off really fast and then slow down. Like, let me do it on my desk here. So that's what that is saying to do. This bar is going fast and then slows down and then fast, so it's going That's kind of what that says to do. It can't be a cool effect in the right context. You can write that for any instrument though. Crescendo role is just to open roll with a crescendo on it and then it'll crack at the end and a buzz role that fades away with a sforzando piano on it. So you can write roles with two dashes on them and even just one dash on them. But those are going to have a different sound. If you want that role sound, you want these three lines that says like a big open role. 23. Mallets: Okay, Let's talk about mallets. You can, but don't have to specify what kind of Mallet you want used for the percussion instruments, anything that's going to be hit. Now I see you don't have to you don't have to specify what kind of mallet. If you don't, they will use their best judgment. But there can be quite a different sound depending on the malate is being used. Generally speaking, when we describe a mallet, we describe two possible things. One is how hard or soft it is, and two is what it's made of. You might say yarn mallet, which would be one of these. And that's going to be pretty soft. So a yarn malate is pretty soft. Here we have rubber mallets. Here we have wood mallets, plastic mallets, and brass mallets. And these are gonna go, going down the list as I just did. Those are getting harder and harder and harder. The harder something is, the more harder the sound is going to be. That's kind of a weird way to say it, but I think it's accurate. You hit something with a soft mallet, it's gonna be a boom sound. You hit something with a really hard malate. It's gonna be a click sound. It's gonna be very focused. Now that also depends on the instrument. So something like a marimba is a very soft sound, and a marimba is made of wood. If you tell them to play a marimba with brass mallets, they're probably not going to do it because it's going to damage the marimba. But remember, it is almost always played with yarn mallet. However, you can specify to use a hard or a soft mallet. It's still going to be a yarn mallet. But these ones, you can see here, these are harder, these ones even are hard and these are soft. So there's a varying degree of yarn. Malate. Xylophone, which is made of wood, is typically going to be played with plastic mallets. Maybe would mallets, although I think plastic is more common. Trying to remember, not typically yarn mallets on a xylophone because they won't, it won't be as loud, it won't speak as well. But you can certainly ask for yarn mallets on his eyelid phone if you want if you want it to have a dampen sound, that would be a way to do it. What I tend to do is if I have a very specific idea in mind, I might say hard malate, soft mallets. Actually really just wanted those two. Then I'll let, let the performer do whatever they think is going to sound best from there. But that will basically tell them the sound I'm looking for. If I say I want a marimba with a hard ballot, they know what I'm talking about. They know I want a very kind of pointed sound out of the marimba as much as possible, as much as is possible from the rainbow. The same thing goes with any instrument, really even the timpani, you can say harder or softer mallet on the tympani. There's not a lot of flexibility that tympani has in the balance that they can use. But they can do certain things. Snare drum, that any kind of drum is typically going to be played with wood sticks. But if you want it played with a soft Mallet, you can certainly ask for that and that's fine. I like to not specify the material, although you can instead just say hard or soft. That way. They kind of know what you want and it doesn't put them in the position of asking them to do something that they're not willing to do. If I say play the snare drum with knives, They're not gonna do it because it's going to rip apart the snare drum. But if I say play the standard room with a brass MATLAB, with a hard mallet. Then they're gonna say, okay, well he wants a different, a very specific kind of thing. Let's see what we can do. But it is very common for in fact, almost universal, for percussionists to carry around this huge bag filled with tons of different mallets. Like a professional marimba player doesn't walk around with a marimba. They expect there to be a marimba when they get there, but they do walk around with his monstrously big bag of mallets. All professional percussionists have access to hundreds of different mallets that they can use. So don't be shy about asking for a specific kind of mallet if you want one. 24. Bowing: I want to talk about Boeing because this is something that a lot of people, when they're just getting started out with percussions, a very popular thing to do, as it should be, because it's a really cool sound. I've written for bowed percussion. It's a really great sound. You should know about. When we talk about bowed percussion, what we're talking about doing is using literally a cello bow. Actually, I think they use a base bot most of the time. The same thing we use to play the bass with the hair and everything on percussion instruments. So instead of hitting them, pulling a bow across them to get them to resonate. It's a very ethereal sound. It makes them ring. It's not like a hit, It's a slow growth of the sound. A lot of overtones, harmonics, very pure sound. We can go a lot of different instruments. We can bow the vibes, we can bow the marimba. Boeing, the xylophone is less reliable. We can bow symbols. There's a lot of different things you can go. Things to note about Boeing is that because of the way they have to do it, It's kind of like this. You can't do fast rhythms with Boeing. It takes awhile for they have to bow it for a couple of seconds before the instrument even starts to produce resonance before it starts to make sound. You can't do it fast. It's a slow, ethereal thing. It takes them a minute to get set up with the bot. And it takes them a minute to put the bow down. So you have to think about all of those things. I found this nice video where with this person explaining how it works and doing some demonstrations. So let's listen. I find it interesting when I start playing with Boeing after the years, It's not a very complicated thing, but it's nice to have some ideas about what we're doing. First thing is, let's see, we have symbols. Very easy. You have a symbol and you go through this. But mostly when you do like this, don't have a problem either. Your fixed assemble so hot that you already dumped him it a little bit. Nothing will come out. So you need a counterpart your other hand to fix the symbol. In this case, what I see very often is people use the middle of fixed it and place, which is working. It's fine. I like to use just one of my fingers and put it a little bit near the edge. Like this. Because since I'm going up, need only this bit of finger to give the energy to hold the symbol donuts and not much more even on a airspeed know in percussion, the world quarterback standards, which are a little bit Muslim. I can use this and fine and ever release point and a very nice contact point. Now the thing for this is a friend of mine showed me for continuous playing. Sometimes you use like this grip. When you go up your touch the upper symbol, the upper side. Then you go down. You'll touch the science side, which has done it works on us because we're neither like this and I go down and losing a bit. So sometimes it's good. Down sides. Of course, in the middle. I prefer to have justice fingers spot here. For me, it's the best, the most color and the widest range. This is for symbol. When you have vibraphone, I often tell the composer us, please use only one bone, not to both, because when we have to play with to both symbols, quartile has and riboflavin. Sometimes it's very complicated because we have don't have contact to the instrument. It's possible you have to fix very precisely the symbol. You have to fix the GoTalk. But it's still for me. I found a little bit difficult to do and to get a good result. When you use one bow on a vibraphone. Also. We have seen same. You just have to contact one. Sometimes I use this finger here when I'm here, especially in Osama when I play was conducted, I'm here. I fixed a fixed with the other hand a little bit the pitch, then I can look around. I consider conductor, I can't see somebody else and go and stab at it. If I do like this, it's a little bit can be the unsecured, especially when their notes or higher in the bars are smaller. So you'll fix it like here. The point for this always what I did also on the symbol half this kind of degree, 9090 degrees. Like to be really don't do like this. I was on the vibraphone. Don't go for this. It doesn't work. You always have to be perpendicular to the instruments you are playing. Sandbox catalase. Here. If the cutoff is by itself, even this standard is not quite fixed, so it's quite difficult to do what I need. I need to fix the CO2. So I push my fingers on the middle of the quarter. That's why I'm left hand. I will try to do this and go here to the board. A little bit of fixation in the middle of the of the quartiles. If I'm in a context of playing, a friend of mine showed me Very nice thing. You put the bow to the quartal and do what touches the cortisol which is besides don't know whether you can see it. It's just this area. This would be many people do like this. And then what happens? Your failure very easily here. You go here and contact the other quartiles and you have a contact point. You're slowly release the other quarter mile, so you're free to play the one which is nothing. That's a nice point to fix. So even without looking, I know where M and I think that's very nice thing to do with Boeing. That instrument that he was playing at the end there is called catalase is the way we pronounce it in English. Catalase. Little metal discs. 