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Track layout view of Music CreatorORCHESTRATIONCollection of instruments


For thoughts on how to orchestrate, try principles of orchestration or artistic orchestration.

For now I'll simply say very briefly that it usually goes something like this:

Back in the day, I used to put the TV on with something not too demanding, a film or something, and idly pick at music tracks which would get done in the evenings over the course of a week or so. I'd then record at the weekend, and I remember rushing round to catch a cafe at a DIY shop before it closed.

One very early decision I'd have to make would be whether to include prerecorded loops from a loop library. The reason this is significant is that if they are going to be used at all they have to go in first so that virtual instruments can then be written to match them. It is possible to orchestrate complete songs or instrumentals purely using loops, and sometimes I have done.

The most time consuming part of loops is finding the right loops. Loop libraries can be huge, tens of thousands of loops, and sorting through to find something that sounds right can take a while. Some libraries group them in packs, which can make it easier if you find a pack you like. Finding loops that work with each other can be difficult because loops often contain chord changes, and can also have different rhythms that don't necessarily gel with what was being done in a different loop. Putting together groups of loops that work as individual instrument parts as well as with each other can be extremely frustrating.

In theory virtual (software) instruments are much easier. The expectation appears to be that you connect your keyboard to your laptop and just play straight into it; the software then turns what you played on the keyboard into notes. I gather this works well if you can play a keyboard, but I can't. This leaves two other methods: stave editing and piano roll  editing.

A pen writing on a music scoreStave editing is done on a musical score, as though you were writing notes on musical paper. This is how classical composers used to write. I gather they could hear in their head what it would sound like. A conductor for instance can look at a musical score and hear more or less how it will sound. Using stave editing tends to restrict the notes to the ones that are in the specified key, which can be a good thing. I did tinker with it, but I didn't get on with it, partly because with anything other than a neat sequence of notes the notation got very complicated, and partly because it wasn't easy to see where individual notes began and ended.

A pianolaPiano roll editing is done on what looks like a chart alongside a piano keyboard sideways. The notes go up and down the left hand side of the screen, and the chart is to the right of it. Way back when they used to have instruments called pianolas.

They didn't have stereos or MP3 players then, and there were plenty of people who couldn't play the piano but still wanted music. So, they had a modified piano that used rolls or rollers that were read and caused the piano to play the notes.

If you're doing piano roll editing you have to imagine that you're making the roll that will be inserted into the pianola. You use a virtual pencil to mark a note onto the roll against a particular piano key, starting at a particular point on the roll. Each note has a length, and you can move the end of the note to make it as long or short as you like. Although sometimes the notes in the key will be highlighted, you can have any note you like, starting whenever you like and ending whenever you like.

In either method, a chord has to be built up one note at a time, and yes that is time consuming. When I first started I picked out the notes purely by ear, and had no idea which key I was writing in. Other songwriters can pick up a guitar or sit at a piano, and as Paul McCartney said once, "If you're lucky, something just comes." I can't. What I do takes hours and hours of unbelievably painstaking effort to put together. It may seem like a long way round the barn, but to me it was just what I had to do to make it work, and I never wondered whether it was worth it. When I had the finished thing, and I had created something where nothing existed before, believe me it was worth it.

Later I starting writing to key. I did wonder whether it would sound any different written that way, but it didn't. Much later I learned a bit of guitar, just enough to record with. I was able to record and edit my own loops, which I could then use as though they were prerecorded loops. Later still, when I was using BandLab, I recorded straight into the track. At this point lines were becoming blurred between orchestration and performance, even though there would still be virtual instruments and/or prerecorded loops.