In this instructional segment, J. Anthony Allen discusses the prevalent use of lush string sections in Hollywood film scores, tracing its aesthetic back to Holst’s The Planets. He contrasts digital sampled strings with real orchestral strings, outlining the process of converting a sampled mock‑up into a live performance: traditional notation, creating individual parts, preparing a conductor’s score, and securing an orchestra. Allen highlights the practical option of hiring a Central European ensemble—particularly in Prague—where a full recording session can be obtained for roughly $5,000, a fraction of U.S. costs. He then introduces three fundamental techniques for thickening a melody with strings—polyrhythmic, monorhythmic, and accompanimental—and previews deeper exploration of each method in subsequent videos. The overall aim is to equip film composers with concrete strategies for writing, arranging, and realizing rich string harmonies in their scores.
Chapters
All right, up next, let's talk about working with strings a little more, a little more detail. This is one of the things that when someone gets into composition, especially film scoring, I see that they latch onto first and with the most vigor. People really associate a big lush orchestra with film soundtracks. And that can be true and not true. It's true in the big budget Hollywood stuff like it has to have a big orchestra, mostly because historically you can kind of all draw that back to Holst, the composer Holst and the Planets. A lot of film scoring, that big Hollywood sound of film scoring is influenced by the host planets pieces. That's why you get those big horns and all that other stuff. But I won't go into that too in too much. That's very opinionated statement. Well, not super opinionated, but pretty opinionated statement. But I encourage you to check out that piece. The Planets is the name of the piece by Holst. Anyway, so when we hear these big Hollywood movie soundtracks, we associate this big string section, and I've already talked about doing that digitally with sampled strings. And one thing we could go into is how to convert your sampled string orchestra into a real string orchestra. That's something that can be done. It's tricky because there's a lot that goes into that. First, you have to notate everything in traditional notation. That's not extremely difficult. But then you have to make parts. You have to make sure everything is notated in a very clear way. You have to make a different part for each player. You have to make a score for the conductor. And then the hardest part, you have to get an orchestra. So we're not going to go into huge amount of details on how to do that. That's a whole separate class. But I will. While we're on the topic, I will tell you that what a lot of people end up doing is you can't just take an orchestra piece, whether it's for a film or just music on its own. You can't just take it to your local neighborhood orchestra and say, play it. If they're a professional orchestra, they schedule their rehearsals and everything two, three years ahead of time. So they don't just do that. But what you can do is if you have some money, you can go to somewhere like Prague. There is an orchestra in Prague. I can't remember the name of it, if it's the Czech Philharmonic or what, but you can just hire them for not an insane amount of money. I mean, it's expensive. But relative to hiring an American orchestra, it's fairly cheap. I want to say it's in the ballpark of like $5,000 to do a full recording session. That's really cheap as compared to what it would cost you here in the US So that's something that a lot of people do. So keep that in mind. But for now, let's focus on how to actually write for strings. Well, so what I'm talking about in this section is let's say we have a melody, like a lush melody that we love, and we want to add orchestra to accompany that melody, to fill it out, you know, to make it bigger and thicker. There's a couple different ways we do that. I'm going to kind of boil this down into three different techniques we can use to fill out that sound. And those techniques are polyrhythmic, monorhythmic, and accompanimental. Let's go over those three terms in a little more detail in the next video, and then we'll dive into some examples. And working on a piece that uses this technique of building a big, lush orchestra sound,