25. Notation: Okay, Let's talk a little bit more about notation. So the trickiest part about notation for percussionists to specify what instrument is used being used. And what's become the standard way is to just write the name of it in English or whatever your language is. There was at 1 proposed universal symbol system put together. I can't remember the name of it or who did it. I actually can't even find traces of it online anymore. That's how unpopular it was. But you'll still find it in orchestration books. For example. This, these kind of triangular shapes is a remnant of it. These are really not used anymore. Much more common to just write the name of the instrument. So if you see those in a book, just keep in mind that these shapes and symbols are just really, they just weren't really adopted. Instead we have something like this. You devote a spot on the staff, you use this clef. This clef basically says I'm pitched percussion. For pitch percussion, you use the appropriate clef. And you say, okay, this note is going to be my bass drum. This node is Tom three. This is my standard drawing, this as Tom two and this is Tom one. This is how I'm going to notate high hat. This is how I'm going to notate ride and I'm going to notate crash. This system is fairly common, but you can say like Tom three is gonna be a different note and that's fine. You just have to kind of define it at the beginning and then be consistent in your piece. You just write the name of the instrument that you want. Now you don't have to write the name of the instrument on every single hit. If you're going to use. Now that we've set up this kind of legend, we can just write the notes and the player will know to reference the legend, to know what instruments are supposed to play on. But when in doubt, write the name of the instrument again. Because why not? One thing that I've found to be useful that I was told by conductors is a really great thing to do and made a lot of them really happy was to take this convention. What I've done, you won't be able to see it here, but these are my three percussion staves. And what I've done is at the beginning of every page, I wrote in a box, I wrote the name of the instrument that the percussionist is going to play. Next. You can see on this page, the percussionist don't do anything. And yet I've still notated what their instrument is. This says TAM, tam, bass, drum, and vibraphone. That means their next note is going to be on those on every single page. Let's go up to another random page. There are notes in a box. It says, here's what's coming. And then when they start playing, I give it again. And I say, this is the instrument that is intended there. Just so there's no ambiguity. At the beginning of any page. The conductor can just look and see what percussion we're expecting to hear next. That's not required to do, but it has been something I've taken to doing and has been appreciated. So do that. You'll make friends. Otherwise, just use language to say the name of the instrument that you want to play. Define how you're going to notate it at the beginning of the piece. Or in a note before the piece, just a note in the score. And then you can go on from there. You should also have a page in your score or in the part or probably both. Kind of defining what it's going, what is going to be needed for each part. For example, here's the cover page for this piece. The part of percussion for, so this has four percussionists. This is the fourth percussion part, and these are the instruments that this part is going to need. Now. And here's how they're going to notate them. This is very clean, very easy. Now I also told you, I think way back in the beginning of this class, I told you about creating a percussion score. That's just all percussion parts put together into one big part with multiple staves. That can be really handy too, because then the percussion, the person in charge of the percussion section, the first percussion is usually the principal. Percussionists can divvy out the parts if they see a better way to do it. That actually happened to me where when I was working with an orchestra or the principle of percussionists, cut apart my percussion score and created new percussion parts. He cut it and pasted the percussion parts in a way that divvied up the work. So all the notes got played. But something I may have given percussion three he gave to percussion one, because you found an easier way to negotiate the choreography. That's all great. Let them do that. If they want to do that, let them do that, but definitely give them a starting point by making apart. 26. Drum Kit: Drums set, drum kit, however you want to call it, not the not exactly a standard thing in percussion setup of an orchestra. However, it's not that weird. If you ask for a drum kit, you can get one. That's just fine. They will be able to do it. But most orchestra percussion sections don't have just a drum kit on stage anyway. It's a little out of the ordinary, but not very much. Notation for drum kit is you will use this standard system. Then there is a standardized drum kit system. Is exactly this that we're seeing on the screen. You put your snare, kick symbols, hi-hat. You'll want to notate everything that you possibly can for the drum kit. You don't want to write. Just like the words. Find a groove. That doesn't really work very well. Remember these are otherwise classical musicians and just saying find the groove really takes them out of their comfort zone. It'd be better to fully notate what you want. And then maybe put a note there that says, listen to the trumpets and lock with that groove or something like that. You can give them tips but notate as much as possible. Because if you just say like do something cool, they're going to come back to you and probably asked for more specifics. Remember, these are classical musicians they want to play what's on the page. If you don't give them anything, they're just going to feel weird. Notate as much as possible for drum kit. 27. How the Voice Works: Okay, Let's talk about the voice. I wasn't going to add the voice into this, but I thought it was worth touching on a little bit. I do want to go through the common vocal ranges and a little bit about working with singers. I'm primarily here talking about, I guess working with seniors in a choral context and not just about adding singers to an orchestra, which is something that happens often. There are a lot of symphonies that call for acquire. Just a lot of other pieces that choir as incorporated or a soloist is incorporated. Or there's like opera. But there's also just writing for choir, which just voices. I don't want to spend a ton of time on just writing for acquire. But I do want to talk about some of the basics about working with the voice. I'll start with this little anecdote. I remember being an undergrad, studying with this composer. Who was a very fine composer. I had a lot of respect for him. He was still has quite a good reputation in the United States. Does a lot of great work. Really good composer. I was very fortunate to be starting with him. I went into his office, I just finished a piece. I wanted to go into his office for my lesson. And he said, Okay, What do you want to work on next? And I said, You know, I'm thinking about writing a piece for choir. And he said, okay, how should I talk you out of doing that? Then he proceeded to talk me out of doing that. And the reasons that he wanted to talk me out of doing it wasn't any orchestration or reason and it was I think he had a little bit of a bone to pick with singers. Working with singers can be hard sometimes if we're stereotyping, working with any instrumentalists can be hard. Sometimes. They do have some unique things. Let's talk a little bit about some of the uniqueness. First, let's talk about just how singers make sound. Pretty simple. You can actually think of it like parts of a wind instrument and parts of a string instrument put together in a way. So we have vocal cords. Imagine those like strings, they're not, but they're kind of like strings. And we all have those in our throat, I think. But then we have wind. And wind goes over those chords and it makes them vibrate and it generates a wind instrument. The thing that's different than any other instrument is what happens after that. We can make our vocal cords resonate and produce a sound, a tone, a pitch. But then it has to go through our throat and know. A lot can happen in those places. We can shape that sound using our mouth into words. We can shape. We could do a lot with our throat and our mouth to change the timbre of the sound. The way someone's throat and mouth and even like nasal passage, I'm not a physiologist. I'm just kind of guessing on some of this, but it's basically fact that the ways the shape of someone's anatomy has something to do with how they sound. So it's a very complicated mechanism. Let's talk about some of the basics around working or writing music for the voice. So let's talk about big picture range and tessitura, some notation stuffs and breathing stuff. Let's get that out of the way and then we'll go through each of the better known of the more common vocal ranges. 