Orchestration Masterclass, Part 3: Lines and Doublings

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, welcome to orchestration part three. In this class, we're gonna focus on writing for the orchestra and in particular the kind of horizontal element. The next class we'll focus on the vertical element, but there's actually going to be a lot of vertical stuff to this, to what a mean by that is when we have a piece of music, There's a lot of it that happens horizontally and a lot of it there happens vertically. Vertically. It would be like all the instruments in the score. Horizontally would be like melodies and passage of time. So we're gonna focus on individual lines and looking at how we can bring those out within the orchestra. In particular, we're gonna look at different ways of doubling things to make them sound thicker. This is a huge part of orchestration. So we're gonna start by saying things like, if I have a flute play a line, what happens when I make it play? Make the oboe play the same line? Then we're going to expand and say what happens if I have those two things happened, but there's an octave in-between them. What if I add a trumpet to that? What if I add a trumpet and octave and a third higher? Those are all the different kind of systems that we're going to look at in this class. So without further ado, let's dive in and start writing some music for orchestra. 2. The Format of this class: Okay, let's talk about how are we going to organize this class. There's a lot to cover. So what we're gonna do is we're going to talk about lines and color in this part of the class. What that means is when we have a lot look, let's look at an example. Let's say right here. Let's go to write swell. This works. Sure. I see this little line. This little violin line. This is violin one. That's cool. What this composer decided to do was double that in violent to violent, violent two is the same. Why why would you do that? Would it sound different if it was just filing one? Is it purely a matter of volume to add the second violence or is there a timber or reason to do that? That's the kind of thing we're going to talk about. We also have note on the very end here of this first bar. So there's different kinds of doubling here. And then everybody playing the same rhythm, different notes, different shape. Going on to the next bar. All that's what we're gonna look at. Why would you double? It doesn't make any sense. We're also doubling in the bassoons. This I think is the oboe. Everybody's playing that little riff right there. Then the reads kinda take it off and go from there. What we're gonna do is look at the six different ways you can do this. There's six different ways you can double or not double. You cannot double, you can double, you can double up the octave, you can double it a harmony, etc. There's a bunch. There's roughly six different ways to do it. What I think we're gonna do is we're going to look at a Bach chorale. This is a kind of standard way to do this on an orchestration class. We're going to look at a Bach chorale. We're going to write it up for orchestra. We're gonna do it a bunch of different ways and we're gonna look at how the sounds change when we double in different ways. We're probably going to get real sick of this Bach chorale because we're going to work with it a lot. Maybe we'll switch it up and do multiple bach chorales. But the reason I'm using a Bach chorale is because I generally just loved the way they sound. I actually don't get sick of them very often. And I don't want to think too much about composition. I don't want to worry about that. I want really nice sounding short pieces for us to work on. Those are great material for that. Okay. Let's move on and talk about kind of a quick wrap-up of what we've already talked about. Then we're going to go into some new and fun technical things. 3. Previously in Orchestration!: Here's my phone cool thing. Previously an orchestration. I just loved doing that. Anyway. The previous two classes here we've talked almost exclusively about instrumentation, how the different instruments work. So now we're going to be applying some of that as we're writing. As we're doing these kind of melodic experiments with Bach, we do need to think about what we know about the instruments. Ranges, extended periods of playing, arm fatigue, anything like that, breath. Anything that we know that it's particularly difficult for any instrument we need to be mindful about. As we're doing these projects. We are going to pay attention to those things. I don't see anything here that just really sticks out as, Wow, that's tricky. Because this is like a professional piece. Well, here's something. I see a lot of notes here. Let's take a look at what's going on there. So think, I'm thinking is you've got a lot of low stuff here. So we're going to be children Toga, toga, toga, toga. But it's actually not very low. The base is down here, shallows down there, everything else is actually pretty high. That's not gonna get to chug. Chug. We have this oboe really going for a long time or no, no, no, Sorry. Goes to here and then there's a break and we go down here. Yeah, they are going for a long time. Without a breath. There's our rest, so they're gonna be sneak and breaths I'll throw out here. That's maybe something to think about. Anyway. Those are the things we're gonna be working on. In addition to our big topic, we're gonna be applying some of those things. So consider those kind of like a subtopic, but very much important for this class going forward. 4. Tools I'm using: Okay, tools we're going to be using for this class. We're gonna do something a little different. As you know, if you've taken some of my other classes, especially in my theory classes, I really like to use MuseScore because mu score is free, although that's changed a little bit lately. It's like free with an asterisk. Now. It's free. Most people can get their hands on it. And it's on multiple platforms. Works great. I still think MuseScore is a good program. However, going up to where we're gonna be going, I really think we need to upgrade to a more professional tool for this class, for our notation program, I'm going to be using Dory co, Doric row is relatively new program. It is a professional level notation program. It's significantly, yeah, I think I'd say significantly harder to use than Mu score. However, you have a lot. The reason it's harder to use is because you have a lot more flexibility. You can add things that you can't do in something like MuseScore. It's a much more professional tool. Now it's very possible that everything we do in this class you can still do in mu score. If you want to stick to mu score, that's okay. You can do that. In fact, if you're using any notation program, it's probably fine. You're more than welcome to use any notation program you want. The main reason I'm switching the MuseScore is because I want to be able to load external sample libraries, higher-quality orchestra. Now I think you can do that in MuseScore, but I'm not sure. It seemed a little clunky. And I'm just much more comfortable in darker now, use whichever notation program you're most comfortable in. You could actually even just skip notation programs and just use a dot if you want to work on the mini grid, that's fine too. You don't have to buy dora co, you don't have to switch to door co. However, I would say, if you are doing professional notation work, writing music professionally for acoustic instruments, or aspire to write professionally for acoustic instruments. You really need it at some point to upgrade to a professional tool for that new scores isn't quite yet. Although music, new scores, pretty impressive, it's lacking in some, some abilities. Doric row is a great program. There's a few other ones out there too. I'm going to be using Doric row. And for my sample library, I'm primarily going to be using the BBC Symphony Orchestra library. It's not the highest quality orchestra library, but it's pretty good. I've been pretty happy with it. There is a free version of it available. And I'll put a link to that in just a couple. Maybe the next video or the next lesson or the one after that. I'll give you a link to it. There's a free version, there's a pro version. I think there's one in the middle. I think I'm using the free version, although I may have installed the pro version at some point, I'm not really sure. It's kind of hard to tell. Actually, it's a little confusing, but I think you'd probably be good with the free version. I'm going to walk you through how to set that up in just a minute. Right now, actually, go to a new video and do that. 5. Setup (Dorico and the BBC Symphonic Orchestra): Okay, So I'm going to walk through the setup for the BBC Symphony Orchestra library in Doric row. If you're not using Doric row, this might not be terribly useful. Although it might be because I'm going to show you how these things work together. Now we're not going to spend a ton of time in this class. The technical stuff underneath sample libraries. We will get to that eventually when we work on this illustration stuff. But we're not quite there yet. However, I need to go into some of it so that you all understand what I'm doing. Indoor CO, What I do is I'm gonna go to New, New from Template and go to Orchestra. And I can kind of do any of these, but let's do classical orchestra. I'm going to make a new file that's just gonna be from their template of a classical orchestra. This is just going to give me all the instruments I need. There we go. Here's classical orchestra. Now, what I need to do is go to the Play tab up here. Now, this is kind of like an audio sequence or at this point it's not, but it is. This shows me everything that's going on. So here's all my instruments. Now, all of the instruments are going to play through this. Haley on Sonic SE, That's the default Doric row sample player. They'll sound fine. The default stuff in Doric goes not bad. It's kind of funny actually. But if we want to use a different orchestra library, like I do, what you need to do is load in your sample players here. So these three buttons here are kind of important. This one means that this device is on the power button. This one is going to pop up the interface for this particular sample player. I can click on that. And now I see, here's all my instruments. And I have some effects options and some midi routing if I need it, and levels and stuff like that. Then this one gives us some preferences for this track, which we don't really need right now, but we can rename the track and stuff like that. Instead of loading up all the instruments we need, there's an easier way because loading them and then routing everything through midi is actually like really kind of tricky. What I'm gonna do instead is I'm going to go to the Play menu and then down to playback template. And now I have these BBC Symphony Orchestra core, discover and pro. I'm going to click on pro core. What the heck? Now you might not have these, these probably don't show up to you. Hold on to that. I'll come back to that in just a second. Hit Apply and Close. And now you see they all showed up here and everything is loading. So I'm going to close this for a second. Don't Save and let me go back to this one that I had opened a second ago. This is just kind of a default piece that I think comes with Doric row. I think. Just looking at nice classical piece. It has a lot of instruments. And when I switch back to this file, it really takes a second for it to load because it's putting a lot in RAM of our computer. Here. I go to Play. You'll see here's kind of what looks like a midi sequence. Here's all my BBC, SO instruments. And I can go up to here, go back to the beginning and hit play. I don't know why that was crazy loud. I think when I was jumping around between files, they turned something. I switched to make that insanely loud. One of the finicky thing is about these midi sample libraries and having multiple files open, it's very dangerous thing to do. So that wasn't crazy loud to you. It means that either it recorded fine or I went back and overdub the same volume. Try not to have multiple files open when you're doing this. Crazy things can happen. Last thing on this. A minute ago I said hold onto this idea that you don't have those playback templates in your session. I'm going to give you those. You have to download those separately and install them. When you go there. When you go to play playback templates, you can hear click Import, import playback templates. I'm going to give you the BBC Symphony Orchestra wants to download that will save you hours of your life and setting these up. I'm gonna give you those, as well as a link to the BBC Symphony Orchestra free version. And the next thing, if you're using Doric row, you can download those and use them to set these up. 6. Caveats: Okay, One caveat regarding our setup in the way that I want you to kind of treat this. Remember that what I said in the previous classes about dynamics and about how the computer isn't really great at giving us an accurate depiction of what it's going to sound like. Let me give you an explicit example of what I mean. I can open the mixer here. Now with this mixer, I can say, let's make the bassoons the loudest thing in the orchestra. Just by doing that. That throws orchestration out the window. So what we're gonna do is we're not gonna touch this mixer. Everything we do with creating our sound of our music here and the specific colors we're going to do with the orchestration. We're not going to do with the mixer. We're not, in terms of orchestration, using the mixer would be cheating. And you can do some cool things with that. But if you're working with acoustic instruments, you don't have a mixer, they're just doing what they're doing. So we need to really understand the sound that we're asking them to produce and how it blends with everything else. No mixtures. Alright, let's move on. 7. Why Lines?: Okay, let's get started talking about lines Instructure and what we need to think about. Speaking. If you think about I'm just now remembering that I didn't dream about this microphone last night. I think I've been doing this online teaching thing too long when I'm dreaming about my dialogue mic. Weird, I think in the dream I was yeah, I was demonstrating how I really should this is actually a factual dream. I was demonstrating how I should be talking into it. It's quite close because it's a, it's not a super sensitive mic. It's a great mic for dialogue and for all vocal stuff. But I should be going straight onto it. But instead of going into the side, because I think it's important for you to be able to read my lips and not be like this. So random. So random. Okay, So that's my day so far. Let's talk about orchestration. Right? Lines. What do we mean when I'm talking about lines? So we're gonna start by focusing on lines, not necessarily individual lines, but lines that intersect each other. The reason that this is a good method is because most harmony is made up of intersecting lines. Well, I shouldn't say most. A lot of harmony is made up of intersecting lines, two lines playing alongside of each other in harmony or something like that. The other thing is that most instruments in the orchestra are monophonic instruments. They can only play one note at a time, or they can only play one note at a time without some special techniques. That's something we learned about. In the instrumentation section. Like a clarinet of fluid, any piece, any wind or brass instrument is really designed to play one note at a time. Strings can play more than one note at a time, but most of the time they're playing one note at a time. Some percussion instruments can play multiple notes at a time, like remember any of the keyboard instruments. Then obviously piano, harp. There are some instruments that are more chord instruments, but the vast majority of instruments in the orchestra are playing one note at a time. Starting from the perspective of looking at a, at a line. Or you might even be able to just say a melody, the same thing. Really. A melody is just a line that is the most prominent line. Looking at a melodic idea of melody, a line wherever you want to call it. And it kind of focusing on what we can do with that. We're not just going to orchestrate Mary Had a Little Lamb, 100 different ways. We are actually going to look at some real music. And that's why I want to use these bach chorales, because lot of the time and orchestration classes they do use Mary had a little lamb, 100 different ways. And over that, so let's use some real music. Let's move on to talk about a couple more principles. 