J. Anthony Allen teaches orchestration starting with strings and winds, covering each instrument's range, how to write idiomatically for it, and common mistakes. He includes practical details like preparing parts and page turns, plus techniques to make sampled orchestras sound real.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Orchestration. You may know me by my many, many music theory classes available here and by about a hundred other classes available here. One of the things I've gotten asked from literally thousands of students is for an orchestration course. And I've put off doing it until now because it's a very dense topic, it's a very deep topic, and I had to design a curriculum that I felt really good for, diving deep into orchestration. But I think I'm there, so. And you found it. So, first of all, here are a couple orchestra pieces of mine. I've won a bunch of awards for writing orchestra music, and I'm pretty proud of the orchestra music I've written in this class. What we're going to do is we're going to start off the way that most college classes teach orchestration, which is with the topic of instrumentation. This is like the way I like to explain instrumentation is when someone comes up to you as a composer and says, so you're a composer. Do you play every instrument? You can just say, yes, you have my permission to do that. But the real answer is no, I don't play every instrument, but I know how they all work. That's what instrumentation is. So we need to learn how each instrument works, and then we're going to go deep into orchestration. So in this section, we're going to focus on the strings and the winds. We're going to learn about every instrument in those two groups, how they work, what their ranges are, what. What you can write for them that will sound good, and what. Where you can get into trouble with writing for them. And we're also going to talk in this class about writing for the orchestra in general experiences I've had of working with orchestras and how you. How you prepare parts, how you think about page turns, all the nitty gritty stuff that you have to know. And even if you're not planning on working with a real orchestra, all of this is really valuable stuff. If you're planning on incorporating like a string section into electronic tracks or anything like that, I'm going to talk a lot about how that works as the sections of this course unfold. And we'll devote a bunch of time just to talking about how to make your synthetic orchestra, sampled orchestras, sound very real. So join me on the adventure. We're diving in right now with some basic stuff about how the orchestra works. And then we're going to hit the ground running with the strings. So let's do it. Sam.