28. Tessitura and Range: Let's talk about tessitura and range. We've mentioned tessitura before, way back at the beginning. And it becomes more important in singers, especially when it comes to fatigue. The difference between tessitura and range. Let's address that first. We'll talk about this fatigue issue. So let's say I wrote a piece. There was a solo line and it was, it used an F on the treble clef staff as its lowest note and an F at the top of the treble clef staff as it's high, it's nope. It's range is an octave. Okay, cool. We have that piece is using a range of an octave. So easy enough. Any singer could pick up that score and say, is this piece within my range? By looking at the F to the F and then say, Yeah, that's in my range. I can sing that low note. I can sing that high note. I can sing this piece. Makes sense. However. Now let's say that we take a little bit closer look at that same piece, same range, f to f. However, the majority of the piece exists up on the top of the treble clef staff between D, E, and F. The vast majority of the piece is up in those three notes. Now we have a little bit different problem. Somebody looks at that piece and they say the low note is F, the high note is F. Can I sing this piece? Yes, you can. However, the tessitura of the piece is very high, meaning it's, the majority of the piece is sitting up high for a long time. And that is going to be more difficult than if it was sitting in the middle. That makes sense. That's the tessitura. We look at the tessitura as the range of the majority of the piece, whereas the lion share of stuff landing, if it's equally distributed throughout the octave, that's fine. That's totally cool. But if it's a very high tessitura, meaning we're going to be sitting in that high range for a lot. That's much more strenuous on the voice. Then in the middle range, the low range can be very strenuous on the voice as well. It just depends on the particular singer. When someone looks at a piece, they should be looking at not only the range, but also the tessitura. Because it has to do with fatigue and endurance. When conductors look at a piece that's something they look for. They look to make sure it's a good fit for their choir because they want pieces that not only fit the range of their group, but also fit the tessitura of their performers and things like that. That is something to consider. It's not something you need to worry about as your writings, necessarily. Because you should write, denotes that you want to write. But it's just something to be aware of. Let's talk about some notation stuff. 29. Notation & Symbols: Okay, Let's talk about some notation stuff that we have in choral music are actually ingesting vocal music in general. First, older vocal music, you'll see this convention of using flags for every note and not connecting them like here we have a quarter note and then 416th notes. Why are these not connected? Beamed together as 416th notes? This was a convention. I think it was used primarily to help us fit in the text. But you don't have to do that anymore. It's actually quite difficult to read. If you look at a more modern score, you'll see things beamed together like normal. So you don't have to separate everything. However, when you see it in a score, just know that it's probably an older score or at least an old-fashioned style score. The text goes at the bottom, underneath the notes. One syllable of text per note. If something is going to have a single note is going to have a single word is going to have multiple notes. That is called a melisma. You would show it with a tie like this. Here the word Lord is going to go low hard. It's going to have to, you're going to stretch it on the vowel sound over to the next one. And this half is going to have two notes. They're connected like so. Let me see if I can find another example of that. Here's one. Here on children. This is going to be children. All right, so chill is gonna get two notes. Let's call them melisma. When you do that, this is a piece for it looks like piano and voice. I think this is actually a little excerpt from Puccini opera. Quite complicated. Here's a choral score. I just grabbed some random examples of things that look at. This is a choral score written out as soprano, alto, tenor, bass. Common to see things written this way. You can have the occasional spot like right here where the note splits. Let's look at right here. That looks weird to me. But let's look at right here. So in this case, you would tell the section to split. That's okay. Meaning like half the section go to the low note, half section go to the high note. Here is coral highlights from a Disney movie. So Piano intro. And then we have two voices and a soloist. So three voices here. Then a piano part. I grabbed this one is to show that the rhythms connected. Sometimes we see coral scores written in two staves instead of four, where this is the soprano, alto and this is the tenor bass. Really just kind of how we're used to seeing if you've looked at counterpoint or any for voice stuff. Quires can perform off this. Although it's a little trickier, but it happens. Stanzas, I should mention stanzas like this. If you're not used to seeing this kind of notation, here's what this means. This is a repeating refrain kind of tune. So we have wade in the water, Wade in the water. Wade in the water. God's gonna trouble the water. Now we get to here and what? The reason there's four lines here. If you haven't seen this before. This means that the first time we sing this, we're going to sing. Everyone is going to sing the first line. See that host all dressed in white. And then everyone's going to sing. God's are gonna trouble the water. And then everyone's going to sing. The leader looks like Israel is real, right? God's gonna trouble the water. Then the next time I think if we keep going, we might get to a repeated thing or maybe we just start over. That isn't very clear in this. But at any rate, the second time we get to it, the second verse we're gonna sing, see that banned all dressed in red. And then God's gonna trouble the water. And then looks like the band that Moses led a little water. Third time. We're gonna sing this third verse. Look over yonder, what do I see? Etc. So that's how repeated stanzas work. In soloist material, you don't usually see that. Okay? I think that's everything. Otherwise we pretty much right at the same. You can. Usually it works best to put dynamics and crescendos, day crescendos and things above the staff, which is not normally how we do it. But if you don't put it above the staff like this, it gets in the way of the text. Usually we have a lot of our dynamic markings, often are above the staff and see if we see that anywhere else. Yeah. Like right here, be an ECMO. Ecmo. Normally we put that below the staff or in-between two staves. Nothing there. Nothing there. Yet. Here it is. That's a forte above the staff. This kind of notation where we have a notehead and then the stem going both ways. That just means the soprano and alto signals notes in unison. Here they're both going to sing a C, but the soprano line is going to hold it a little bit longer, all the way to there. The alto line is gonna go down. This is actually a unison, but we do it that way because we're showing two different rhythms. Okay, I think that's it for notation. 30. Breathing: Breathing signals got to breathe. They have to breathe sometimes even more than wind instruments because they're just letting their whole lungs come out. They don't have like a read or a mouthpiece, like slowing them down. Few things you can do. One just right with that in mind, right? That they have to breathe. Try to write in rests. They can breathe very fast. You can also, if you can't write in a spot for them to breathe, you can do this note, this breath notation thing. That's like this little comma here. What this means to a singer is it means sing this note, saying all of these notes normally on this note, sing it for as long as you can. I mean up to a quarter note, but shave a couple milliseconds off the end to get a breath and then try to get that note. It means cut this note short as much as you have to in order to sneak in a breath right there. If you don't have a good spot to put it in a breath, you can always just put it in these commas and basically say, do what you can, get a breath. Now in coral writing, it's a little trickier because you want their breaths to be in B coordinated. They can stagger their breathing. So you can have a really long line where you just say stagger breathing, just write that. In which case the different people in the choir will take breaths at different times so that you can maintain your sound. But if there's a stop, we want to make sure the end of the syllable lines up. Let's say the sound that they're seeing is like a T. So they're singing the word ends in a t. Toast. They're singing TO that. That's what they're saying. But then they're going to end on a note and take a breath. We need to. So what the conductor is going to work on is where the st of toast lands because they're going to go to next note so they can take a breath there, but we've got to figure out exactly where that St lands. You should notate that in. You should note, hey, where that st goes. I would put what I would probably do in that case is write a whole note or whatever on the word toast on TO. And then tie that over to an eighth note and put the st and then an eighth rest toast. Then into the next note that a thrust is their breath. Think about breaths and how all this comes together. Lot of that fine tuning of the ends of words and stuff. You don't have to always deal with because that's one thing that a conductor will deal with. But as much as you can get it in there, you should you should figure those out. I didn't figure out where your notes are going to land. I'm talking backwards. Okay, So long story short. Don't kill your singers. They got to breathe. Let them breathe. 