8. Foreground, Middle Ground, Background: Okay, now one concept that it's a big concept and orchestration and one that I don't think we're going to work with a lot in this part of the class, but I want to introduce it so that it's in your head as something. That is this idea of foreground, middle ground, and background. Now if that sounds familiar to you, it might be because you've taken one of my mixing classes, audio mixing, you're making, you've done a recording, or you're making a piece of electronic music or something like that. And you go into the stage of mixing it that's balancing everything and there's more to it than that. But that world, when we're mixing a piece of music, we think about foreground, middle ground, and background. The same is true with orchestration, which is an interesting idea. When we're orchestrating, we are doing a lot of similar things as we're doing when we're mixing music. A lot of the principles are the same. We're trying to focus on that depth by creating that foreground middle ground background. We're trying to focus on space by filling out the stage or the hall. We're just doing it completely acoustically and not with faders and things, but with dynamic swells and stuff like that. Well, a lot of the principles are the same. It's really kind of, kind of fascinating. When we talk about foreground, middle ground and background. Foreground, the thing that most upfront you could think of this as. The thing we really want people to hear the most, most in their face. Maybe the melody. Most of the time, if you have a really pronounced melody, you probably want it in the foreground and there's orchestration, all things we can do to help it come forward. You might want things in the background. So background means they are less important in many ways, but not expandable. Let's call them differently important. You might say something like the base. The base is at something. In a lot of cases, the base might not be something that I need everyone to be super aware of, but I need it to be there to give the piece or the suction. A grounding layer, sort of speak. And the middle ground might be, could be anything. But a lot of the time we use the middle ground for extra rhythmic ideas, texture ideas, things that give the ambiance of the piece. Things that are not as important as the melody, but things that are not as important as the melody. But we definitely want to be heard. That would be middle ground stuff. Keep those things in mind when you're looking at orchestra music. We will work more with those in the future. But for now, because we're only going to be working with a few lines at a time. We might not be able to really dive in deep into that concept yet, but I wanted to be seated in your head. Keep one ear out for that. 9. An Example piece: a Bach Chorale: Okay, So what I was gonna do right here is pick which Bach chorale we're going to use for this whole class. But as I've been thinking about it, I think we may switch. We may not stay with the same on the whole time because we might get super sick of it. But these are really beautiful corral. So maybe we won't get super sick of it. Maybe we will just love it. We'll see, but let's pick one. I have here the Bach Raman Schneider book. This is 371 harmonized chorales, the big book of bach chorales. If you've taken some of my theory classes and maybe a couple of other places I've mentioned this book. It's just a great thing to thumb through if you like, corrals. Great way to practice sight reading. This book. As you can see, it's quite worn out. This is my second or third copy. I have this 371 corrals. I also have because I'm a super nerd 20 sided dice. So here's how we're going to pick. I'm going to two-sided 371. So I think I'm just going to roll this twice and then multiply those numbers together. And that's gonna be our Chorale. Not exactly precise, but close enough. I have a nine. Nine. Number two is oat landed on my keyboard. Let's redo that. Close enough. 89 times eight is 72. Let's look up number 72. Fairly low. Number 722. Good. Short one. I don't want to try to pronounce this. It appears to be the key of G minor, I think. Yeah, I'm seeing G minor. So let's dive in and look at the lines in this. Let me get this on the screen for you. 10. Finding the Main Lines: Okay, So here's the first piece we're gonna work with. So I've entered it into Dory co. Let me turn these funny colors off. This is the one that we picked through the dice roll number 72. This is the name of it. Google tells me. It translates as keep us lowered faith to your word or Lord, keep us in thy word and work, something like that. Whatever it doesn't matter to us really. Like I said before, G minor. It's got this nice Piketty third at the end. That means that it's a tonic is a minor chord, but at the very end we put the major chord of that anyway, just for fun. As we would expect for a minor corral like this, we have a lot of leading tone, so we have a lot of F sharps pop-up help push us up to G. Let's hear it. I've inputted just in the piano part, because we're going to bring a play with it a whole bunch. Here it is in the piano. Let's just say first observations. That foreground, middle ground background thing is pretty apparent just in this. We have kind of a, a distinct melody and the soprano voice. Most of the time in a corral, we hear the top voice as the main melody, although not always. Then we've got, so I would call that foreground. We've got baseline, some nice movement in it. But I would call that perhaps background. Some nice motions in the middle stuff. The altos and tenors, like that, giving us good middle ground material. All that will be really useful in orchestrating it. In terms of lines, we have four lines here, four lines making up one harmony. We're gonna focus in on each of these lines and we'll do a little bit something different to each one and hopefully build out an orchestration setting from there. Okay, a couple more things. In this section. 11. How not to distribute this within the orchestra: Okay, so first thing I want to show you is what not to do. There's something that whenever I look at orchestra scores by young composers, There's something I see people do a lot that really just screams. Both. I'm an experienced at this and I don't really know what I want this to sound like. I haven't really thought about what I wanted to sound like. So let's talk about how to avoid that by showing how to do it. I'm gonna take my top voice, my top-line here. I think if I select it and then go to filter voices, all up stem voices. There we go. I've selected just the top voice here. This is the highest voice. So I'm gonna put it in some of the highest instruments. Put it in the flute. Flute too. Sure. Oboes, clarinet. I went up there high. Alright, and then bassoon gets a little bit lower. So let's maybe go to the second voice. All downstairs. Let's put this in the bassoon. Alright, so let's put that in. Zoos, put it in the other bassoon two. Now, this is super high. Let's maybe take it down an octave. Let's take this down an octave. We go. Now how about horns? Let's put this in a horns also, what the heck? We need to go back up and active. Sure. That puts it right in my comfort range of further horns, which is a very narrow thing. Let's keep going. Let's get our tenor line. We're going to go Select Filter. Voices, up stem voices. It's getting a little bit lower, so horns would be good. That's pretty low. Let's pull that up. An octave. Was our first node D, as I thought. We'll go horns 34 for these. Let's also go trombones. That looks good for trombones. Then maybe trumpets. Trumpets can get pretty high. So let's take our top line. Put that there and all three trumpets. Sure. Maybe that last trumpet we'll do our alto line. And let's take them up an octave. Looks good. All right, then last we just need our lowest voice. Gonna do the same thing as before. Yes. It doesn't really want to let me copy those first rests. Let's go tuba. And then we'll go select voices all upstairs invoices and delete them. I'll select that. It's in our two bullets put in bass trombone also. Let's leave percussion alone for now. That looks like a good, thickly orchestrated thing for strings. Let's do just the obvious thing. We'll take our top line there. Let's get our alto line. Actually, let's do violin 12. And then our alto line, which is this line, the viola are tenor line. I believe that was our top line. We're gonna put it in the cello. It's a pretty good range. It's getting high. But kinda dig cello up there so we're gonna leave it. All right, and then our base. As you can see, what I'm doing is copying and pasting this whole thing around and there's nothing wrong with copying pasting in part. This looks pretty high though. Let's move this down an octave. We go. What we have here is big. We have a big huge sound. What are we really going to hear? Let's hear what the computer says and then let's kind of walk through it. Let's just, let's just give it a shot. Here we go. So that actually sounded kind of good. Very Oregon like I think it's on an organ like because it was just blasting. Earlier in this video. The thing I said was when I see things like this, I see something that looks like very immature writing. And the reason is, it's the kitchen sink. We're just kinda using everything. You don't need to use all the instruments. You don't need to use half the instruments. If you flip through an orchestra score. Most of the time, less than half of the instruments are playing at once. If you say, I really want this, I really want to use the winds here. That doesn't mean you need to use all of them. For example, let's look at this flute. Flute one and fluid two are in unison. Is it going to sound any different? If I get rid of fluid two? In this case, what's the computer gonna do? It's probably going to do a little bit less volume on the flute. But we're not really hearing that flute very much anyway. It's not very high at all. We're not really hearing that. We're hearing the trumpet. That's real. That's, that's kind of how it would be in a real-world situation. We would hear the trumpet over any of the fluids. So why do I have this? Why did I have this flu doubling, doing a unison doubling, right? They're both planning the exact same thing. That's pointless. In fact, this is pointless to, because you're not going to hear this over the trumpet. So we can get rid of that. Oboe, perhaps the same thing. It might not sound very much different. In fact, let's get rid of the oboe, the clarinets, bassoons. Let's get rid of all the winds and see if it sounds any different to us. Here it goes. Not really, maybe some really subtle things, but not really any different by getting rid of all the winds because the winds weren't orchestrated very well. I could add the winds in, in a way that you definitely would hear them, but the way I did it here was not it. So just to remember, you do not need the kitchen sink every time. We want to be a little more delicate, actually, a lot more delicate with the way we are distributing things throughout our score. How do we decide? How do we decide what instruments we want playing, what, and at what time. We need to start off by thinking about what we want it to sound like. It's just like anything. So let's go to a new video and talk about that. 12. Adjectives: How do we want it to sound?: Let's think about what we want this to sound like. Just, we'll just use this as an example. We could make it sound light and springy and light. We can make it sound heavy, which is plenty where we are now. But we can make it sound heavier. We can make it sound dark, we can make it sound bright. We could make it sound thin. You can make it sound thick. Virtually any adjective you want to throw on there. We can emulate or reinforce that adjective, I should say. In our orchestration, we're in a very thick setting here. What makes it thick? Really kind of all this brass, low, low brass and our low strings here. What if we made it sound lighter? So let's do something that's gonna be a lot lighter of a situation. I'm going to undo a whole bunch and get my winds back. Because when I think about light for orchestration, we want some wins. Let's see, Let's do. We also want thin flute one? This is pretty low for flute one, but that's okay. Let's stick with it for now. Ovo let's not have oboe do the same thing the fluid's doing. Let's have oboe do the alto line, I think is this B? D? That's right here with the horn is doing. Let's put the oboe here. Now I'm going to look at the intervals here. Just want to make sure that we know the intervals are fine. I mean, because it's written piece, I'm not worried about like counterpoint or anything like that. I'm looking at the distance to see the oboe. I want to be under the flute, but not by a lot. You see they're actually really close. They're only a third away for most of this. So that's good. That's going to make a pretty light sound. They're both really low. I might want to pop that up, but claire, nuts. Going to leave out bassoons, I'm gonna leave out. And I think all brass. Going to leave out. Maybe. I'll do something weird with the trumpet. Watch this trumpet. It's going to come in right there on those last few notes, we'll just add trumpet one, just to give it a little bit of extra little kick. That maybe there'll be too much. We'll see strings. Let's do it all. Let's do the same thing. Let's take strings out here. Well, let's take the tenor line. Put it here, but I'm going to delete these first few. And then let's put the baseline and the cello up an octave. And we'll get rid of that, and we'll get rid of the viola. Let's see what I've got here. I've got flute, oboe, playing their lines to soprano and alto lines. Trumpet, one coming in just at the end, doubling at the unison. The flute line that I've got. The soprano line coming in, the violin. I think ten or line coming in here, and then baseline coming here. I may not have the alto line anywhere. That's okay. We'll deal with that later. I have the piano muted by the way, so we're not going to hear the piano. So this should be a fairly light sounding orchestration. Let's hear it. Let's hear it one more time. I think I'm going to get rid of this cello up till that first fermata. Also, including that Fermata. Including the fermatas here. That was bugging me. Yeah, right there. I want these to enter after the fermata on the Armada. Let's hear it now. Much lighter treatment of that same material. I didn't need every instrument in order to do this. This is very kind of more of a razor blade approach. Still got a nice big sound. It's easy to forget how thick the violins are. Remember that's like 1015 people playing that. If I really wanted a lighter sound, I might leave this lighter than this, might live with strings out completely. Just play around with adding more winds throughout this. We always need to start by thinking about what kind of a sound we want. It's not just a matter of like throwing paint at the wall and seeing what sticks. Think about what you want before you write it. 13. Doubling is a word with a double meaning.: Okay, real quick, I wanted to just interject a little bit about this word doubling that we're gonna be dealing with a whole bunch. This we're doubling has two meanings and orchestration completely unrelated from each other. Super annoying. But I want to make sure that we're clear on these two meetings. We've already talked about one of them. When we were talking about instrumentation, we talked about doubling in terms of maybe the flute player is expected to double on piccolo. That means play both instruments not at the same time, but that would be an accepted doubling or unknown doubling or something like that. The way, it just means the way someone might be expected to play two instruments. That's one use of the word doubling. But what we're talking about now is not that at all unrelated. What we're talking about now is doubling the same musical material in two or more instruments. This right here is not a doubling. These are playing two different instruments to different, they are playing different musical material. Violin one and this bar in particular, violin and flute are doubling. They are playing the same material. They are doubling at the unison. We could even say, meaning that there's not a harmony that they are playing. There's not an octave that they're playing. They are playing the exact same notes. That is the kind of doubling that we're talking about now that we're gonna be working with for the most, the majority of this class, for all the rest of this class. When I say doubling, that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about someone planning to instruments. It's just weird how we have in one very specific discipline, orchestration, we have a single word that means to completely unrelated things, but it's the way it goes. If four are the rest of this class, if I need to refer to someone as playing two different instruments, I will specifically say that instead of the word doubling, going forward, doubling means same musical material or very similar musical material played by the same instruments, played by different instruments. 