J. Anthony Allen introduces orchestration, the art of blending instrument colors to create texture and timbre. The course splits into two parts: first learning what each instrument does, then how to combine them. He uses Brahms's Symphony No. 1 to show how choosing low horns over flutes changes a passage's entire sound.
Okay. So a lot of people have been asking me for an orchestration class, and I've done a little poking to figure out what exactly your thoughts on orchestration are and what you're looking to learn. And I've kind of boiled it down to two things I think most people are looking for in an orchestration class. One is the ability to write music for the orchestra, primarily for the purposes of film scoring or something like that. That's great. The second thing is to make their orchestra music sound good through the. Through whatever daw they're using. So getting a sample library and a good orchestra sample library to sound really good, we can do that, too. So traditionally, the way orchestration is taught in a university is kind of two parts. It's a class called Instrumentation in Orchestration. So the first part is instrumentation, and that's what we're primarily going to cover first. And the second part is orchestration. So in instrumentation, you learn what all the instruments are and how they work. We'll talk more about that in just a second. In orchestration, you learn how to craft all of those sounds into a blend, into a painting, how to take all those different colors. Each instrument gives you a different color, how to take all those colors and paint with them. It's a little bit different than writing the music. A lot of people write music just on, like, two staves, just on, like, a piano grand staff. Right. And then they orchestrate it, meaning they write it out for the full orchestra, or they write it out for some other combination of instruments. You don't always have to be working with a full orchestra. Orchestration can mean like, I'm going to write this out for string quartet or wind quintet or something like that. It kind of just basically means rewrite it for more instruments. So what we're going to look at is, in orchestration, is how different sounds combine. Looking at what we have here, we have Brahms Symphony Number one here. So you can see here that he's got the horns on this low note and then two other horns coming in on this melody. Why is that in the lower horns instead of the upper, upper horns when this is sonically higher pitched? Why would you do that? There's actually really good logic to that. And that is something we can talk about in orchestration. We have here the flutes and oboes in this nice harmony, moving around in rhythmic unison, and the strings in the two violins and octaves. What kind of sound does that create? And when combined with those flutes up in the same range, what kind of sound does that create? That's orchestration. That's what that's all about, is how all of these sounds work together to make a unique palette of colors, I guess. So that's orchestration. But we're going to start with instrumentation. So let's go to a new video and let's talk about what we mean when we talk about instrumentation.