31. The Soprano: Range and Sound: Let's talk about the different types of voices that we encounter in the choir. Now there are four. We have soprano, alto, tenor, bass, but there are a couple of others. There are a couple of others that you may use that don't, that aren't as popular, I guess. But are still fairly well-known. Mezzo soprano is one. It exists between an alto and soprano, has its own kind of term. There are a few others, we'll talk about those in a minute, but I want to go through the four main ones. So let's start with soprano. Pinto is the highest one. Sopranos are usually women. Sopranos or the highest. They, there are a few different kinds of sopranos though. There is, there is your kind of operatic soprano singer. We might call that, if you want a fancy term for that, we might call that a lyric soprano, or even a coloratura soprano, means they're very comfortable in the highest of ranges. There's also something called a choir soprano. At any of these have a choir soprano acquire alto, tenor. That generally means untrained, not a soloist. It's not a very common term. Actually. Child Soprano is though we do come across child sopranos, boys sopranos. These are basically a soprano, someone who sings in the range of a piano. Young kids, mostly young boys, their voice hasn't changed yet. If you look at children's choirs, like some really top children's choirs, which there are and they exist. Boys sopranos have this really angelic sound. You hear them in church choirs a lot where younger kids are brought up in the choir. I guess there are some famous ones, some famous young people's choirs, where you find boy sopranos. It's not because they exist mostly in church choirs. It's not the most common thing to be able to write for boy sopranos and those child, those really young voices. I wouldn't count on having access to that. Soprano range. Any of the voice ranges is very washy. It's not like with our other instruments. When we looked at the ranges, we said, well, we have a definite lowest note and a little bit of flexibility on the highest note. With voices, we have flexibility on both ends. We have low as a person can go. It's really just about physiology and training. So it could be a lot of different things and the same thing with the highest end. With soprano. We generally, with all of these, we generally think about two octaves is normal for a professional singer. This chart is showing a three up to C6. I think that's a little generous. This one shows about middle C up to C6. Generally on the staff. C2c is going to be good for a soprano, but know that these upper notes are screamers. They're going to have to really belt those out to get those that's really high. These low notes are gonna be pretty quiet. Yeah, pretty quiet. The real money stuff is right in that mid range where we're gonna get the best sound, the most comfort, and the best longest endurance from any of the singers. But particularly in this case the sopranos. We talked a bit about kind of sopranos singers and the invention of the diva. I'm trying to remember where I was reading up on that. I think it was in the history classes I made here. They, I did a bunch of research on this. And the kind of idea of the modern rock star comes from the opera diva. And there's like a lineage. They're really quite fascinating thing I read, I talked about it in the history classes. You can go check that out if you want. I don't want to go into the mentality of the diva singer, but in this context, spoiler alert, dealer means is not derogatory at any way. It means like basically rockstar singer. Anyway. Let's go on and talk about the altos. 32. The Alto: Range and Sound: Next we get to the altos. That's our second thing. Again, the altos are usually, usually altos are women in most in a typical choir, sopranos and altos are usually women in tenor bass are usually meant. We do have one in-between, soprano and alto, and you can see it in this chart. And it's mezzo soprano. You can think of that as like almost soprano. They're a little bit lower than soprano and a little bit higher than Alto. This chart calls Alto contralto. And which is weird, we would just call this Alto. Alto soprano. Mezzo soprano exists in-between, so you'll encounter a lot of sopranos that consider themselves actually mezzo sopranos. Altos that consider themselves actually mezzo sopranos, because it's an in-between thing, depends on where they're comfortable range is. But in the choir we generally simplify it down to four groups. If someone has a mezzo soprano and they're in a more traditional acquire, they're probably going to decide whether they're an alto or a soprano, or the director is going to decide that the range, again, roughly two octaves, giving us up to G. Let's see what this one gives us for Alto, roughly E, E3 up to F, Let's call that E5, E3 to E5. See here, you know, that's pretty low. I would always write Alto in trouble class. I wouldn't write it down and base class, but down to that e, which is going to be really quiet and really hard for them to hit. So don't count on that. Then upmost of the treble clef staff, with this E being probably their highest note, which for them is gonna be pretty screaming. Don't sit up there the whole time. I think that's all I need to say about Alto. So let's go on to tenors. 33. The Tenors: Range and Sound: Tenors. This is what I was when I was in acquire. Although it's probably really a baritone. But they put me in the tenor section. We do have one in-between, alto and tenor. It's called the countertenor. It's a very high tenor. I'm gonna talk more about countertenor because there's some fascinating history about counter tenors. I'm gonna, I'm gonna save that for after we can tell with a basis, I'm gonna circle back around and talk about countertenor. But just know that countertenor is in-between alto and tenor. It's very high tenor. Anyway. Tenor arranged, see roughly, say S3, up to probably a C5. C3 to C5. Yeah. Again, we would write tenor on the treble clef staff. We often write it transposing. Let me show you how we do that. You'll see this in coral scores. Pretty often for tenors and basses. There is a clef we use. If we look at our clefts here, this class, it's very subtly different than a treble clef. It is a treble clef with a tiny little eight underneath the little thing here. This means that we're transposing by an octave. We don't typically see this and other instruments that are transposing by an octave. This is really kind of reserved for vocal use, but it basically means we're going to write the notes on the treble clef staff, an octave too high. So what we're going to hear is their notes and octave lower. So that lets us write for tenor in the treble clef. We almost always do. We're going to use the treble clef with the eight under it. For tenors, for bases, we're going to use bass clef, but for tenors we use this. Let's look at our other chart. Says tenors up to S5. A little bit bigger range in this chart. Remember that low end is going to be tough and that high-end, it's gonna be tough. It's pretty screaming high. But you can start to see how all of the ranges overlap like a lot. So if you need to write this C, for example, this S5, you can write it for the tenors and make them just really scream it. It's gonna be loud and tough for them to get. Um, it's gonna have a very specific timber because they're gonna be straining to get it, which can be cool and that can be useful. But if you want that note without that strain, you can easily give it to the altos. Fits right in that range, or the Sopranos if it's right in there. So you can kind of use that tension created by the range of the nodes to, for effect. Let's go into the basis. 34. The Basses: Range and Sound: Alright, let's talk about the base. Again. We have one in-between, tenor and bass, and that is the baritone. Baritone works really similar to mezzo soprano. That you have a lot of baritones, singers who, when put into acquire their deemed, are you a base or are you a tenor? Because we don't typically have a baritone in acquire. Let me rephrase that. It's not that baritones are not useful in acquire. They very much are. But when we have four sections of acquire, we got to find a place to put the baritones. And depending on their sound and what the director thinks, they may put them either into the base group or into the tenor group. Some parts, some pieces do have specific baritone sections, like for sure. But a lot of time, baritone countertenor and mezzo-soprano are used more for solo material. You might have a piece for mezzo, soprano and piano. I have a piece for mezzo soprano, piano. Actually. It's very specific to that, to the range of the mezzo soprano. We use these other ones in more and solo material than in a choir context. However, you can't use them. Acquire contexts. Base down to, it looks like there may be saying s2 up to four or so. Base. We write them bass clef, nothing fancy there. Base, yeah, here's our given us. E2 up to D. Just a hair above middle C. These notes are pretty thin. These low notes and the base like right in this range. These are not necessarily quiet. These are pretty powerful. These are Baylor notes. For a good bass singer. You can really build out these low notes, so it's a little bit different than some of the other ranges. I think that's it for base, nothing really out of the ordinary. Let's move on. I do want to jump back and talk about countertenor for just a minute. 