14. The Six Methods: Okay, So that being said, as orchestration is about combining colors, we're now going to go through the six main ways that we can combine colors. When I sit combining colors, I'm being pretty literal here. We're of course talking about sound colors, the colors of the different instruments. But if you think, if a fluid is read in an oboe is blue and I play them together, I'm gonna get purple. It's not very much unlike that. We have all these colors, all these instruments in the orchestra, each one makes a different color. And we're going to start combining them to make really beautiful color palettes are really ugly ones depending on what you want or anything in between. The six ways that we blend these colors together. There are more than this, but these are just the standard six ways that we use as a starting point. So that's what we're gonna do. Pretty much the rest of this class, we're going to work through these six ways. The first way is a single instrument playing the line. That means using the color of that instrument and how can we bring that out the most? The second way is two or more instruments. Two or more of the same instrument playing a line in unison. So that would be like both flutes playing this same line. That does change the color. It's slight, but it does affect the sound a little bit. It is a technique that, that is worth considering using in the right situations. That's way too. Number Three, two or more of the same instrument playing the line in different octaves. So that would be like if I had both flutes playing, but one flute up in octave. That is a very distinctive sounds like playing an octave versus playing a unison. Number for two or more different instruments, playing the line in unison. So that's like what we have here. Flute, oboe. Let's not what we have here, because those aren't doubling. This would be doubling if these were playing the same material. Oops. Now, that's what we have here. The same material in unison, two different instruments. Number 52 or more different instruments playing the line in different octaves. Separated these out by an octave, probably by taking the flute up an octave. Then we have this kind of Fifth Case. Number six, several instruments playing the line with the intervals between the instruments being other than only unison an octaves. In other words, adding a harmony in other instruments. So those are the six main ways that we blend color with the orchestra. So we're gonna dive into method one. Right now. Here we go. 15. Method 1: Thin and Clean: Okay, so what I want to do next is we're going to go through each of these methods. So our first method, method one is just one instrument playing a line. Another way I'm gonna do this. We're not just going to write out one line for one instrument. I'm going to do all four lines, but each line just in one instrument will still be working with multiple lines. But each line is in and of itself only in one street. Keeps them more interesting. I'm basically gonna do the same thing four times in order to make more musically interesting examples. Now you might be saying to yourself, why are we gonna start with one instrument playing? One line? That seems really rudimentary and simple. Yes, but hold on, young grasshopper. Baby steps we're going to build from here. And there's a lot we can take away just by looking at what it's going to sound like. What if we give it, give the line to just a single flute versus giving it to multiple fluids, different problems. So I'm actually going to go through and do this for all the different families because they each have their own unique things. Now there's a million things to keep track of here. And what you're really going to want to do is It's difficult to say, but I don't want you to listen to what I'm saying and just like memorize like a thousand rules for the way, if we do it this way, it's going to sound that way. If we do it this way, it's going to sound like that. Try not to memorize all these rules. What you really want to be able to do is internally kind of hear what you're writing. Think if I put this melody in the flute, what's that going to sound like? Stop, pause, think. What does it feel like with that melody in the flute? Think through it and say, well, that doesn't work, That does work. I like that. Now I say that like it's the easiest thing in the world to do and it's not, it takes a lot of practice, but that's where I want you to get me telling you all of these things that I'm kind of visualizing while I'm putting these together is really just my way of helping you get to that. These are good things I'm telling you, but what I really want you to be able to do is internalize and kind of hear this stuff. Listening to a lot of orchestral music will help as well. Let's dive into the strings. 16. Strings: Now the thing to think about with the strings is that I should probably do like the winds and brass first. But here we are. Let's do the strength. The thing about strings is that when we give a melody to one, to violence 11 instrument, we're not giving it to one instrument. We're giving it to like ten or 15 people, depending on the size of the orchestra. So we have a very unique sound from that, but let's just do it. Let's take our piano part. I'm gonna take part one and put it here. There we go. Now I'm going to go to Edit and select voices in, slip by downstream voices and get rid of them. There we go. So now we just have voice one in the first violin. I'm going to put voice to in the second violin. Now I have voice to in violent too. Well, let's finish this out. Let's put in the viola, put the tenor line. Then in the cello will put the bass part. So now we have the four voices separated out. So first thing I'm going to look for is do we have any out of range notes? Don't think we do. Looks like it sits in the ranges of these instruments quite nicely. Actually. One thing is Doric WHO actually has a feature where the notes going to turn red or green or something. I can't remember if it's out of range for that instrument. So I can quickly see that I don't believe anything is out of range as long as that feature is own, which I'm pretty sure it is. Let's take some guesses here on what's going to happen. What this is gonna sound like. This is gonna be actually pretty thick sound because this is a lot of people playing these individual lines. So let's look at just violin one actually. I'm going to solo violin one. Let's just hear violin one here. Okay? Now, I'm already annoyed at our sample libraries not being very good. Now, there's a lot we could do here if we wanted to make this thinner. As you'll find. When we do this technique of giving one line per instrument, generally the result is clean and clear. It's very simple, pure clean sound. The strings muddy that upload a bit. What we can do if we really wanted to, we could write solo here. Watch this too. This isn't gonna do anything to the midi. But if we wrote solo and we put that on all four instruments, then what we're asking is literally one person play this. We can say just one person play this line. And then we basically have made a string quartet within the orchestra. We have for solo instruments, you can do that and it's going to sound way different than if it was the whole section. It's gonna be quieter, it's gonna be thinner, it's going to be cleaner, so to speak. A really lovely sound actually. Now you have to be careful about what you do around that because it's much quieter, but it can be a really great sound. Let's hear it altogether. With all the strings in. Here we go. Nice. One thing that I think would help is if with these particular samples is if we slowed it down. This is again, one of those things where the samples are not doing it justice. This is not really what it's going to sound like. There's this definitely push that we will deal with setting up better samples later. Right now I just want to focus on denote. We have to use our imagination a little bit. Because that's just part of the nature of composing. I slowed it down a little bit. Let's see, let's see what happens. Maybe a little bit better. If I really wanted this to be thin and clean, what I would do is write solo on all four parts here. We just take it down to that string quartet. It's going to thin it out a ton and make a really clean and pristine sound. 17. Brass: Okay, let's try in the brass. So remember what we're going for here is clean and clear. I'm going to take our first line. In this case, our first-line is our highest sound. So I'm going to put it in a trumpet. And our second line. Well, let's just look at that. This is relatively low for the trial. Actually, this is good range for the trumpet. It starts off down here in the G, goes down to an F sharp, that's the lowest note. Highest node is up to this F natural. And that's just fine. That's a good range. With this range, what that means is this trumpet isn't gonna be screaming if this was an octave higher, well, if this was an octave higher, BTU high. But if this, if this app was up around a C or something like that above the ledger, in the ledger lines, then it's gonna be screaming. They have to play that really loud. If we want clean and clear, we don't want that. This is a good range to make something clean and clear. It's right in their comfort zone. They don't have to belted out. They can keep it nice and simple. We don't have to write solo on this because this is just one person. It's not an ensemble. Now if we wanted to add our second line, Let's see. What would be good to put it in. I don't want to put it in trumpet too. Um, because what I'm gonna try to do here is use just one instrument per voice. It's gonna be a little tricky, but let's put it in the horn. That's okay, That's cool. Let's see what's going to happen in the horn. The range is fine. Now you know how I feel about horns, but this range actually is pretty fine for a horn. I think it's okay. Yeah, I think that's gonna be pretty cool. Let's go to our third line. Okay, So this is like a tenor lines, I'm thinking trombone. Let's try it in our trombone. Now we're getting pretty high here for our trombone. But we're not out of range. I'm going to leave it. This is not screaming for trombone, but it's not low. But remember, trombone doesn't work the same way as trumpet as when a trombone goes to a really high notes. They don't, they actually can play a really high notes with some control. They don't have to like, wow, to get those high notes, the lower notes on the trombone. And they do some of the low notes. And if they want to get them those low pedal notes that we looked at, they want to get those, they have to get them out like that. Really put some air behind them. But the upper range of the trombone can be really sweet. I think this might work rather nice. Let's leave that there and then let's try our baseline. In the tuba. This nothing got a range. These quick things can be quite clunky. The trombone or I mean, on the tuba, kinda depends on our tempo. They're fine. They're totally fine in any tuba player will say, I can play that. They're right. It's just for my personal taste. Those kind of big archaea lines get really red. They take away from the lightness that we're trying to create. Let's leave it. I think it's okay because we're going on a fairly slow tempo. But I have a hard time getting real legato sound out of a tuba. I guess I'll put it that way. G down here is gonna be a really nice sound on a tuba. This chord looks really quite nice to me. We have this big third here, g to be an octave in-between. We have another octave of the G and then I guess D underneath that. That looks like on really nicely stacked court, I think that'll be a nice sound. Let's hear it. Here we go. What we've heard here is actually pretty correct. I think that's that we've heard of. Pretty nice sound, very light sound, yeah, but trumpet clearly dominating. How can we deal with that? The range for the trumpet is good. The trumpet, it's just usually going to cut through more than everything else. We could do a few things, we could do dynamics. Let's go to our Dynamics and let's say the trumpet. I'm gonna give them piano. If I do that, I need to give dynamics everybody. So let's say mezzo forte to everybody else. This isn't a great way to deal with this, but it can be okay. Oftentimes when you've got a chunk of music that's designed to go together, that to blend together. Conductors really like you to have the same dynamic on all of them. Then they will balance them out. Our case, what we're doing here is basically telling the conductor, hey, don't let this trumpet stick out too much. Which conductor would assume anyway? But this will make it quite clear what we want. Let's see what the computer does with this information. Let's try it again. I rather like that except for that weird horn note that jumped out at the end. What was that? It was like a weird sample thing. There's no reason for that to be here. Just a horn player wanting to be heard, I guess. Anyway. So that worked definitely toned down the trumpet, maybe a little too much. Maybe I might go up to a mezzo piano here to balance that a little bit more. But if we didn't want to do dynamics, one thing we could do is we could center, could consider a mute on this trumpet. We could do something really goofy like offstage. This is something that composers have done a bunch where you take some, usually this is done in the brass. You take some players and put them literally offstage like in the lobby of the concert hall. This is not a good use for this, but it is something you can do. Um, but mostly if I was giving this to a real orchestra, I generally like this sound. What I'd probably do is I would probably write this the same dynamic as everything else. It was like this, and I'd left the conductor balance it. But it's a nice sound. When the trumpet is balanced, that's a nice sound. Again, one instrument per part per line, I should say. Really nice, almost Baroque sounding. Well, I mean, it's back. There you go. But Finn and clean. 18. Winds: Now if you gave me this music and said, write this out and make it as thin and clean as possible. My gut would be, I'm going to go to the winds. The winds are really where it's at for thin, clean, light. Airy sound, airy, sound like a lot of air, makes lot of sense because wind instruments, let's put it into the winds, see if we can make a nice light and airy sound. I'm going to take the first part. Let's put this in our highest things. Probably going to be the flute. I'm gonna get rid of this mezzo forte, just so we see what we get right out of the bat. Our second part, or alto part. I could put it in the oboe. However, the oboes got that. It's a double reed. It's very bright sound. It's not going to be the most mellow sound in the world. However, I only have four instruments here, so I kind of have to use the oboe. Alright, let's use the oboe. I liked the oboe, I liked the sound of the oboe. But when we're trying to make a really light sound like this, It's not my favorite trombone parts. Let's go to the clarinet. I guess it's gonna be able to low but deal with that in a second. Then. Bass part we'll put in the bassoon. Let's look at what we've done here. Get rid of this. Actually, let's leave those all there. I think that kind of helps with playbacks. In other out they're also do the same dynamic. Okay, so let's look at the oboe parts. Range wise. We're pretty low. Nothing is out of range. Nothing's really like in that kind of goose squat area. That's kind of upper range of the oboe. Sound. Pretty nice. Clarinet is pretty low here. But we're not quite out of range. I don't think because we're at counts or pitch. Bassoon. I really loved the upper register or the bassoon blends really well with the oboe, but let's leave it down here for now. I'm almost tempted to take part of it, like switch some of these voices around so that we get a voice that has some higher notes in the bassoon. But let's not do that. Let's keep it simple for now. We're getting more complicated later. So all in all what I'm seeing here is quite nice. Let's try it out. See what our samples here. Think of it. I need to mute All my bras. We're only hearing wins. We got to try. It's quite nice. If I wanted to make this even lighter. One thing I might consider doing is just getting rid of the base part. Just doing that. That would make it feel just a little bit lighter. That low-end, It's kind of bugging us down just a little bit. This would lighten it up even more. I could also take this clarinet up an octave. Let me just try it out. It's a little bit of cheating, but who cares? Okay, so now I have this cleaning that up an octave. That's going to make the clarinet the highest voice. Which is interesting. Okay. I put my clarinet above the flute. Is that bad? No, they have different colors. We don't really have to worry about like voice crossing and stuff like we did back in counterpoint classes. This is a different thing. There are very good reasons to make the clarinet above the flute. Remember the low end of the fluid is going to be hard to hear. This isn't so low that it's not gonna be heard in some of these low notes are pretty low. But let's see what we got. Yeah, so light and clean foreshore, that's probably the best way to get that nice light and clean sound. 19. Percussion: I'm kind of a completion list, so I felt the need to include percussion here. This isn't really going to work, and percussion. Percussion would work to complement what we're doing here. But by itself, There's really no percussion that I want to do here. We have way too many notes to use. The timpani. Side drone is, it's weird, but bass drum, snare drums, cymbals. None of these are gonna be particularly useful for our purposes here, I would consider using malate percussion, maybe xylophone, especially xylophone, could play this in one person with formalists. Maybe difficulty. But xylophone is a nice little light and airy instrument. It's a little clunky. So that makes it feel less light. But it's, it's mostly high frequencies and it will be, it could work. Um, I can't think of any other percussion instrument that would really, even the malate percussion instrument that would really get across this sense of like thin and clean that we're looking for. Maybe like catalase or something, but those are like so bright that I wouldn't want to use them. It's worth considering for this kind of thing. I wouldn't use percussion to try to get a light and thin sound. Percussion out probably. 