Finishing Up The Full Orchestral Arrangement Project

Before summer break started, my last post was an update on an orchestration project that I’d been working on at the time. I still actually ended up finishing it over the summer despite not writing about it. It’d be weird if I didn’t actually write about how it ended up so that’s what I’m going to be writing about this week.

In the last post, the basic layout for the climax was decided. We had the percussion playing a bit faster and the cellos and double bass were still doing the same thing as they were before the climax. We also had the violins, horns, and some winds all layering the melody with the rest of the winds doing runs. The things we added were a trumpet section that was playing chords, timpani, and a glockenspiel. I had the trumpets change chords before the downbeat in order to make them sound less square. The timpanis added more impact and the glockenspiel was just a little something extra that I felt like putting in.

After the climax continues for a little bit we started to work on how we wanted to move towards the ending. The way we went about it was building tension and then finishing with the orchestra playing one big chord. So the climax transitions into a back and forth between the violins and horns playing swells and the rest of the orchestra doing a staccato type call and response in between. For the percussion, we took out the timpani and a few other elements of the percussion to lessen the impact from the climax section. The chords we used went higher in a stepping type fashion as well as the swells. After a few measures the orchestra comes together and ends on one big chord.

Once we finished with the orchestration we worked on setting the levels of the instruments right because for some reason after we exported the track some of the instruments were a bit quieter than we were hearing them in Logic. One of the things I would probably change if I were to do this type of style again would probably be to extend the length of some of the sections. In my opinion, some parts go by a bit too quickly and you can’t really remember what each section sounds like. However, that was kind of to be expected in an exercise like this project. Another thing I would do would be spending more time with the programming of a few instruments so they would sound a tiny bit more natural.

Overall, the project ended up better than I initially thought it would sound. There were a few times were I was having a hard time thinking about what I wanted some of the instruments to be doing, but I think everything turned out alright. I ended up learning a lot more about different ways you can use the instruments in an orchestra as well as how to develop sections of a track. It definitely took a bit of while to write out, but I think if I were to do things again it would go by a bit faster now.

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