Orchestration isn’t just for those interested in classical music or film score. The concepts you can learn from orchestration affect all western music. Concepts like combining instrument textures across different octaves can be found in synthesis, for example. So how do you bridge the gap and make orchestration accessible?

As part of the trimester break’s activities, SAE Institute has offered a range of creative masterclasses tailored to the content students have been asking for. With the Bachelor of Songwriting and Music Production now on offer at SAE, it was the perfect time to dive into the world of scoring to film, with Stephen sharing his technical knowledge and creative decision making on his score for Andrew Huang’s Spacetime. Scoring the clip specifically for the event, to allow students to see the creative process on a clip they could score themselves, Steve walked them through the early steps of breaking up the scene into key focuses, developing the early sketch and motifs, fleshing out the track through orchestration and instrumentation, and finally polishing the track with music production techniques, like transitions, effects and mixing.

When first breaking into the game, or when you start to branch out and contemplate that next purchase, it is a daunting task that awaits you, sifting through hours of YouTube videos of instrument walkthroughs and demos. It is easier nowadays to become paralysed when deciding on a sample library than by learning the DAW that controls them. So, how do you choose one library?

There honestly hasn’t been a better time to break into the world of music composition. With the advent of technology and the internet, there has been an abundance of music and a blurring of lines between styles, genres and the previous chasm that was the divide between professional and novice. As we head into the 3rd decade of the century, the availability and accessibility of quality compositional tools is only getting better, with so many options available to suit you from student to master.

As you begin your film score compositional journey, you may start out with no real idea of where to begin, but as you complete more and more projects a unique workflow that works for you will begin to appear. Nevertheless, there are some commonalities between composers, steps that we all inevitably land on, whether in the same order or not. Whether you maintain the workflow I share you with you or not, you may find value in some of the considerations below, helping you to fast track your next score or think outside what you have already completed to find new ways of expressing the film’s storyline.