20. Piano/Harp: So quickly we can talk about piano and harp. We know what this is like in piano. What's, it's going to sound like an harp. Let me put the whole thing in the harp. Is it playable? Let's see. Yeah, I think it is. I think a harpist can play it as is. The harp is very kind of plucky. It's almost like a guitar in that way. Like classical guitar in that way. It's not going to be good way to get this light and airy sound. Um, I could use if I wanted to use hard, I could use it to complement the winds. In fact, let's do that. Let's, let's, let me show you how I do this. This kind of goes out of our method a little bit. So consider this like a diversion. What I might do here is we're going to look at this chord. What do we have here? G, D, G, B. Okay, So we have a G major chord. So I'm gonna go to the heart. And I'm gonna do something like this. Let's go g, g, g, and then let's go something like that. Just make a nice big cord. They're just kind of thinking through it. Let's do it here too. And there's another GK. So let's do the same chord. What I'm doing here is just going to tell that a harpist to arpeggiate some of these downbeats, I should get this harmony. That's the same harmony. Okay, cool. Let's do one more. Let's do we have a different code here? You have a CFC, so we have an F major chord. Kinda cool. Gonna be kind of a weird sound. F. Sure, I could go on, but I would basically write like this. Then let's select them and tell them to roll it. That is the symbol for our arpeggiate or just kind of like roll it big squiggly line before it. I'm going to play this and the winds. Let's see what we have here. Okay, that's kind of cool. I might even get rid of this low stuff actually, if I really want to get that light sound, just give them a couple of notes up high to arpeggiate. It'd be a nice light thing. Harp can actually compliment here. But giving this, any of these lines to the harp as its own thing to, to create this kind of light, thin and clean sound. It's not really going to work very well. But to complement, it can be quite nice. 21. Method 2: Warmth and Wavering: Okay, The 22 or more of the same instrument, doubling the line at the unison, know octaves. What we're going to get out of this is maybe different than you think. We're gonna get a little bit more warmth from having two instruments there. And that you can kind of think about that the same way that we get warmed out of the strings. So think about when the string, when there's a solo violin playing. Then if you, the difference between that and the whole section of violence, like a lot of them all playing the same thing. Is this a much, much warmer sound that will warmth comes from the imperfections of everybody. Everyone's intonation is very slightly different, like they can all be in tune but still make that warmth because everyone is just a tiny bit different than everybody else. That makes warmth. If you're a guitar player, It's kind of like a chorus pedal. The big thing we're going to get by doubling the same instruments at the unison is a little bit more warmth. Now what we're going to lose is We're gonna get a little more what I call wavering, just because I liked warmth and wavering. But wavering isn't a perfect word here. I'm trying to find the opposite of precision. It's like imprecision, I guess. Think about things like the articulations. If you want the note to go like that. To be very short and precise, you have two people doing that exact same thing. Might be a hair off, and that might make a little bit of imprecision in it. Also intonation, if you've got two flutes playing the exact same thing and they're just holding a note with no vibrato. That's a little dangerous because they can be a little bit off and that can sound kind of not good. If they're perfectly in tune by the human ear, then you will get that warmth. But if they're just a little bit out of tune, you're just going to sound out of tune. So there's a little bit more danger there. Now one thing that's worth noting is that there's another reason to double like this. The reason is security. Like if you're working with a not very good group or maybe a high-school group, junior high, something like that. Then you might double for security. For example, we might say, let's put the line in two fluids when I really only want it in one flute, maybe just using flu as an example. But maybe we haven't got to put it in both fluids just because it's kind of a tricky line and it might not get played very well by one or the other. You get kind of added security by adding it. Giving it a two people versus one. Basically, it's not a great orchestration reason to think like that. But if your concern is that the line isn't going to get played, then giving it to people in amateur group can help. It can help make sure it gets played. The big thing that we're gonna get out of this method is warmth. But at the sacrifice of less precision. 22. Winds: Okay, let's see the winds first this time. This is going to be an effect that is not very good for the computer to have figured out. Let me say that again in a less weird way. The sample playback isn't going to accurately show this. And I'll explain why in a second. Okay, So I'm gonna give our top line to adjust to the two fluids. Unison, flute one flew to perfect unison. Now what are we going to hear here? In the real-world? What I think we will hear is a little bit more warmth. Because the two of them, this slight imperfections that can be good here on maybe we're not really playing these fermatas, but these fermatas with those long sustained things in perfect unison can be a little bit dangerous because they can drift out of tune a little bit. But in a professional group, really. However, what I think we're actually going to hear when I hit play with just these two lines, is essentially one, flute louder. I think because the very slight imperfections that we expect a human to do, the computer is not gonna do. It's gonna be exactly the same. Let's actually listen to one soloed and then both together and see if we can hear any difference. Now there is a way to bring out those imperfections. We could D2, N1, just buy a couple of cents. We could do something like that, but it's not. Let's save that for synthesis ration stuff. Mute the piano. And I'm gonna mute flute, T2 case. We're only going to hear flute one here. All right, So let's hear it. Now. Let's do that with both fluids. Here we go. Yeah, it sounds the same except a hair louder. But listen to this F sharp right here. Just focus your ear on that F-sharp when we get to it one more time with both fluids. Vibrato, vibrato on that F sharp. That's what a normal flute player would do. Vibrato is something that really contributes to that warmth because we're not really saying what speed do you do that by Bravo at different players are gonna do vibrato at different speeds slightly. That's going to thicken the sound and create that kind of warmth. In this case, the computer playback isn't accurate to what we would hear in the real world. It would sound a little bit warmer if we were doing it. Same is true, going to be true on all of these. I could double put the second part, the alto part of this corral in the clarinets to depart. Third, the oboe 22 apart, and fourth part in the bassoon to two apart. And again, we're just going to hear it as though it was 12 apart but louder because that's the way the computer works. So let's think about this a little more carefully. If we put the outer part in the clarinets, let me do it so that we can really see what we're doing here. Now we have the clarinet playing part two with 22 apart. So let's ignore the fluids for a minute and just look at the clarinets. In the clarinets, kind of the same thing we're going to hear. It's going to be a little bit warmer because we're doubled. Some of these articulations might not perfectly land, but it's not like they're complicated articulation, so, uh, probably be okay. You're not gonna hear like attacks of notes all over the place. If we had a more complicated rhythmic passage, that would make me a little more nervous. But because this is rhythmically pretty simple, the articulations are probably be just fine. Again, vibrato on these held notes is going to add a little bit of warmth. What happens with this combined with the fluids? It's gonna be just a little bit warmer. Sound. It will be a hair louder, but not really. The increase in volume from doing this is slight. Having two instruments doubled the same thing. It does not make it twice as loud at all. Because if we said something like this, we said, Okay, I want you to play this mezzo piano. I want you to play this mezzo piano. We've got two people playing mezzo piano. They have ears and they're probably going to make sure their resultant sound is about mezzo piano. They might even play a hair quieter just to make sure that the two sounds together. A mezzo piano. They're going to balance themselves. There's also like a physiological thing with sound, where like doubling the sound actually like if you have two speakers and then you add two more speakers, and now you have four speakers. They're not just automatically twice as loud. There's a sound physics thing happening. Anyway. This will make it louder, slightly, but not twice as long. Depending means it's not really a volume thing here. Less clarity, more warmth. 23. Brass: Okay, let's go to the breath. Let's take this first line. Here. I'm going to mute my flutes, clarinets. Okay, Let's say, what if we gave that first-line to the horns? Oops, I need the whole line. Let's give it to the horns. Firstborn. Let's give it to the second one. Now, what's our result here are gonna be same kind of deal. It's gonna be a little warmth. Articulations are a little warmer. Articulations are gonna be less precise. The horn doesn't have a ton of vibrato, so it's not going to add an over amount of vibrato. Let's look through the rest of them. I mean, I could do What's going to happen if I do this. I have for all four horns playing the same line. This now is going to get into the realm of adding significant volume for people is different than one person. That will add quite a bit of volume. It will also add warmth, but we're kind of circling back on warmth here. Because this is a little confusing. But let's think about it like this. If you have one instrument and it has to play the rhythm. Very tight and precise. If you ask one player to play that, it'll sound good. Let's assume professional players. It'll sound great. They'll play it just like that. If you ask two people to play that on any instrument, It's going to sound potentially less good. Because it's very tricky for that, for two people to line that up perfectly. So it's going to sound less good. So then you're, you're gonna get a warmer sound out of the longer notes. If you have three people, it's going to sound even less good. It's gonna be like by good, I mean precise. It's going to be even less precise. But you're going to have a warm sound out of those long bones. If you had four people, it's going to sound even less precise, is gonna be like dark, dark, dark, right? Probably. But now you've added four people and this sound you're going to get is going to be less precise. But it is going to be this is we're ready to say it, but it's gonna be so and precise that it's going to be kind of good Again, like the sound won't be a precise sound, but it'll be an accurate sound. It's like it's like if I blur the lines on something, I make something new, almost. It can be a good sound. To do that. It's like two things. Can sound sloppy, but things like welcomed kind of sloppiness, it's strange. But this will be a fairly warm sound. It'll be loud and have that different kind of precision to it I was just talking about. Same is true on all instruments. Trumpets here. The same. Trombone, tuba, tuba. Let's assume we had two tubas. I wouldn't really double them in at the unison in any logical case, mostly because they are hard to get those precise rhythms. So if you're gonna give them any precise rhythms, really want them to be by themselves so that it doesn't get even more clunky than tuba can already be. Sometimes. I'm sure I'm gonna get tons of hate from tuba players, the comments on this, but I don't even tell you what the horn players do to me. 24. Strings: Let's talk about the strings. The strings are kind of a tricky one because if we were to say solo, or if we were to try to double something at the unison, we already are doubling it at the unison with strings, because strings means 1020 people. If I give it to violent one, let me take my violin or my first voice here. If I give it to violin like this, there's already 215 people playing it and that adds that warmth to it. It doesn't have to be that way. I could make it a solo. Solo would mean that warmth would go away, but you'd get more intimacy from it. See if you can imagine that for a second. Imagine solo violin playing this line are playing, Mary Had a Little Lamb or wherever you can do. Just imagine that. Now imagine the sound of a whole section of violence section playing that music. They're very different. That's the kind of warmth that we're talking about here. They're all just playing in unison. Probably from what you imagine. But I could do this. I could add violent one and violent to playing the same thing. Now I've got a whole ton of people playing unison line. That's kind of interesting, but it's not going to add a lot more warmth. There's not a great reason to do this other than volume, this will add some volume. If nothing else, then it's a symbol to the conductor. The conductor might see that and say, you want this line to really come out and they will try to boost it and add add volume to it. Let It Be louder than everything else. I guess I should say. That's going to be significantly loud. It's already going to be warm because it's being played by a section. So it's not really that the articulations already going to be less specific because it's been played by a section. So you're not gaining a whole lot by doing this. There was I'll tell you this, there was a reason that we would do this. And sometimes you can see things written this way in older scores. 19th century I think was the heyday of this. It wasn't for volume and it wasn't for timber, it wasn't for clarity was for a totally different reason that we don't have anymore. The reason was and Tiffany Hall, which is a fancy way to say panning. In other words, back in the 19th century and a little before then I think we used to set up the orchestra a little bit different, where violin one would be on one side and violent two would be on the other side. If we could do this kind of a thing where they were doubled, we would basically get the sound of the first violins or all of the violence in stereo. If you had just the first violence, it would be on the left side, just second would be on the right side or vice versa. I don't know. Composers will play with that a lot. We don't set up the strings like that anymore. It's kind of violent. One is on, if you're looking at the stage on the left, then it bleeds into violent two. Then the violas and shallows. Most of the time sometimes we still do it that way, but not very often. You do see this a lot in older scores for that reason. But in modern scores it's really, I think just a volume thing. I think it's just a way to add volume. 25. Combined Ensemble: Let's put this into practice a little bit. I'm going to keep the piano muted and I'm going to leave violent one as having just this line, which to me is kind of doubled at the unison because it's the section. But I'm going to try to do some actual sticker orchestration here. Let's take our second line, which is this one doubling the clarinets. I rather liked that. So let's think about that. Let's get rid of all these horns. Good riddance. What we have here, ignoring the piano, we have the violins playing this top voice. That's going to be rather pronounced and very warm. Then we're going to have part two, the second voice played by the clarinets. And I'm going to put two clarinets in unison, meaning it's going to have a little more warmth to it. I think that's going to blend very well with the violence for creating a warm sound. That's what I'm gonna try to do here. Warm sound. Now let's see what else we can do. What should we do with the third part? I could use bassoons, oboes, and fluids. I'm gonna try to create a warmest sound I can. I'm going to leave off fluid and oboe, just because they're a little bit high, they're very bright. Bassoons also because they're double reeds. Let me take my third voice. Kat attempted to go horns. Yeah, let's go horns. Okay, so I'm gonna go horns, but I'm going to get just my third voice. There's the third voice and the horns. And again, we will double unison doubling to get down a little bit warm. This is nice and low. They do have some of these quick little things here. Quick little rhythmic things. Let's leave them. It will be okay. What can we do with our bass part? Our lowest voiced thing? To get it to be nice and warm. Tuba by itself can be warm. Oops. Let's try this. This is a little bit breaking our pattern, but I'm thinking is, let's do tuba, doubled at the unison with bass trombone. About that. I think this might create a nice warmth, nice warm sound. It's almost a doubling of the same instrument. They're in the same range. But I think I like it. Okay, cool. I've used a couple of these doublings to make maximum warmth. I think for this little Bach chorale, I'm going to unmute everything except the piano. Let's hear it. Let's see what we did. Now, remember, we're not really hearing these doublings because it's a computer, but kinda OK, Computer didn't balance as very well. It gave us a lot of tuba. Let's get rid of the tuba and just go with bass trombone. I know I'm supposed to be doubling stuff, but I think it was a sound better. Let's also get some dynamics here. So let's go with a clarinets mezzo-forte, just so that we're sure that it's playing everything at the same volume. It was definitely not mezzo piano and the strings I haven't marked kind of liked where the strings were, but now everything's more like that. Mezzo forte. So let's hear it now. Pretty good. I'm not sure why my play head froze here, but rather nice. Sound, pretty warm. One of these horn notes stuck out and it made me think muted trumpets, like trumpet 12 in unison with a straight mute, would actually be a really nice sound to blend into what we've got going here. I think that would work really well. But cool. I don't know if it's useful, but I'll give you this file to play around with at the end of this section as well. 26. Piano/Harp/Percussion: Okay, Just quickly, percussion, harp, piano. This template included bass, guitar, which is not unheard of. That's the thing that can happen. But I'm not going to use it. Doublings here. We can have two pianos and an orchestra. It's not unheard of. You can't have two harps. In a big orchestra. You sometimes will find two harps. Lot of the time. That's a volume effect or a way to get around some of the tricky tunings of the heart. But you're not gonna get a warmer sound by doubling them. It's mostly going to be for volume on all of these precaution. Doubling percussion with the same percussion instrument, like if I had a snare part, having to snare parts, that I would consider to be extremely rare and pretty useless. I can't think of a single orchestra piece I've encountered where two percussionists were asked to do the same thing, the same instruments. I really can't think of anywhere that that's ever happened. So you would just typically really not do that? Yeah. I think that's all I had to say about harp and piano and percussion in this particular technique. 