35. Countertenors: Little sidebar, little bit off topic. Maybe you consider this break a little bit of a break. I wanted to talk about countertenor is because just a couple of days ago, promotion thing for my theory book, I was asked to write a little thing that you can probably find online now about my favorite books, about music. Be it fiction or nonfiction. I wrote this thing and I think I talked about five different books that are, that have been really useful and influential on me. Both. And some of them are fixed and some of them are non-fiction. But one of the fiction books I wrote about was this book, Christ to heaven. And it's about counter tenors. Sort of. I was just reminded in writing this and how big of an influence this book was. I may have talked about this book in the history of glass. I'm not sure. But what I was in high school when I was a little kid, I was really into the Anne Rice vampire books Interview with a Vampire and the whole series. I was like a troubled little goth kid. I liked the, The Vampire bucks. I still do. I still think they're great. I'm kinda half considering rereading the whole series again. Now the n rice has recently passed away. It's finally done. I suppose. I have tons of them now that I haven't read. But anyway, I read the first few vampire books and I just thought I need to read everything and rice has ever written. I picked up this, not realizing it wasn't a vampire book. I decided this is by n rise. It must be good. It has nothing to do with vampires. This is historic fiction, historical fiction. And it's about a royal family who, I believe English, maybe I'm not sure. But royal family. And there are two brothers who are going to inherit the throne when the father dies. And the, I believe the younger of the two brothers is kind of a bad dude. He really wants to inherit the throne. The older of the two brothers is a little bit more lackluster about inheriting the throne. And he really likes to sing. Little kids. The younger brother basically arranges to have him kidnapped and put into the church and to become a castrato singer. Now this is something that actually happened. This is why I'm talking about this in terms of this class. This happened back in, this is an illegal practice now. But this happened. There was a type of singer, pretty much a countertenor, is what we would call them now. But what this singer was, what's called a castrato singer, and it would be young boys, is primarily happened in the church because they wanted boys sopranos. They wanted that really pure boys soprano sound. So they would take these young men and surgically prevent them from reaching vocal maturity. Let's put it that way. The name of the, they were called the castrato singers. So you can probably fill in the blank on what that surgery was. And it would get them to have that boy soprano sound forever. Actually, maybe they were higher than countertenor. Countertenor is, is the closest thing we have to it now though. So in the book, this is a big problem because after this procedure, you cannot have children, which means you could not inherit the throne. Anyway. This book is just beautiful. I loved this book so much and it gets no love, no attention. Anyway, the practice of the castrato Singer has been banned for a long time. However, there is a YouTube clip of one. You can find one on the last castrato singer. There's a very grainy video of them. Are audio, even of them singing so you can hear what it sounds like. It's fascinating. Anyway. You cannot assume that you will have castrato singers. You should not assume that. But you may have counter tenors are in grad school. There was a countertenor that I would come across at my school where I went to graduate school. And as beautiful, It's a beautiful sound. There you go. Read this book. If you're looking for a book of fiction, historical fiction, It's a lovely book. Sad, but lovely. 36. The Everything Else: Next we're gonna move into this weird category called everything else. Everything else category. We're going to have stuff that some of it is always in the orchestra. Some of it is very rarely in the orchestra, but all of it needs to be addressed. I guess. Some of these things I'll have a lot to say about and some of these things I won't have much to say about. The first two things. We're gonna talk about it on the piano and the harp and kind of keyboard instruments in general. And with those, it's primarily notational things that we really need to dive into. I think in a lot of these things actually it's kind of notation. But I'll try to also talk about dynamics and orchestration. Orchestration. Orchestration things. That's the kind of reason for this weird header of everything else, things you may encounter. Let's dive in with keyboard instruments. 37. Piano and Keyboard Instruments: Okay, So keyboard instruments in general, Let's start with the piano. Very common to have a piano in the orchestra. The piano is not a particularly loud instrument when it's in the orchestra. If you really want it to come forward, you need to make some space for it, right? So you need to, if you have a section of music where you've got the brass blaring and the piano doing something, you're never gonna hear the piano. However, if you have some of the strings playing quietly while there's a piano thing happening, the piano can cut through. I like to think when it comes to orchestra music, I really like to think of the piano as a precaution instrument, and especially like a malate percussion instrument, like a marimba or xylophone. Close to a marimba, actually. You can get rhythmic things with it. You can get harmonic things with it. But giving it melodies and things, because it doesn't sustained for a really long time. It's really going to give you that percussive sound on a melody. You might do something like have a melody that's played by the flute and doubled in the piano. What that would do is make, you'd hear the flute, but then you'd hear this little tink on the beginning of every note from the piano, right? And give it a little bit of a percussive entrance from what the piano adds to it. We'll talk more about that kind of stuff in the orchestration part. But when you write for piano, just a couple of things. Remember that takes two hands. You can use all five fingers. However, in each hand, don't write anything bigger than an octave between outside fingers. You can have something that stretches a long way, but in each hand, not more than an octave. Now, some pianists can get more than an octave. Some can get a ninth, 10th, 11th. But if you want it to be accessible to every pianos, keep it within an octave. If you're working with a real virtuoso, virtuoso, so player, yeah, you can write a ninth fairly easily. But if you want to keep it safe, keep it to an octave. Okay, Next thing. Let's talk about petals really quick. Petals are, there are three petals on a piano. They don't always work the same, but you can assume that a piano within an orchestra is a good piano, is a grand piano. It's got, and it's got all three petals normally. Here's, here's our petals. Now you're probably familiar with the right petal. That's the damper pedal. I don't know. Sorry. Yeah. Let's call the damper pedal. When you push it down, everything rings forever. When you let it go, a damper goes down and stops the notes from reading. If you want things to wring more, you say, put that pedal down, lactate that one just with the word pad, like that. Pedal. This means put the pedal down. This little flower thing means lift the pedal up. There's a couple of different ways you can do that. You can also do it with a line where it says pedal down and then a little tick means let the pedal up and then put it back down. And he notation program will do that. But you can see here pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal up. You can also just write like something like pedal liberally or use your best judgment on peddling. This particular piece, this is a solo piano piece of mine. I was very specific about the pedaling. You don't have to be this specific. But there was something I was trying to achieve here. Let's jump to the other, the outside petals, the leftmost petal, which is sometimes called the soft pedal. Sometimes it's called the Una Corta puddle. What this does is if you look inside a piano, you'll see that for all the notes in the mid-range, it changes a little bit on the highest and the lowest notes, but all the notes in the majority of the piano. There are three strings. For every note. The hammer hits right in the middle. The hammer goes and hits all three strings. What this pedal does is it shifts the hammers over a little bit. So instead of hitting all three strings like this, now. It's only hitting one of the strengths. That makes it a little quieter, little softer. It's almost like putting a mute on it. The variation in what it does in terms of volume and in terms of what we can do with a full orchestra. This one is not going to be very