27. Method 3: Power, and Organ-like: Onto the third thing, the third technique. This is doubling at an octave. Same instruments doubling at an octave, like two trumpets at an octave rather than a new user. This has different characteristics and a different sound to it. This creates generally a more powerful sound. It kind of cuts through a lot better than doubling it a unison. And the intonation problems that can happen at doubling at a unison generally aren't as big of a deal. They can be if there's really bad, but more or less, they're going to be a lot better. Doubling in an octave. We're not so sensitive to very slight inclination issues. It also gives it a much more kind of Oregon like sound. If you do this a lot, you can get this feeling of like an Oregon, like a big church organ. I don't know if organs are always in octaves. I think it's just the overtone series that we get from those big church organs. A lot of them feel like they're in octaves. So when we double things at the octave, you can get that kind of Oregon sound. But that's not bad. It's actually pretty cool. With this. We think about, with this technique, we think about a little more power in the line if we really wanted to cut through, this is a good technique to do. We also think about Oregon like one last thing I'll point out before we dive into it is that we find this usually to be the most effective and you don't have to do it this way, but it tends to be the most effective when we double out. That means if you've got like two lines, then you want the lower line. You want to add an octave down. And the upper line you would add an octave up. So they're doubling out like that to make them thicker. If you take an upper line and double the octave by adding a lower one, it's just not as powerful as doubling them outwards. Now you have four lines. You probably wouldn't double all four at the octave. Would just double the top one. Because you wanted to really cut through a little bit more. All four lines would be like kind of a mess. But the top one, maybe even the bottom one. If you really want to bring out that kind of Oregon sound, maybe I've emphasis to the interesting baseline are an important baseline. You could do that too, or an inner voice. But you wouldn't do it with all of them. Typically, you'd only do this with one, maybe two lines. In peace. Let's try it. Let's go to the winds first. 28. Winds: Okay, let's try this in our clarinet. I have our first voice here. It looks pretty good. Let's put our first voice again in the other clarinet. Get rid of this text if you need it. Okay, So this is our top voice. We're thinking about doubling outward. Then that means I want to take this one and move it up an octave. Let's do it. That looks right now that it makes this part right here screaming, still within range. For the clarinet. It's okay. But that's 40 loud or not loud? It's pretty high. But I think it's okay. Clarinet is one of these thing, is one of the instruments that can fairly well-controlled. It's upper range. I think this will be a unique sound. Good sound. Now what is the playback gonna do? Because again, just like the unison thing, I think it's going to play it back with a little bit of the Oregon like quality to it. I think it'll cut through a little bit more. We're not going to really hear the full effects of the octave. Like we would if it was played by humans. Because we want these to be just a hair out of tune to really get that sound. But let's hear it. Let me mute the piano. That's here. What the computer does with this. You can't actually really hear that Oregon like quality. If you know, if you listened to a lot of organ music, you know, the upper pipes of an Oregon, they really sound like that. That's very organ like I think if we did some other stuff like let's do this. Let me just, I'm gonna take the top two voices and put them in the violin. The violence will be split. And the next two voices and put them in the viola. I don't know, whatever. Sure. Okay. So now we're gonna hear strengths. That's all I wanted to do. I don't want to stress about how weird this is. What I'm doing in strings. We'll deal with the strings in a minute. I just want to have strings playing so that we can hear how the clarinets cut through because they're in that octave. Let's hear this. We really probably primarily heard that top voice. But I think that bottom, the second clarinet in the lower voice, I think that was here and that was audible. It was getting blended in with the strings quite a bit because it was in the same range. But it was really supporting the clarinet and made it stick out a little bit more. And it gave us that Oregon like sound. This works on pretty much all instruments. The winds. Yeah, nothing sticks out as something that wouldn't work. You just have to watch out for range because you're moving things up by an octave, usually in the winds. If you really want a melody to cut through when the winds, this is a good technique to do it. 29. Brass: Okay, Let's do the same thing in the brass. Where do we want to do this? Horns, trumpets, trombone, bass, trombone, tuba. Let's remember that, that kind of doubling outward thing with the octave. So if we do it with, well, we only have went to it, so we can't really do that. So it'd be trombones. We could do an inner voice, but down low and go down. That's going to make it a little bit muddy. I'm going to keep the strings in here so that we still hear that. Let's try it with, let's try it with trumpets. Let me standby. Now this is going to get a screaming. Let's see what we can do here. We might need to do a little bit of moving things around. Let's get rid of this. Let's look at our trumpet one part. We are already at the top of our range right here. That is super high. D, Wow, that's just like a streamer. And then all the way up to this F, Look, I click on him and I hear nothing. That means that our sample doesn't even have a sample of that high. Yeah, we tap out at D. That's really out of range. Even if we had a player that could get those notes, which is possible. Theoretically, they're going to have to screen them. They're gonna have to play them so loud that it's not going to work. What can we do? Well, we can cheat our way through this a little bit. And do you know that term cheating our way? That's like an actor. If an actor is onstage talking to another actor and they're like face-to-face talking and the audiences over here, and they're talking. They have this term that says like, I want you to cheat that a little bit, meaning that I'm not going to directly face this actor because then my shoulders to the audience. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to actually talk to this actor that's right here by talking over here. That way. Not directly talking to that actor, but the audience doesn't really realize that because I'm just kind of sneaking my way out towards the audience a little bit. It's called cheating. I like to use that term a lot. In terms of orchestration. We can do something a little sneaky. Here. What I might do, There's two things I could do. One is I could double down. So in other words, take this, Let's try that first. I can take this one, put it in my first trumpet. Then I can take this one and move it down. This isn't exactly cheating. Let's see. We're in range. We're in range, but I don't love it because it's just so flabby down there. The low end of the trumpet isn't my favorite thing. I'm gonna do something different. We're going to go back to where we were with this up high. I'm going to let this be up real high, but I'm going to sneak my way out right here. We're gonna go down to that G end of a phrase. I'm going to take this be all the way. Let's try to hear this much of it. I'm going to take down an octave. Then if I still want to be doubled, I'm going to go to here and take this down an octave. Then let's take these two notes down also, trying to find a smooth way to get back there. To get back up that octave. Still going to have an octave apart. But I'm gonna have the line leap. Now, my line isn't too jerky. There's a big leap right there. And then we go back up. There was a big leap there. Then we're getting some rural high notes, but think this might work. So I'm starting an ending. With the octave above and in the in-between the middle part I'm on an octave under. That's just kinda how I have to do it to make this sit into range without being ridiculous. Let's try it and we'll hear the strings also. Not bad. I think what I would do if this was really my piece, I probably wouldn't do this. I would realize that because this is going to put me in a tight spot in a range. I just wouldn't double in the trumpets and this line. Unless I could live with doubling down, adding an octave underneath. You know, what would work? Let me show you. I'm going to go off script here. Because I am always so scripted as you know. Can you take us back up an octave to where it originally was? Going to take this back up in octave. Yes. Okay, So now we're back to the original. Here's what I might do. Let's take this one, our top one, down an octave. We're gonna double under. I'm going to take this one now down an octave. We're doubling under. This may or may not work because remember, we prefer to double outwards like that. And this is a fairly, this is the first voice, is the top voice. So it's not ideal, but it could still work. The bigger thing I don't like about this though, is that it puts trumpet to, in this really low range, which is for the trumpet, not a great supported range. It's really kind of flabby. To me. There's not a lot of stability in this really low range down in these really low notes. To counteract that, I'm going to double it on the unison. We have three trumpets no, to supporting that low part. That's going to give it a little bit more stability and a little bit more thickness because of that intuition thing that we talked about in the last technique. And then in the first trumpet, we're gonna be an octave higher. I think that'll get me the sound that I want. Let's give it a shot. Okay, interesting a little. I think with real human players, this would be a sound that I would like. But I don't love the way the computer is playing out right now is a little too little too flabby, like I said. But I think if we really heard the width that comes with this doubling, we would have something interesting, a hard technique to do in the brass just because of the ranges. 30. Strings: Okay, let's go to the strings. Now what we've done a lot in the strings so far is just talk about how this is. The strings are already doubled because there's a lot of them playing at once. And so a lot of the techniques we've looked at so far, most of the techniques and the other two techniques we've looked at so far, not particularly effective or kind of already built into the Strings. This one, not so much though. This one you can have some good fun with in the strings. So I'm gonna take my first-line again. Put it in violent one. Let's put it also in violent too. So let's double it the octave. So let's take violin one and go up. And I can tell that the range is gonna be just fine here. Yeah, this gets pretty high for the violin, definitely not out of its range. This is going to cut through quite a bit more. Let's, Let's hear this by itself and then we'll add in the rest of the strings. So here's what it is doubled with. The violence. Still got a trumpet go in there. Yeah. I was like, wow, there's a lot of trumpet he Nicea in doubling by octaves and others trumpet playing. Okay, one more time. Okay, pretty cool. Let's add in the rest of our parts and let's just really try to fill this out with the violins doubled at the octave. So let's go to that. Looks better. Let's hear it now just to remind you what we have. We have our first part in the violin, one up an octave. We have our second part in violent to at pitch. So that's making a sorry, we have our first part also in violent to at pitch. That's making violin 12, both playing the first part, but in octaves that should make that first part really cut through the rest of the strings. The viola part is playing our alto part. The cello is planning our tenor part, and the base is planning our bass part. Well, let's hear it. Next. It kind of sounded like there was this organ like quality on the top of it. We also lost some volume on the inner voices. Our base really cut through for some reason. I don't know why our sample library it was doing that. We had so much power between the violence and the base. The viola and cello were a little bit buried. We'd want to think about that. Another way you could do the same thing is to actually shift everything up. So put the bass part in the cello. Put the cello part and the viola, put the viola part in violin two, and then split violent one. You can easily tell half a section to play it an octave higher and the other half of the section play it an octave lower. So you could split violin, one that you're getting the octave in there, just in violent one. You would do that by writing DVC or just DIV, that means split. And then you can write two lines. Um, you'll have to split those out into two parts or two staves when you do parts, that's a separate issue. If you're dealing with humans. But if you're just dealing with the electronic thing, that the word is DVC, it means split. Or if you want to be fancy, you can do div with an accent on it too. That means split into two. You can also do div off for where you say divide into 44 groups within the violent one. I've done a piece before where I did div O3. And you can totally do that, but it creates a bunch of confusion. Because remember how stands and desks are setup with violin, there's two people to withstand. If you're doing odd numbers splits, they can easily say, Okay, you guys do, Do the top, we'll do the bottom, you do the top, we'll do the bottom. If you do in threes, you have to do you guys and half of my stand do the top half of me and it's gets complicated. Try to use even numbers for DVC. Okay, let's move on. 31. Combined Ensemble: Okay, let's do a combined ensemble thing. How about, let's leave our strings may be doubled up there. Then let's take our bass parts. Let's take it out of the base, the string bass. Let's see if we can double it. Or trombone and bass trombone. Remember that? Trombone and bass trombone are very, very similar. This is kind of like doubling it the same instrument. What I need to do. I took this down an octave already. Okay, So remember that in the bass part that I just erased the previous video, I dropped it down an octave. We're already down an octave. So I'm going to take our higher part, move it up an octave. Here we go. So now we've got this lower part, doubled at an octave in the trombones. That's cool. And our upper part. So let's put our field, or are alto voice. Let's put it in a clarinet. Actually. I think that might be kinda nice. Because this is, I've got, I've got the strings doubling the soprano voice. I've got the trombone doubling the bass voice. Both of those in octaves. I am going to double the clarinet, the alto voice, but it's going to double it at a unison. Just to give it a little bit more power. But not, not the cut through because we want it to be as kind of a secondary line. That was the alto voice. I haven't done anything with the tenor voice yet. Good. Let's put the tenor voice in the forums, maybe. Trumpet, trombone. Let's put it in the horns. Again, double at a unison because the horns probably need it. Get that back. I just want to get rid of these. Let's review what we have One more time. The soprano voice from our chorale is in the violence 12 doubled at the octave. The piano is muted. I should point out that the violence, or double an octave up. We have the original octave plus an octave higher. Our base part is in the trombone, with the bass trombone doubling an octave down. So that gives us that outward doubling of the octave that we like. Our horn is playing our tenor part, doubled at the unison, and our clarinet is playing. Our alto part again doubled at the unison. All right, let's hear it. What did we hear? We heard a lot of base. Again, I don't know why dora CO is so bass heavy right now, but definitely an unnatural amount of trombone in that. But what was accurate to what we would hear in real life is that we primarily heard the base and the bass voice and the soprano voice. We heard trombones and violence. That was the main thing that we heard because they were doubled in octaves. They're gonna cut through. Everything else was supporting. We did here these quite well. I don't know that the doubling at the unison is doing a whole lot for us. Probably a little bit just in terms of volume. I do think in real life though, that the thickness that would be added to this would be a really nice warm sound to this, would help us to have an extra sound. But this is a pretty decent way to orchestrate this. I think. 32. Piano/Harp/Percussion: I do want to point out one thing about the piano harp and percussion. With this technique. Whenever you have an individual line in the piano harp or percussion, consider doubling it in an octave. In other words, if you're gonna give the piano the melody, instead of the piano playing individual notes for that melody. Consider giving them the melody in octaves. I think. Anyone who's a guitar player knows this, that playing a single melody is cool. But if you wanted to have some power, play it in octaves. So that is true of the harp and the piano. Any melodic percussion, xylophone, marimba, even chimes. Whenever you want those things to cut through and really be heard which those instruments, especially piano, is relatively quiet within the context of the orchestra. If you really want the timbre of the piano to cut through on an individual kind of melodic idea. Always consider doubling in octaves. You don't have to. But if you really wanted to cut through, it's going to usually work for you. So always think about that. That's all I really wanted to say. I think about this technique and piano, harp and percussion. I'll give you this file to play around with if that's useful to you. And then we'll move onto method for. 33. Method 4: New colors: Okay, method for we're going to break pattern a little bit here. We're going to talk about this one a little bit differently because we're starting to talk about combining instrument families. Here. We're really talking about making new colors. So it doesn't make sense to do this with just the winds and brass and the strings, because this is all about combining different things and making new colors. If I had to summarize, what we're getting out of this out of this method. It's new color, new, new sound, new timber. What we're talking about here is doing something like this. Let's take our first-line. Let's go to Select, adjust our top voice. Let's say we want this in the oboe and let's double it at the unison in the trumpet. Okay? So we have unison, but two different instruments to different instrument families. Even. So, we have to think about how these are going to blend. Are they going to blend? This isn't exactly like not everything blends. I'm trying to make a cooking analogy here and say like, you can't just throw in every spice and hope that it's going to taste good. But I don't know enough about cooking to make that analogy work. So hopefully you understand here, not everything works. Some instruments blend with other instruments and some don't. Quite frankly. Now, when I say they don't, that is a matter of opinion and it is controversial. You could make anything blend with anything. Yes, you could. And in the right situation, you can make any combination of instruments work. But to me it really comes down to 21 thing. One thing that I'll tell us, if the instruments are going to blend well together. What I wanna do in this section is look at that one thing and look at doing that one thing like correctly and using that one thing incorrectly, because both of them have some applications. That one thing is the envelope of the sound. The envelope of the instrument might be a better way to say that. I think let's just dive right into this. So let's go to a new video and let's talk about what I mean by the envelope and how to figure it out for each instrument. 34. Consider the Envelope (ADSR): I want to show you this graphic here. Now. If you've done any work in electronic music, in synthesis, then this is probably really familiar to you. And if you have an orchestration textbook and you look this up, you try to find this graphic in your traditional orchestration textbook. You're probably not going to find it. This is just something that I've really latched onto because of my background in both electronic and orchestral and instrumental music. I think it's one of the most widely overlooked things about Orchestration. What we see here is a graph called an ADSR envelope. And this is used every day in synthesis when we're designing a sound. When we're making a little cool little synthetic synthesizer sound. This is what we think about and this is what we work with. Let me explain that and then I'll jump back and explain how this relates to what we're doing. So basically, you can think about this as the volume of the sound. This can be applied to a whole bunch of different ways, but let's think about it in terms of volume. We have the initial attack, that's the a of ADSR attack. That means how fast does it take the sound to go from nothing to get up to its full volume? Example. If I do, if I do this, there is an arch there. There's a line that goes from 0 to full volume over, I don't know, 2.5th or so. It ramps up. That's our initial attack. Now if we think about an instrument like trumpet, trumpet can go by, in which case there's a line. I don't know why I went sharp there, whatever. But it can also go down. In which case, there is no line or there's an extremely fast line that makes this line virtually straight up. It is on at full blast. You don't need to understand fully these ADSR envelope. So I'm just showing you the four elements of the set. Then in most sounds, there's an initial decay, that's the D decay. That means the sound goes up to its full volume, backs off a little bit. And then that's where we sit. This is like the striking of the sound. If we think about a guitar, guitar is a good example, we strum a chord on a guitar. This is actually the loudest point from when our pick is going down. That's our pick on the strings. The actual resonating sound of the guitar. Once we're done strumming it, it comes down a little bit and then it rings. This is the ring. Then at some point we stop the sound. Now on a guitar, we can just let it fade away. In which case it's going to have this slow release. It's going to fade away and stop. Release is the, are the or we can stop it with our hand and then it's going to have a release very fast. So this line is going to be basically straight down. Attack, decay, sustain, release. All of these lines are basically a function of volume over time. With the exception of sustained. Sustain is a function of is kind of a static sustain, this kind of a static amount. This is our sustained volume. It's not really time based. We sustained for as long as we're gonna sustain and then we trigger a release. Okay? Don't worry about that too much. What we really care about here is the attack and somewhat the release. Maybe this decay, in some cases, this decay. But let's focus just on the attack for now. To keep it simple, we want to pair instruments that have a similar. So going back to the orchestration element, instruments that pair really well have a similar attack. They have a similar envelope to each other. So let's look. Flute and oboe. Let's think about how a flute attacks. It's got a little bit of a ramp up. Unless you've asked for a very specific staccato notes, then a flute playing like a line like this, is going to have a little bit of an attack. It's not dead on. We want to pair it with one that has a similar attack. Strings. Violin tends to have a much slower attack than everything else. So pairing, doubling something like a trumpet with violin is going to be a little dangerous because the violin, because you're going to hear the trumpet burst. Because it's gonna go dot, dot. And the strings are gonna go, wow, wow, wow. They don't match. You're going to hear that trumpet and then you're going to hear the strengths that can be useful more on that in a second. But if you wanted to be a cohesive blended sound, that's not going to get it, right. It's gonna be kind of a mess. It's going to change over time. Okay, let me explain this one more time. Let's take a trombone. And timpani. Cool. Trombone has a sound. That's why it definitely has some time in its attack. It's not, but that's not what trombones do. It has some time in that attack. A tympani is a percussion instrument. It's attack is virtually instant. It goes bum, because you hit it with a mallet from its attack as dead-on. If you pair those two things together, you're going to hear the timpani before significantly the trombone. That's not a great blend. If you want them to match perfectly. Hold that makes sense. When you're blending sounds, think about that attack. You want to blend sounds that have a similar attack. If you want to create just a cohesive color. Let's talk about, let's go to a new video and let's talk about matching an unmatching envelopes. 35. Pairings with Matching Envelopes: Okay, so let's try a few that I think match up pretty well. Oboe and Oboe. Yeah, those match up pretty well, but that's not what we're doing. We're doing different instruments here. Let's see, flute has a pretty quick attack, and oboe has pretty quick attack. Those would blend together pretty well. Clarinet tends to have a little bit slower attack. Then oboe. If you can hear this, I'm going to turn this up. This clarinet sample, listen. Think about, whereas the volume in that OneNote, where's the volume its highest or its loudest? It's not the very first thing we hear, right? That's the envelope here, this oboe, same thing, and these have very similar envelopes. They feel like they're taking the same amount of time. So these should blend pretty well. Let's hear them together. Let me mute the piano again. Pretty nice. Let's try sticking with the, sticking with the clarinet. Let's get rid of the oboe. Let's think about soon. Yeah, okay, we're gonna blend at the unison. We have to go way up here, but that's okay. Let's hear it. Okay, not bad. Let's try a horn. Similar. I think these will blend. Okay. Next kind of ethereal pamper. These actually don't blend all that well, in my opinion, I think it might just be the samples that we have here, but we're, we're hearing more sustain in the trumpet. They're kind of that envelope. They're staying at that peak longer than the horn is. Now let's also talk about articulations. If I do this, let's go to the trumpet. That was an example I pointed out a minute ago. The trumpet. These aren't going to blend great to me. This particular sample that we're hearing has a pretty long envelope. It's taken quite a significant amount of time, meaning like less than a second, but sometime to get up to that full volume. Whereas this is a little bit faster than it, I think. Let's hear them together. And then I want to do something weird. Oops, here we go. Hey, so that one doesn't work all that well, I hear a lot more trumpet then clarinet. I do get a little bit of shimmer from the clarinet, which is kind of a cool sound actually. But that falls into that category of pairings that I don't think work very well. That mismatched envelopes that can work well because you'll get that. It's that Trumpet sound, but with a little bit of a halo around it from the clarinet. But let me do one other thing. I can always change that envelope with dynamics. If I go to like this, I've just added dots to all my trumpet notes. Now they should be dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Like really quite short. That's not going to match with this at all. But let's try it. Now, something interesting has happened. These don't match at all. But what did we hear? What did we really hear here? We heard the attack of the trumpet and the sustain of the clarinet. Now, that's kind of interesting because now we've just kind of made a whole new instrument. This is what orchestration is really all about. Using. Taking apart that envelope and making a new instrument out of it by taking the attack of one thing and the sustained him another thing. These do not blend by the envelope. This is not how you do it. However, they do something really interesting because they don't blend. Let's tease that a little bit more. Let's go down that rabbit hole a little bit more and talk about things that don't match. In the next video. 36. Pairings with Mismatched Envelopes: Let's see if we can make this even worse. Worse is the wrong term. You know what I mean? Let's get him out of the clarinet. Let's keep the trumpets staccato, nice and short. Let's go to violent. Violent, one's going to have a slow attack. But somehow it got the quick articulation. Something in my software here is telling it to play this articulation, staccato articulation. And that's not what we want, but let me see if it really does that. Let's just hear it as is. We didn't hear this short, but I also don't think we heard the trumpet. Can we just hear the trumpet? Okay, let's do this. Let's mark these with a dynamic just so that we're sure that we're hearing things to mezzo forte. Now let's here these two. Now what we should have is staccato, trumpets and legato, violin. I'm still not hearing very much at all of the trumpet. Let's mark that for tag just to help us out a little bit. Now what we should be hearing is these like a sharp attack from the trumpets at the beginning of the note and then the sustain of the note on the violin. It's going to morph from a trumpet to a violin, and then back for every note. I think in this case, that's not a very appealing sound. It's kind of nauseating a little bit because we're just kind of always doing this. By, by, by type sound. Could be cool in some contexts. But it's not really working for me here. Let's try something a little shorter. Let's try oboe. Perhaps without the staccato. I'm just going to mark these tenuto. I'm just going to mark these tenuto to help us out. That means play them along. Let's try that. I've also got that marked forte. This is the problem of scores. You got to make everything real small to see it all on one page. Here we go. Oboe, long, violin, not marked, but pretty long. Let's hear it. This is a good example. Here's what I hear. On one hand, I like what I'm hearing because I'm hearing mostly violin. You were a lot of Ireland. But I hear this almost looks like somebody's whistling along in the distance. That's that oboe, because they're doubling at the unison. And they have a similar envelope. I kind of liked that kind of whistle and the distance sound. However, I also hear mismatched envelopes, especially on the attack. Even having marked these tenuto, the oboe attack is much shorter than the string attack. I still hear this like two different things to different attacks. They're off from each other. It sounds like an accident. Listen close. It's kind of hard to hear, but if you listen really close, listen for these two attacks happening. Yeah, it's very hard to hear. It's not so much the attack. It's the top of the attack. That's what I'm listening for. When I hear the oboe get there first and then the violent get there just a little bit after. It's like that or like that, I guess. I don't like it. Maybe it's just me. Now I could finesse this and make it work by I could give them both a tenuto marking and let's see if that helps. I don't know how the computer is going to interpret that, but let's see what that does. That kind of solved it, but it created some weird tuning problems. It might be only one that heard that. I think these B flats down here, they were like out of tune from each other. That's really strange. Anyway, we'll deal with that later. Just something to consider. We're making new sounds here and the new sound doesn't necessarily have to be perfect combination of the two sounds. It can be an imperfect combination of the two sounds. And the way you would do that is with sounds that don't have the same envelope. You get the attack of one and the sustain of the other. As we deal with more orchestration, we're gonna take that to a pretty big extent where we might fully orchestrate that out where we have a hit and then from the strings and then a sustain of the winds. This is kind of our introduction to that concept, but it's an important concept. So let's play around with this a little bit more. Let's try to do something with all four voices and using this idea and see what we can do. 37. The Full Orchestra: Okay, let's have some fun. I'm going to take this string part out. And let's see where do we want our first voice to be? We have it right now in the OBO. That's cool. Let's maybe do oboe. And it's got these tenuto marks on it. Let's try oboe and horn. Let's hear those two together. I'm going to remove these articulations. Let's try now. Yeah, you know what, you can almost hear the envelope be off on this F-sharp. Listen close to that F sharp here, that drives me nuts. I think that's just in our samples, but let's make sure I didn't do that. So let's not use horn. Let's use Assuming clarinet. She needs clarinet one. Let's try that. That's nice. I'm hearing a lot of oboe, hearing. Clarinet give us a little bit of a background sound. So it's a pretty unified blend. I'm talking about orchestration, like you would talk about wine. And it's kind of like that. The biggest difference is, I don't know crap about wine. But I know a lot about our illustration. Okay, let's go to our alto voice and see if we can make something cool happened with the same idea. Let's put our Alto in bassoon. Then. How can we match this? Bassoon and horn might match quite well. Yeah, I feel like those envelopes line up really nicely. Let's just press on because I can't really solo those two right now. Let's go to our third voice. Let's do our third voice. The horror and also the second horn. Let's double that in. Trombone might work. I think that'll work. Then we'll do our last voice. Our last voice in tuba. Our last voice in tuba. Let's think about the envelope of the tuba. Quite slow. I'm tempted to go with the cello. I think we can make those blend. That's a weird one. But let's try it, I guess. Okay. Let's see if we've got all four of these voices going now, let's see what happens. Here we go. I think that worked really nice. We've got a very blended sound all around. We've got a lot of extra weight behind it. It does. It sounds very different than it did when we did it. The same thing with just four instruments. Now we've got four instruments. Each one of them doubled with an instrument that works well within its envelope. I think it's got quite a bit more color to it, a little bit more depth to it because of that. It's just much, much fuller. It really is starting to sound like an orchestra. Cool. We're on the right track. 