useful in an orchestra. Makes everything a little bit quieter. Changes The tamarind tone little bit. But we don't see it used very often in, In combined with orchestra solo music we do. The middle petal is the sustained Udot pedal. Now, this one, not all pianos have, a lot of them have a, have three petals. But if you have like an upright piano or a not very good grand piano, you might have something different for the sustain pedal. It might be like basic. I can't remember what it is. Sometimes the sostenuto pedal basically as a damper pedal for just the low end of the piano. If you push it down, it takes away the damper on the low notes of the piano. What a proper sostenuto pedal is, which you can assume you have in an orchestra because you have a good piano there. Is this funky mechanism that people don't use enough. And I love using, let me show you. I use it a whole bunch in this piece. This is a really long B's. Second movement. Use it. Sustain Udot pedal. You typically notated as SOS and then align for where you want to use it. What you do with this sostenuto pedal is used. Push down some notes. You can either push them down hard so you hear them or very gently. So nobody hears you push down those notes. Then you, while you're holding those notes down, you press down the sostenuto pedal. That's going to take away the damper on just those notes. Now you can let go of those notes, but keep the puddle down. These notes are held down. In the case of this music that you see here, what you're seeing is before the piece starts, the performers asked to hold down these notes and then press the sustain pedal. Then go do, do, do, do, do, do, do derivative. Only these nodes are gonna ring from this quick little riff. This high B flat is gonna be quick and in passing, A-flat is going to be in passing this G because it was there. This G is going to ring. This f isn't, but this E is gonna ring. That's why it says let that just sustain and sit on it for about three seconds and then depress this other chord. And then we're gonna do the same kind of thing. Big RIF, just those notes are gonna sustain, et cetera. Here's another one. Sos. That's the sostenuto pedal. It's really cool and it's really fun to do tricks with. I don't think people use it enough. There you go. Here it says separate SOS, That means keep the sostenuto pedal down. Prey is kind of like still, still SOS, don't like go through this whole passage. Then right here. Wait for all sound to die away. Right there. Then do it again. Sustainable pedal, super cool. Okay, so those are the three petals on the piano. Lot more about the piano. I could write a whole class just on writing for piano. Maybe someday I will. Other keyboard instruments that we come across. Toy piano, That's one that you come across fairly often. And that is exactly what it sounds like. It's, you imagine old Peanuts cartoon where Schroeder I think is playing, like sitting on the ground playing a little piano. Professional pianists loved these things. They all have one. They might not admit it, but they all have one. It's kind of like a cellist, which is another good keyboard instrument. It sounds kind of like bells. It's not super in-tune, but it gives a very specific effect. Just Google like toy piano. Usually it's maybe two octaves. Not real, real big. But they are pretty fun. Cellist is another one that's like a bunch of little bells. Harps, hook is very bright. Harpsichord. Harpsichord is a bit like guitar. In that it's kind of a picked string. Imagine a piano where instead of getting hit with a soft hammer on the inside, you had someone with a very hard Guitar Pick, going, going and picking every note. That's kind of literally what a harpsichord is. It's very, very bright. It sticks out and it has very little dynamic control. It's like the node is either play it or not played. Some dynamic control, but not much. For all keyboard instruments, look up the petals, look up the notation that you're using for it. Primarily, you're going to be stuck with the piano. Unless you're doing something strange, then you might use one of those other ones. 38. The Harp: The heart. Again, entire class should be devoted to writing for the heart. The heart is a very difficult instrument to write for. Because it has some peculiar, Peculiar things. I have done a good amount of work writing for the harp, both as a solo instrument and as an orchestra instrument. I mean, the thing I think other than the big issue which is the petals, which I'll talk about in a second. Other than that, I think the surprising things about the harp is that is that as how loud it is, heart can be quite loud. It can compete with piano. I think it can be louder than piano sometimes, especially in the low end of it. Karp's could get loud and they can get very quiet. But again, I like to think of them as a percussive instrument, less so than the piano, but still, they don't have a lot of sustain at the volume that we need for it to work with an orchestra. So they are quite like percussion, percussion instrument. Okay, so first of all, there are tons of different kinds of harms. What we're talking about here is this one, it's got a bunch of mechanisms at the top. This is, I think we typically call it as a classical harp. It's not a Caltech harp or any of the other ones. The biggest thing that sets these apart is that they can play chromatically. If you look at this image, what you're seeing is basically the red strings, I believe r is see the pitch C, So they can find C quickly. I think the black ones here are GI or F. I think it's F. If you count from C to C, you're not gonna get 12 strings, you're going to get eight. So basically everything is diatonic. That means the strings are C, D, E, F, G, a, B, C, and then another active in another active in another rock. That doesn't look very chromatic now, does it? They can't play a C sharp. These can play entirely chromatically. The big thing that makes them different is the petals. So if you were to look at the back of one of these, this is where the person plays. When you play a harp, you're sitting like this. And if I'm playing like this, these petals are right at my feet. Okay, So your, your legs are going on either side of this. We have seven petals at the bottom. A lot of people do know that harps have petals. They do. This is what's complicated about harp. Each petal has three positions. When it's in this middle notch here. It's natural. When it's up. It's flat, I believe. And when it's down, it's sharp. I could have that flattened sharp backwards. I think that's correct. What does that mean? Let's look at the first one here. So the first one is D, This is the De petal. If it's all the way up, then that means all the D's, all these strings are flat. This one pedal effects, all of the d's. So all of these are now D flat. If I take that pedal down to the natural position, that middle spot. All these are not natural. If I put it down to the bottom position, all these are now sharp. Cool. So by that logic, let's say I wanted to do a bunch of stuff in G major. All I have to do is take my f petal and put it in the sharp position. By taking it down. Then I have G, a, B, C, D, E, F sharp, G. So now I can just go like this and play G major scales all day long. Okay, cool, simple. Now here's the problem. What if I want to play something in the key of G, But I occasionally wanted F-Natural. That's outside of the key. It's cool, happens. Now I need an F natural and an F sharp. Now you've got a problem. Now is when things get funky. You could do two things. You could write the music in such a way that they have an eighth note or something where they can. Move the pedal. They can move the pedal while they're playing. They should not hit that F sharp for a second. Move the pedal down to F natural. Hit the F natural. Once it's done ringing or whatever, press the pedal down again and move it back to an F sharp. They can do that. But let's say what if you wanted somebody to trill between an F natural and F sharp G, You can't do that. You can. What you can do is go to your E and move it to the sharp position. Now you have an E sharp. And if you write a trill between E sharp and F-sharp, you have now a trill between F natural and F sharp. Crazy, right? So do note that both B and E and F can go and see can all go to the sharp position and the flat position. So you end up with a lot of b sharps and flats and things like that. The way we keep track of this, there's a few different ways we keep track of this, but you see this symbol a lot. This symbol says, kind of shows us the positions of our petals, right? So this says that the DEA is in the natural position. C is in the sharp position, B is in the natural, E is in the flat position, F is in the sharp position, G is in the sharp position, a is in the flat position. This is kind of mind-blowing because normally in a scale or a key, we wouldn't have both sharps and flats. But the way the heart has to negotiate it, strings, they're more used to seeing this than the rest of us. They have to deal with this because they can only have one note per string. Let's see if we can translate this. Let's make it all sharp. So it's called that D-sharp. And then we have a D natural G-sharp, G-sharp, and an A-flat. So that's gonna be an harmonically the same note. I don't think this is a key, I think this is just an example. But this is a good example here you have two of the same note, which they can do. They can do that on purpose. Here it is, in practice what you might see. So if we look