38. Method 5: More Colors and Synthesis: Okay, Now that five, again, we're kind of off the script that we started with the first three. Because now we're really getting into blending and making new colors and looking at individual instruments or even families for that is going to be not a very worthwhile thing to do. What we're talking about in this method is now taking where we left off, where we're combining multiple instruments to make new sounds, new colors, and separating them out by an octave. We're going to get even more octaves or more colors. This is really kind of broadening our palette. Even more. Kind of think of it like, well, think of it literally look at color palette. You're like this, this artist and you have this pallet and these are all your paints that you're going to paint with what we were doing before in the last one, the last method, we had a color, Let's say we had read on our palate what we added by doubling in unison. All of these other instruments, what we added was different shades of red. We added. Well, no, What we added was, I'm trying to figure out the right analogy. We added all the prime colors. We added red, blue, yellow. Green is green and prime color wherever green, maybe purple. We added the main colors and we were able to mix with them a little bit. Now we're going a little bit deeper. And now what we're adding is like to our red, we're adding red, dark red, light red, pink, kind of burnt brown. We're getting much more detailed in each color. We can do a lot more with each one. Now, I really start to think about synthesis. I know I talked about like electronic music synthesis when we were talking about envelopes in the last section. What we're getting into now is a lot like FM synthesis. It's not really, we're not really doing FM. Don't worry. You're not going to have to do FM in long division. But the way we're combining sounds to make new sounds. I think about an, a same way that I think about FM synthesis. If you're not familiar with FM synthesis, check it out. It's pretty interesting, but I think it's actually worthwhile for anyone studying orchestration to also study sound design and synthesis. I think these are valuable things that go together completely. If I was gonna write an orchestration book, I would make it. It would be called something like orchestration and synthesis, or synthesis and orchestration and sound design. Can we actually do this? This is a good idea. Anyway. Moving on. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take some of our doublings. Let's look at where we left off here. We've got the oboe and the clarinet doubled at the unison. What's going to happen if we double these in an octave? We take the oboe up an octave. Now we've got two octaves of this line split between two different instruments. It's going to give us even more color. Gas. So that's what we're working with here. What I think I want to do for this one, since this one ended up pretty good. I want to compare this to this same one with the octaves added. What kind of AB test these? Let's go to a new video and let's add octaves and then see what happens. 39. Exploring the Differences: I don't know how accurately the samples we have are gonna play this back, but I don't want to try it. I'm going to go to, I have two versions of this same file open right now. I'm going to go here and move this up an octave. Now my oboe part and clarinet part is separated by an octave. Let's see what else we did. This looks like, yeah, horn, one, bassoon, unison. So I still want to obey that outward thing. If I'm on the alto line, which I don't think I am here. What I want to do maybe is pull the bassoon down in October because it's so high. But that goes against the opening outward. In reality, what I would do here is probably leave the inner two voices, the alto and tenor, doubled in the unison, and not with an octave up or down. I leave them octave doubled at the unison. Put the top voice, the soprano voice doubled in the octaves, and the bass voice doubled in an octave down. That would make this nice thick texture. However, I really want to go nuts with this. I am going to move the bassoon down an octave. That's down an octave from that. Now we have this horn part and it's trombone part are probably are tenor part. Could take this horn part up or this trombone part and down. Gonna get awfully complicated if I take this up, but I think I'm going to do it. I think that'll sound better in this case. We don't have so much really low stuff. Now this is going to make an awkward voice crossing. Where horn to is gonna be above horn one. What I would want to do, well, let me do it first. What I ought to do here probably is switch horn to into horn one, like flip those two parts, or give horn to two horns, three, because remember that often 13 are strongest players in the horns. But probably just flipping 12 in this case would be the smartest thing to do. But they're played digitally right now, so it doesn't really matter. They're both equally as good. We'll leave the trombone. We have tuba and base two button cello. Well, the easiest way to do this would be to take this and get rid of it and take it down here. And now we can take it down an octave. We couldn't take it down an octave in the chat box. I think that would have taken us out of range. I think this works quite a bit better. Now here's what I wanted to do. Now we've got the same thing as we had before, but with octaves. Let's hear it without octaves first. That's this one. Just to get it back in our head. Hear what this sounds like. We'll switch over to the version with actives. Great, Now let's see how much different than this one sounds. It feels a little more forceful, more cutting through. Obviously that base is like the biggest thing. Little too much base for me. I'm actually going to put this back in the cello and bring it up an octave. Let's leave the base as unison. For now. Let's do that. Let's hear it one more time. A couple of things I don't like about it. The thing that really sticks out to me the most is how high this horn part is. Gets up here and it's just squeaky high and screaming. It's just not a sound that I like at all. But it is I would probably change that to go so high. Otherwise, yeah, it's it's a more complex sound. It has more density to it and also has more. It just cuts through more. There's a lot of, I want to say it's like this nice sound, but it's made of razor blades because it's just more like more like glass. It just kind of sharp cuts through. I don't know, I'm running out of words. But hopefully you heard the difference there. Let's try adjusting this one more time and see if we can get it to something. Let's actually go back and do the thing that I said, the way I would really do it. Let's do that. 40. Another Way: Okay, So I'm going back to this is the one before we added the octave. So now we've still got the unisons here. Let's take this OVO. Let's do this. Probably what I might do here if I really wanted to bring this out at an octave, I might not push that oboe up because I don't want it to be really high in strained. I might put it in the flute and then pulled that up an octave. Now that fluid is really high, really I, Yeah, but that's okay. Now, I'm going to add an octave on the top, an octave on the bottom, but we're just getting such a fat sound with this low octave. Don't want to do it. Let's do it. So I am gonna do this, I'm gonna take this here. But I'm going to try to control this with dynamics. Let's take it down an octave. And then just to make this not so intense, with our samples, I'm gonna mark it as piano. Now I have an octave between the tuba and the base. So an octave on the bottom. And I have an octave between the flute and a clarinet on the inactive on the top. And then everything else has doubled at the unison in the middle. This I think is going to make a better all around sound. When we're trying to make a nice smooth sound. One thing I think that we will get a little too much high stuff. I think this is going a little higher than I would want it to. I might I might consider something else for that. But let's let's let's hear what what our computer does with it. We go. That was actually a pretty balanced that was more balanced than I was expecting. Still a little too much high stuff that could be because of this forte we put here. Let's try getting rid of that and replace it with like, I don't know, mezzo piano. Let's go piano and just make sure Let's put a piano. There. Were telling that fluid to be a little bit quieter than everything else. Let's see if that does any difference. The base worked out. Okay, I think let's hear it one more time. I liked that a lot better. Pulling back that flute gave us just a little bit of more erogenous spore, less of that piercing high stuff though it's not that piercing, but a little bit. Nice bass sound, very balanced. I have this worked really quite well. Good technique. 41. Method 6: Harmonic Density: Process number six, methods sex. Last one. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to do doubling at a harmony, doubling at a different note other than an octave. This is sometimes compared to like mutation stops. So let's talk about mutation stops really quick. On an Oregon. We've been talking a lot about Oregon and there's a huge relationship between the orchestra and the organ. I'm tempted to say the orchestra is designed to emulate the Oregon, but I don't know if that's true. Or the organ is designed to emulate the orchestra. I don't know if that's true either, but it certainly seems like one of those two things is correct. The Oregon you have stops that you pull out. Those, add a new set of pipes and you can get octaves. And that's why earlier when we said this sounds very Oregon like it's because we get those. But there are some stops on the Oregon called mutation stops. And those add a harmony to the note. You could have stopped that you pull out. That is just the right length to create like a perfect fifth. Now as you play chords, you've got this perfect fifth moving in parallel with you all over the place. Now if you took music theory and you think, whoa, why would I do that? Because now I have every node is a parallel fifth. Yeah, this music works a little different than that, but it is true. You definitely don't want to do that. But a lot of the time we can use that perfect fifth to just kind of influenced the timber and make it so we don't necessarily hear that fifth. Anyway. The reason I'm comparing adding a harmony to these mutation stops is that we can use those both the harmony and the mutation stop to add a timber more than we can add harmony itself. Let me explain that one more time. If we add, let's say we add, we have a note and we add an octave on top of it and then a fifth on top of that. Okay? So now we have note Octave fifth. We move that around on a melody. What we might do is we might really hear that octave and only a little bit here, that fifth. And in that way, we might not perceive it as having a fifth, but having a particular color, the color we get from whatever instrument we put that in. So more on that as we start to do this. This technique is most often used on the melody. The primary thing of a piece of music. We wouldn't use it so much on an inner voice, although we could and just have it be diatonic note. One other thing to consider is that when you're doing this idea of intonation between the instruments becomes kind of a big deal here. If I've got something that's like an octave and a third higher. And it's trying to harmonize with a note, an octave into third down. That can be a pretty difficult thing to match, especially when you've got a player over here doing the fundamental and a player over here doing an activator third higher, they might not be able to hear each other. So you can have intonation issues with this method, but it's something to consider. You wouldn't want to do a lot of this in a real amateur group. List. Some of it you could. But in a professional group, it'll sound great. Whoops. Let's dive in and do some. 42. Formula One: Melody in Thirds: Okay, this method isn't perfect for the kind of thing we're doing here because we're doing a chorale to harmonize something in thirds. Little tricky, but let's do this. Let's take this and let's select our top voice. Let's put it in. For example. No, not the fluid. The clarinet. There it is in the clarinet. Cool. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to harmonize this with the flute. I'm going to put it also in the flute, and we're just going to harmonize it by a third. Now, one thing I meant to say in the previous video is that what is the effect? What is the bigger effect other than getting the harmony that we're going to create here is it's really a matter of density. We're going to make a harmonic density, a thicker sound. Okay, by doing this, it's not like an octave where an octave is a relatively thin sound, but it can really cut through. This is just a thicker sound. Here's my clarinet playing our top voice. Now I'm going to go to my flute. I'm going to harmonize this in a third. So my first note is a G. I'm gonna go up to a B. What I wanna do here is stay in key. You don't have to do this. We could do chromatic harmonization, where we do literally major thirds for every note. Not going to sound good here, but that will sound, that could sound good in a more modern piece. Here I want to stay in key. We're in the key of G minor. So I am going to move these D flats up to D natural G flats. These are a little trickier. Yeah, they should be Gs. We go, Let's hear it just these two lines. Here we go. Now in this case, is this going to work with the rest of our Chorale here? Probably not. Because what we've done here is we've assumed every note in the first-line is the tonic because we added a third on top of it. So that's probably going to make a big old mess with down here. This kind of chorale texture isn't a great use for this method. We might do it in something where we have a little more sparse, a little sparser accompaniment. Like, let's just say, let's make an accompaniment. Let's make a string accompaniment chart. Let's do like a G minor chord. Whoops. I'm just gonna make some chords to fit with this really quick. G. B flat, D, G, G minor. Here, Let's see, we have, it's going to be a, B, and D. So let's call it B flat. Let's call it out like a B flat major chord. B flat. I'll just do two more. Here. We're going to get another B flat and a D. So that could be back to G minor. One more C, E-flat, let's call that C minor. That might be strange, but you should go to E-flat. Good to see. You can go to G. Okay. Let's just try that. Okay, we'll see if it works. So I've just got some kind of generic chords that I think will work with these notes. Let's try it. I kind of works, but it's very quiet. So let's move on to our next, next formula. So the first formula that I came up with here is you could just add a third tier melody. Think about the timbre of the two instruments that we're combining. Now let's build that a little bit bigger and let's add an octave and a third. This is another thing that can sound really nice and make it thicker. Let's try that. 43. Formula Two: Melody in Octaves and Thirds: Okay, now I'm working with a whole new piece here, right? Like I just took this melody and made my own chord progression. You go with it. We're kind of throwing out the corral at this point, but that's okay. In order for it to make sense, I think I need to get these back in key. Probably just that node will do. Yeah. Just because without the full corral, that leading tone just doesn't really make sense. So I'm gonna put it back in key and I think it'll work better. For this next technique. I'm going to use the same ideas of everything, except I'm going to add an octave. We're going to have the melody an octave above it and a third above that. This is the one I talked about before. Now I can actually do this easily since we are working on effectively a whole new piece. I can easily do this by just taking this, my clarinet part down an octave. So what's going to work? Well, go bassoons. Horns can get down there. Trombone. Let's do bassoons. Keep this all in the winds for now. I put it in the bassoons, then I'm gonna take it down an octave. Now we have, if we treat this as our main melody in the bassoons, we now have octave and a third. Cool. Let's get this text out of here because that's a little frustrating. Let's hear it now. Maybe just to help us out, I'll give us a little bit of dynamics here. Let's just give ourselves a forte here. We can cut over those strings a little bit better. Let's try that. Not bad. It's pretty cool sound, however, all my strings are just too loud. So let's just do this unnaturally loud. Let's try it again. Pretty interesting sound. Let's hear it without the strings, just so you can get a good feel for what, what this technique sounds like. Okay, no strings is ten. Okay, so pretty thick, like we're getting a much thicker sound here. But we also have that active on the bottom, so it cuts through a little bit more. Let's do one more thing. Let's add one more note to this chord that was basically moving around. Will go to a third formula for doing this. 44. Formula Three: Melody in Octaves, Fifths, and Thirds: Here's what we're gonna do. Our formula, tried and true. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go melody plus an octave, plus a fifth, plus a sixth. And you're like, Why is Sex? Hear me out. Sixth above the fifth, which is a third, will get there. Let's try it with what we have here. We have an octave here. Next, we need a fifth above this G, So we need a note that starts on D. We could use our flutes here. But I'm going to use our fluids for that highest note. Let's go to our oboes and take them up to that. There's is. Now I want to pull everything back in to key here. Just a boring these to get them in line with our key signature. We're not going to go this far, so it doesn't matter, but I'll do it anyway. It's good. Okay, so now we have a fifth and now we're gonna go as sixth above that. So if we go a sixth above a fifth, Let's just count that out. So our root node is G. So we went up to a d, which is the fifth. If we go up a major sixth from D, we get D, E, F, G, a, B, B. Which the relationship of that note, B to our root node G is a third. It's actually an octave and a third. But it's still a third. But it's not as be an octave higher than this. Let's take this and go up an octave. This can be a really nice sound. This is pretty high in that flute. So what I might consider doing is taking the whole thing down an octave, but let's try it. Let's hear it by itself and then we'll hear it with our weird little harmony. Here we go. That's where I stopped putting everything back in, in key. Maybe I, maybe I should do that just for fun. Finish putting these in key. There we go. Geez, probably, that f is probably fine. But anyway, anyway, what you can hear is it's quite thick. Because remember what we've got here. If we got rid of all the octets on everything, what we've got is our root node, a third, fifth. We're moving triads on every note, but we're spreading them out by a whole bunch to make it just this wall of melody. What's cool about this though, is that the notes are spread out so much you could still probably identify the melody. And if you had to sing along with the melody, you'd probably seeing this g or this G right here one more time. Pretty cool. Let's hear it with our strings. Here it is with the strings. Definitely sits above those strings. And all the notes don't conflict even though it's a lot of notes happening going by. They, they fit into that harmony. Rather nice. I want to do one more thing that I wanted to try the same thing in brass. Let's try it. Let's take this. Let's take our bassoon as our lowest thing. Put it in our bass trombone. I'm gonna have to take it down an octave, I'm sure of it. Let's go down an octave. Which means if I want to hold the same pattern, I needed to take everything down an octave. So here's our clarinet. Let's put that in the first trombone. Definitely going to have to be down an octave. Get rid of that. Our oboe, which is up the fifth. Let's put that in the horn. Also down an octave. Then our flute, trumpet, obviously down an octave. Here we go. Alright, so we have the same stack intervals here. Here, these without the strings. And just hear what this sounds like. I liked it, but I think there was that envelope problem. I don't know if you heard that. Almost suddenly like there was a harpsichord snuck in there somewhere. Piano was muted. What that was, It was like a weird sample. Is happening. Strange. Let's hear it with our strings and just see what happens. All right. I think they're gonna blow the strings away because we marked the strings is piano and all that brass has forte. Let's actually take this piano will weigh. See if we can balance a little bit better. But you can see this stack of intervals works really quite well. 45. Anything is Possible Here!: In this section, I've given these three formulas for doing this and kind of increasing amounts of density. We started with just thirds. Then we added octaves in thirds, and then we added octaves fifth third on top. These are all things that work really well, but I don't want you to be limited by those. You can stack harmonies however you want. If this was my own music, I really wouldn't do it in such kind of countless ways. I was just doing. I would really think about the harmony that I'm trying to reinforce and really making it work within that harmony. Um, so it doesn't always have to be unified. Like if you're going to do something and following thirds and then at one spot you want that third to open up to a fourth, opened it up to a fourth. Go crazy. When you're orchestrating In this kind of a thick texture. You can break your pattern. You can break parallel rules. You can leave all that stuff in the past. You're a modern composers, so you can do whatever you want. Any, anything. The sky is the limit in terms of the harmonies that you build in this way. Just think about that envelope rule still applies. The way you're combining colors still applies. The spacing of the way you space out the notes can really matter. So think about all those things as you're building up your harmonies in this way. 46. Finding These In the Wild: So what I thought we'd do next is look through some real-world pieces. Some real professional, high-quality orchestra music. Find examples of these. Now these techniques that we've been talking about are things that we'll be able to find in any orchestral piece all over the place. I think that I'll be able to randomly open some scores, two pages and find examples of the things that we're talking about because these six concepts are used everywhere, like you really can't avoid it. If you're going to write for many instruments, you're going to have to do these things. Let's pinpoint a few of them out in some major work. So I've kind of randomly grabbed three scores from my little library of scores. I have a lot of scores because like I said at the very beginning of the first orchestra class, I just really loved these scores. I love looking at them. One thing that you'll find if you end up buying scores is that we have these Dover miniature series, these that are small and it makes the print really small. Like this one's not too bad because the orchestra is small. But this one is like amazingly small. It's very, very difficult to read. This is why most composers and virtually all conductors wear glasses. Because of these tiny scores. What I grabbed here was Bach B Minor Mass. We can see how Bach orchestrates some things. I grabbed one of my all-time favorite pieces of orchestral music. Check six, which is the fancy way to say Tchaikovsky's symphony number six. Love this piece. Then one of the most celebrated, I guess, orchestration in history in a way is Mussorgsky Pictures at an expedition. This piece is really fascinating from an orchestration standpoint. And it's really one that we study all the time. Because this piece was written by the composer Mussorgsky. I can't remember when it was written, probably around turn of the century or so. Let's see. This edition was 931873, I think. Unpublished though until after his death in 1881. Mussorgsky wrote this piece. However, it was written for piano, solo piano piece. And revile came along. Rebel was widely regarded for his orchestration techniques and ideas and skill. And so revile orchestrated the Mussorgsky piece for full orchestra as a piano piece by Mussorgsky. But ravel wrote it out for full orchestra. Really interesting study. That's why you often see it as Mussorgsky hyphen revival. This is not a hyphenated name. There's two people. Mussorgsky wrote the piece, revolt orchestrated. It will look at some of that. Okay, So let's dive in diamond with the bock. Let me just say first, you might be able to find PDFs of these scores. For copyright issue. I can't for copyright reasons, I can't just give you PDFs of them. These are published things, these are for sale. If you dig around online and weird places, you can probably find them. I think what I'm going to have to do just to demonstrate, I'm just gonna take pictures of a couple of pages and put them on the screens that we can pick them apart. We'll just have to do that because of copyright stuff. Here we go. 47. Bach, Mass in B Minor: I changed my mind on taking pictures of each page because I want to bounce around between a bunch of pages. So I'm just going to try to zoom in with my camera here on some stuff. Let's look at this first. So we're right at the beginning of the block B Minor Mass, only a couple of pages in bar 12. Let's look at this little passage here. So we have two flutes, two oboe and bassoon. We have flute, one, an oboe, one doubled. We have flute T2 and Ubuntu doubled. So these are both doubled at the unison. But they are a relationship to each other. This is a harmony of the top. So let's look at just the flute part. Flute t2 is a harmony of flute one, so this is doubling at different interval and it's moving between intervals. It's got a little bit different shape. It's a similar line. It's reinforcing that line through a harmony, but it is doubled at the unison by the oboe, the bassoon, adding a third line, which we could call part of it. Or we could say it's own thing because it's got a different shape. Kind of moves on different direction. Same thing in the violin here, we could call it its own thing, which I probably would in this case. Well here that in a second, but I want to go forward to a couple of more things. Let's go here. This is just a few pages forward from that. Let's look at these eighth note patterns here. This idea of doubling flute one and Obama won at the unison and fluid to an Ubuntu at the unison. I think that's very kind of indicative of this style. This is kind of a Baroque sound. But what we'll find it a lot here. Here it is doubled in the unison all the way through and then flew T2 and OB2 doubled. Slight variations here. Slight variations here. We can see that. Let's see what our harmony is here. Because now it's got the same shape to it. So B to D, so we're on a sixth, and then we go up a sixth or an inverted third. That all throughout this piece, I think we're gonna find a lot of that fluid, one over one doubling at the unison, Flu T2 and CO2 doubling at the unison. And a lot of the time, the 2s flute to you and AVO2 are gonna be in supporting of flute one and over one. So let's here. It will go from the beginning of the piece and I'll try to follow along in the score. So it's kind of hard to do, but we'll see we can do it will just get a couple of pages in. And let's see what happens. I'll try to point out those passages we just looked at. Here we go. I'm going to focus on the winds. Alright, I got ahead a little bit. This is oddly hard to follow, especially when you're looking through a delayed camera and trying to figure out where you are, but hopefully you caught some of those things. You can find tons of recordings of this piece online. 48. Tchaikovsky, Symphony #6: Check six. Another tiny score. Let's dive in. I want to go to this part, so we're right at the beginning stuff. Another piece right at the beginning, because you can find examples of this all over the place and the beginning is easy because then we can load up like a YouTube video and listen along and get to this spot. I want to focus on right here. So first let's look at this passage here. This is all strings. Violin, one violent to viola. Cello split in half, and face split in half. So first violin, violin one. Let's see, we have F-sharp, AAD, violent to doubled at harmony. Forest down. Sorry, a fifth down. For that whole line. Viola in octaves with violin, one. For this whole passage. Cello, first half of the section. Let's see what do we have here at D E, F sharp, B sharp. So in another harmony, tell us second section. Second half, actually in unison with the first half. So there's nothing different between the two halves of the fellows. You might say to yourself, why, why are we splitting the cello is then there must be a need for it earlier or later. They're just not split in this particular moment. In fact, if we go back just a few notes, we have two different nodes here. So there's reasons. Bases, I think the same deal, they're gonna be the same in this particular bar. But what are they doing? D? They are kind of a variation of what the challenges are doing. Kind of a simplified version of what the cello is, are doing. And then down another octave. So kinda interesting there. There's even more interesting stuff going on. Let's go up to here, right here. We have flute, oboe, clarinet in a. This is not a transpose score. No, sorry, this is a transpose score. So we're not looking at actual sounding pitches here. We're looking at the plate pitches, which means I'm determined to screwed up. Side-note if you want to know really quickly whether or not you're looking at a transpose score or not, look at the key signatures. If there's different key signatures, you're looking at a transpose score. The strings are all in C. They're going to have the same key signature, different clefs, but same key signature. We can see here this clarinet in a, which is what that says there, has a different key signature, so we know that it is not transposed. But let's look at what's happening here. We have an F and an F, So flute one, an octave above, oboe one. So those are in unison. Sorry, those are an octave apart. And they are doubling at the octave. It's clear that an a, I'm gonna, I'm gonna clean transposing doneness here, but I'm pretty sure that this is another octave down. This is three octaves are the same thing. Cool. Let's hear a little bit of this. I'm going to put this here so that I can call it out when we get there through about five pages in, but this hasn't really slow opening, so we'll see if we can get there. This is just one of my all-time favorite orchestra pieces, so I highly recommend you listen to it in its entirety. But let's see at the beginning, this nice bassoon solo and base stuff to open up. Go faster, becomes our part. Let's start down here to get it right there. The winds at that and see where that was. That was right here. Same thing. Doubling. This time we moved into flute to good example of active Dublin. 49. Mussorgsky (Ravel), Pictures at an Exhibition: Okay, Now we're at pictures at an expedition. So this is this wonderful piece Mussorgsky orchestrated by a rebel. I highly encourage you to listen to this whole thing, get a copy of the score and really study it because it's a master work and orchestration. It starts off with this brass fanfare thing. This is what I really want to focus on. So even though it looks here like we have Trumbull, this is actually trumpet because I think we're in, I think it was the French here. So traumas, trumpet, corny is Horn and trombone. Trombone sounds awfully Italian, whatever. So we have this trumpet solo and then this whole kind of brass fanfare thing here. I want to focus on just this and see if we can pick up a heart, how this has been orchestrated. Let's hear just this first. Here we go. Okay, so first we have this trumpet melody. Now let's look first. The first thing to notice here is that we have definitely something in all of this that is the lead, that is the melody. Because it's just this repeated again. G, F B flat, C, F D, G, B flat, CFD. Cool. Let's see how we've figured out our instruments here. We're, we're in transposing land here are horns or an F, Or trumpets are in C. In our trombones are neither. Let's look at just what our trumpets are doing here. We have three trumpets and they're each getting their own note here, which you can do. That's fine. The G, He's doubling at a harmony to make full triads out of all of these right? Here, he doesn't have an octave. And then up to that F, and then down. This is like that one example we looked at, I think the sixth 1, sixth method that I was doing where we end up with triads by doubling everything with octaves. He left off this 1 eighth note. It didn't harmonize that. But it's because I think that would have sounded funny if everything moved up and took away from the solo quality of that, that melody line. But I think we're seeing in the horns also is just more support of these harmonies. And the same thing in the tuba. Let's find another cool spot. Maybe just right here on the next page. Groups, we have some octave doublings in the strings that are nice. Right here. An octave between the two violins, kind of going all the way through here. Another thing that's really cool about the score while we're here is if I go up just a little bit, Here's the original piano piece. It's still kind of in here. This edition of the score. They left the piano piece in. You can kinda see how what Mussorgsky wrote and how revolve kind of pulled it apart into this bigger thing. Let me go back up here for you. So he's got this, these eighth note patterns and it's here in the strings, but he also adds these flourishes in the winds. It's really nice. Anyway, so nice octave doubling here in the strengths. 50. What Comes Next?: Okay, we got to the end of this section. However, there needs to be one more of the real meat of the orchestration portion of this class. So I think we're gonna be in groups of two. So we had those first two classes, part 12 of this series, that we're focused on instrumentation. Now we're going to have two that are focused on orchestration proper. And then we'll have at least one probably to focus on the more since illustration stuff. So one more up next, part four is going to be orchestration again. But in the next one we're going to focus on particular ensembles and instrument families. You can think of this as more of the horizontal orchestration. Whereas in this class what we did primarily it was the vertical weight. Opposite of that, the vert, the horizontal is what we did in this class. Next one will be vertical. We looked at lines, um, how stacking them in doubling them creates unique sounds. But next we're going to look at the strings. How can I make the best sound for the strings? How can I make the best sound for the brass? And how can I make the best sound for the winds will also look at the orchestra as a whole. And then other ensembles like brass bands, wind ensembles, concert band, so to speak, which is a particular ensemble that I find to be quite terrifying to write for. Percussion ensembles. I'm Wind Quintet. A couple of other standard ensembles will look at, because looking at those can be a really good way to kind of focus in on how to write really well for the winds. And then that applies perfectly when we're looking at the wind section of an orchestra. That will be next, the vertical. Yes, vertical element of writing for ensemble. 51. 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, check out 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.