back at our previous thing, it's DCB. This is telling us D-sharp, B sharp, D sharp, C sharp, B natural, and then everything else sharp. And then do that big glyphs. Now everything's gonna be in this key. Here's some music. Here's that symbol right there. It looks like everything natural. Except for the a. Right at the end there. They run up that riff and then they do some adjusting. They pull this petal up. Then sometimes you just get these little things here where it says, move the e natural pedal to E-flat. E natural to E-flat, E natural to E-flat, natural to G-sharp. I don't know how you would do that. That's a weird way to say that should be a natural to A-flat. Something funny there. But then there's a whole new symbol again, kind of reset. And there's another one that kind of shows you how things work. And there's our petals. All that being said. It's a difficult instrument to play. But really good players can do really amazing things. They can do very intricate things. It's a bit like guitar in a way. They, they play like this, which is like this, and this is about an octave. So same rules as piano. You can't write bigger than an octave in one hand. And you have to think if these are the, This is your biggest interval. These, these fingers can't do a ton if you're hitting an octave inside there. So we have to think about how you would do that. Best thing to do is write the music you want to write and then work with a heart player to get it into a very playable way. And you're gonna have to make some compromises. The heart, you always do. But that's the heart. 39. Organ: Okay, Let's talk about the organ. Surprisingly not uncommon to find pieces for Oregon, an orchestra. A lot of the time, if you're orchestra is performing in a church, there is an organ there. Historically, music for Oregon and orchestra has happened for a long time, especially in the form of a mass or something like that. Couple of things to keep track of with the Oregon. First of all, the Oregon can be the loudest thing in the room. Kind of always. Even if you've got the brass section going full blast, if you want the Oregon to win. In terms of volume, it can. The Oregon is massive and huge. And it can put out the most sound if you really wanted to. But it can also be very quiet and delicate. Its range is unbelievable from the lowest notes you can imagine to very high notes. That all depends on the particular organ. So if all of these pipes that you see in an Oregon, our notes, and sometimes there are many pipes for each individual note, depending on what stop you're using. So this is where the notation gets a little more difficult. The stops are all these little buttons right here. Let me see if I have a better picture. Here. You can see all these little buttons. So each stop changes the tone. It's really the same, very similar to a synthesizer. Dialing in a patch, except it's kind of analog style. These are called stops and they pull one out and that lets the air go through that section of pipes. To notate what stops you want to use. This stops have to do with the timber and a little bit the dynamics, but a lot to do with the timber. Here's some music. You see they've notated the stops. As such. I'm not an expert on this at all. So you're going to want to, if you're writing for orchestra or you're going to want to look up how you label the stops. And probably worked with an organist to experiment and make sure you get the sounds that you want. Other than the stops. Organ music is notated on two or three staves. The bottom staff, bass clef, these are probably your petals. Let's see. You can see the petals down here. There's all our petals. You have about two octaves in the petals. And those are big, loud bass notes. Petals. The petals are not like heart puddles or piano pedals were they changed the sound at all. These are actually another keyboard. That's what's there. You're actually playing notes with the petals. If you watch like a good organist play the Oregon, your mind will be blown. Like, I can't even fathom how they can keep track of all the things they keep track of. It's crazy. Watch a professional organists, like play some Bach or something and they'll be, it's weird. It's phenomenal. This is what it is, but it's a lot to keep track of. You can see here, I mean, there's four keyboards plus the petals, plus the stops. And there's more stops here to keep track of. And I've seen organs that are even bigger than this. It's crazy. So anyway, if you're gonna write for Oregon, Please work within Oregon player to help you write the piece because there's a lot to figure out. 40. The Guitar: Okay, Let's talk about guitars. What I'm about to say about guitars might surprise you actually being a guitar player myself. First, let's go through a couple of the most basic things that you probably know about the guitar. But just for consistency's sake, standard guitar has six strings, are tuned in fourths with kind of an oddity near the top. The strings are E, a, D, G, B, and E. So there's kind of a hidden third in there between the G and the B strengths. With the rest of them are tuned in force. There are some guitars that have more than six strings like that. One over there has ten strings. There's not a really standard way to tune. When you have more than six strings. Typically seven string guitars have one more note, one more string lower. In fact, most guitars that have more than six strings, they go lower rather than go higher. I think, I think it's true. The biggest difference between a guitar and like a violin or something like that is that guitars are fretted. All types of guitars are fretted. So anything that we can kind of loop into the general guitar category, even things like ukulele and banjo and things like that are Fred. Instead of being able to move like a glissando all the way up and down. We're going to get this like this did it did it, did it because of the friends. Just a different thing. You can have fruitless guitars. They do exist, but they're more rare. Now here's the tricky thing about the guitar. The thing that I'm going to say that's probably gonna be surprising to you, is that I very, very rarely write for guitar. I hate writing for guitar. Writing for guitar is super hard. There's a lot you have to think about. And even being a guitar player, writing for a guitar is really hard. Not talking about like shredding rock riffs. I'm talking about like classical guitar. I like being able to play like Bach and things like that. That style of playing, this kind of playing that you might more typically see with an orchestra. Although electric guitar is very common as well with the orchestra increasingly. So. It's very difficult to do. Writing for guitar is tricky. It really is. Because of one's particular issue. And it is this. We can play, we are one of a few instruments that can play the exact same note, same octave, multiple places. This makes things a little tricky. Now really any string instrument can do that. A violent can do it. But the thing that makes us different is that we are often asked to be a polyphonic instrument. Guitars are asked to play more than one note at a time, but we are asked to. But any node can be found multiple places with very few exceptions. For example, if you tell me to play C, I'm going to play the C. Or am I going to play it here? Same notes, same octave. If you told me to play this note, I can play it here. I can play it here, I can play it here. Like Google Play it here, put it here. Or maybe here. With a harmonic. I can play at six different places. Now, that's fine. If you just telling me to play single notes, I can just pick one and figure out where to play him. But if you're asking me to play multiple notes at same time, I have to figure out where I'm going to get each note. And keeping in mind, I can only get one note per string. So if you want me to play an E and an F-sharp, those are on the same string, so now I have to find a different spot to play my E. I'm going to play that E up here. Instead of there. That F-sharp there. Now I can do it. But sight reading very difficult and writing very difficult. If you're trying to do polyphonic stuff. All that is to say that even as guitar player, I barely very rarely write for guitar and I really don't like writing for your time. I have written a few classical guitar pieces, but they've been really kind of simple. Just as an accompaniment thing for something else. And I've never really written like a midi guitar piece because guitar super hard. If you are writing for guitar, you are not a guitar player, then what you should do is more or less right, where you're gonna write, but keep in mind that you're gonna have to go through it and note by note with a guitar player and write in fingerings so that they know how to play it. Um, and you've, you can have them figure it out for you. If you are a guitar player and you want to write for guitar, play through it while you write it. Don't worry about being able to play it up to speed. If you're going to have someone who's maybe better than you playing it. But you at least need to know that your fingers can physically get to those places. This is true on pretty much all guitars and all fretted instruments in general. So there is a trick around this. This idea of getting multiple nodes and multiple or the same notes in multiple places has led us to a different notation system for some stuff called tablature. Let's go to a new video and talking about tablature really quick. 41. Tablature: Okay, So this is what tablature looks like now, first of all, let me say something about tablature. It may be it may have been conveyed to you at some point that tablature is bad. If you are a guitar player or a string player of some sort, you may have got the impression that tablature is okay to learn from. But professional musicians read notes, not tablature. That's kind of true, but there is a really good reason for tablature. There's nothing wrong with tablature. The reason is this problem I just talked about and that it's a we can play things a lot of different places. If I was just giving these notes, I could probably sight read it. Up to here would slow me down. This E and F would slow me down because I'd have to really figure out something for that. But this tablature I could cite read completely. Probably at tempo. It's not very hard. So what tablature tells us is exactly not what notes to play, but exactly where to put our fingers and what strings to hit. This says on this strength. So each line here is a string. And it says on the B string, put your finger on the first fret. On the E string. Put your finger on the first fret on the a string. Put your finger on the third fret. On the D string, put your finger on the third fret. And these are the notes that are produced by doing that. This says the same stuff. If you have, if you are working with a stringed instrument of fretted string instrument, you can, you can use tablature. There's nothing wrong with using tablature. Always use it in combination with traditional notation, just like this is, don't use just tablature alone. Because tablature alone usually doesn't show you the rhythm. There are ways to show rhythm entablature, but none of them are in great. So combining the two together is good. Because for me someone who has a classical background would, I'd probably do when looking at this music, I'd start reading here. I wouldn't look at the tablature and just read here, I'd play that here. I'd probably let my eye drift down here. And then I'd stay down here for this whole riff. Because this riff is obviously really easy when you look at it and tablature. But it's quite difficult when you look at it in the notes. I would zigzag between them a little bit. But don't be afraid of tablature. For credit instruments, tablature is just fine. Even pro guitar players have to use tablature. Sometimes it's not cheating. It's just the nature of our instrument. Sometimes we need to know where to put our fingers down. 42. Guitar Dynamics: One more thing about guitars. Often with an orchestra, we see this kind of guitar, nylon string or classical guitar. Guitars are quiet. Guitars really are quiet. You don't think of it. We often think all guitars big loud because they have an AMP. But just guitars like this. Their pinky little things, they don't have a huge sound. You can orchestrate around that and you can find some really beautiful pieces actually that where the guitar really fits in the orchestra, even being as quiet as it is without any amplification. It's hard to write that way. But for even these kinds of guitars, it is perfectly acceptable at this point to have an amp on stage with the guitarist. People do in classical guitar like this. If they're doing a piece with the whole orchestra, they may have an amp. Certainly people playing electric guitar will have an amp or any kind of a guitar. But with an AMP comes a lot of extra stuff. You do want to notate what kind of sound you want in that AMP. Whether it's a clean distortion, reverb delay, any effects. You can write all that stuff in there. And if you do, you need to make sure be as descriptive as possible. Basically, even like don't maybe try not to say distortion, but say gritty distortion. Or I've even student scores specify a particular distortion pedal and particular settings for that pedal. Now the performer may or may not have access to that petal. But they can look it up and they can try to, they can understand what sound you want and try to do something similar. Most of the cases if they're professional, playing with a professional orchestras are gonna find a way to get that petal. Just keep that in mind. 43. Accordion: Okay, real quick. The accordion. I don't have a lot of experience writing for accordion. But the thing to remember about the accordion is that it is essentially a reed instrument, so it's not unlike an oboe in its timbre. There are reads inside it, and when you pull and push the bellows, that's the kind of error cavity in it. It's blowing air through those reads and that's how you get that sound. That means it's going to have a very bright sound. It's going to cut through pretty well. Actually. It can get pretty loud. You'd be surprised. You don't see accordions with orchestras very often unless they're doing tango music or the music of p, It's Ola or somebody like that. Side note. If you've never heard Aster pizzaiolas music. Like pause this video now and go down a rabbit hole of listening to Zola. I love pizza Ola. We were, we were this close to naming our stone Aster in, because of asteroids Zola. I lost the battle on that one. But because my wife thought people would call them assay, somebody that was okay. But he plays a very specific kind of accordion, is what pizzaiolas best known for. But the thing to remember about accordion, depending on the type, they have different ranges. You want to look up what type you are working with. If you are working with one. Because it's read, it blends really well with the other winds. Um, you can include it in the wind section and you would have a really beautiful sound. Bassoons, bassoons blended with accordions is a beautiful sound. I have heard that used in a piece before. I loved it. It was a powerful, amazing sound. So maybe keep that in mind. But I think that's all I have to say about accordions. Really good blending instruments. They're not used very often with orchestra. But it'd be great if they were, because they're really cool. And check out the music. If asked repeated Zola. 44. All the Rest: Okay, So as you probably know, there are thousands of other instruments. I can't possibly cover all of them here. But when you're ever, you're considering using an instrument, the three things you need to always think about is, what is its range? What are its dynamics like? And what is its timber like? So its range pretty easy to look up. What are its dynamics like? That means is it loud and it's high-end or is it quiet and it's high energies that loud and it's low end or quiet and slow end. What does that curve look like? What will it be able to blend with? In terms of dynamics? Is it loud enough to blend with the brass going full blast? Or is it loud enough, or is it a quiet instrument? And we want to only use it when combined with the violence doing something really delicate. The third thing is the timbre. Is it really 3D? Is it really smooth, like a flute? Is. It doesn't have a lot of characteristics like a percussion instrument. Can I change its characteristics by using a mute or doing some extended technique or something like that. If I can, what will that blend with? We're gonna talk a lot more about blending instruments and creating new timbres. In the next section of the class, once we get into the real media orchestration stuff. So standby for that. But whenever you're looking at a new instrument, think about those three things. Range, dynamics, timber. 45. What Comes Next?: Okay, that's it for instrumentation. We now know all the instruments more or less. What's coming next? Next we're going to dive into combining instruments to make powerful sounds and take full advantage of the orchestra. We're going to start by looking at lines. We're gonna say we have a line like a melody line. And it's like Mary had a little limb. I can put that in the violin. What's that going to sound like? I could put that in the oboe. What's that going to sound like? It's cool. But if I put it in the violin and the oboe, what's that going to sound like? Now, what if I put a Glaucon spiel, attacking every other note? On the off notes, added a cello. Tell me like that. That's going to create a very different feel. And in the context of an orchestra, it could be a powerful sound. It might be what we want, It might not be what we want. We're going to look at a bunch of different techniques of combining sounds to take full advantage of the orchestra. We're also going to look at a lot of work of well-known composers and what they have done in similar situations will do a good amount of score analysis in this too. So after lines, we'll get into harmonies and chords and building things like that. And eventually, we will get into crafting all of these things to work best on the synthesizer or the sampled orchestra. But actually everything that we're gonna talk about. In the next class, we're gonna be using a sampled orchestra to convey it, will actually get into that probably right away. I wish I had a full orchestra at my disposal to play every example for you, but I do. So we're going to have to use the sampled orchestra. But I know that's one thing that a lot of you really want to get into in this class, we'll be diving into that as soon as we can. So please join me in the next class, part three. I'll see you there. 46. Wrap Up!: Hey everyone, want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my e-mail list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also checkout on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me. And one of those two places are or both? And we'll see you there.