Here are some details pertaining to post no. 35, which I plainly said I would provide all the way up there in post no. 64. This is all provided for FREE, which is mathematically much less than 15,000 smackers.
The video:
5 Orchestration Hacks To Make You An Amazing Film Composer
“Hack" no. 5
This one states that there are only two “real" bass instruments in the orchestra: double basses and tuba.
This is followed by a peculiar and unhelpful definition of “real bass instrument”, plus vague and incorrect assertions regarding balance with respect to the other bass instruments (
but supposedly not really bass! instruments!). He doesn’t even mention dynamics, footprint, or texture, even though he’s talking about balance. Whut? But the real kicker is when he says that the bass trombone (and, presumably, the contrabass trombone) and the cimbasso don’t “truly have the bass power”.
If you want to understand orchestral balance, it’s an entire study all its own. It can be very elusive, and no one ever perfects it. That’s why, among many others, Beethoven, Mahler and Stravinsky revised their scores over and over, and it was mostly to fine-tune the balance. Ravel, of all people, had planned on writing a specially focused orchestration book that focused on his miscalculations in this regard. A minute or two of Youtube junk ain’t gonna cut it. The coverage here is unserious to anyone wanting to
actually learn how to orchestrate, much less become an
"Amazing Film Composer”.
“Hack" no. 4
The upshot of this one is that bright instruments are used for melodies, and mellow instruments are used for background. This once again scant coverage educates the beginning orchestrator that flutes, clarinets, and horns are to be used for background, and that trumpets, trombones, and double reeds are to be used for melodies. Again, this is the teacher for an online course costing 15,000 worthless American simoleons. Flutes and clarinets and horns are, as EVERYONE knows, used for melodies all the time, and the supposed “singer instruments” (as he calls them), are used for background elements all the time, too, though trumpet minimally. Instrumental timbre is, as everything else, a very big and very important subject that obviously deserves actual adult-level coverage.
“Hack" no. 3
This one talks about scoring in octaves, and he mentions tessitura alongside, which is boilerplate info you can find in any orchestration book, even the free ones on IMSLP—hardly worthy of a breathless three-inches-from-the-camera delivery. It’s like a Sergio Leone ECU, except very annoying and not cool. When substance is on hand, one needn’t resort to such gimmickry. Calm down. That’s not “passion”.
Anyway, at one point he asserts that clarinets have “so many overtones”, and if you double them in octaves, all those overtones will "conflict”. That’s two crucial misunderstandings of instrument acoustics, and instrument acoustics are nothing to slough off when you’re talking about real orchestration.
As is commonly known—or so I thought—clarinets in fact have FEWER overtones, not MANY (i.e., imperfect closed pipe with cylindrical bore). For all practical purposes, clarinets almost only have odd-numbered harmonics. But while they
do have even-numbered ones, too, those are very weak and negligible. A woodwind with "lots of overtones"—which in non-Youtube speak means that the more distant overtones are proportionally stronger than is the case with other instruments—would be the sax family, hence their timbre.
And speaking of timbre, talking about it without talking about dynamics is downright silly. This isn’t even deep orchestration knowledge; it’s very basic.
After this he talks about the different strings of the violin with a graphic that would lead a beginning orchestrator with the impression that the G-string is the highest string, and the E-string is the lowest. Why a simple notated graphic could not have been inserted for clarification is a mystery. He seems overall to be strenuously avoiding notation, and my guess is that he’s playing to his preferred target sales demographic of "orchestral composers" who can’t read music.
Also, he says that Violins II are “always playing on their middle strings”. Lord love a duck.
I’ve skipped over a lot of things in the parts I covered above, and the rest of the video is just more of the same, making orchestration-ally wrong assertions and vague, pointless generalizations, since orchestration that will make you an
“Amazing Film Composer” is not carried out with a random assembly of patchwork “hacks”. It’s a very knowledge, memory, and aural memory intensive subject. I can’t take anymore of this guy crawling out of the front of my computer screen with focal lengths never before thought possible, all while dispensing counterproductive nonsense.
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The next video I mentioned previously, from that “orchestration secrets” channel, is titled:
Secrets to Crafting Epic Orchestral Music. I’m at a loss why anyone would have to point the obvious problem in this one, since it sticks out like a sore thumb. Anyway, the final version of the orchestration starts at 22:54. All seems fine at first, except for the congas stave, but watch what happens on page two with the horns, and overall with the brass on the page after. They’re all notated in 3/4, but the piece is written in 6/8. (Mind you, this is not like Bernstein using 3/4 as an intermittent hypermeter in “America” in WSS. That switches back and forth for
all the instruments. It’s not a concurrent 6/8 + 3/4.) What’s worse is that the parts that are notated in 3/4 do not convey the impression of 3/4, but of 6/8. This would have to be fixed beforehand to avert wasted time and perturbed musicians in the run-thru or rehearsal. Too-clever-by-half notations, if that’s what this is supposed to be, are just asking for trouble.
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The last video I mentioned will require a couple of graphics. It’s from the Heppelmann channel (sorry about screwing up the last name previously), and the video is titled:
The Orchestral Concert Harp.
The first big problem, which is not Chaloupka related, is about how to notate pedaling, at 4:52. Harp pedalings go beneath the bass stave (or in very simple parts, can be placed between the staves), but here he has them above the treble. And the single pedal change (to B-nat. in this instance) should not be boxed. Boxed text indications are reserved for foot-crossover changes. The box alerts the harpist to the non-idiomatic deviations.
The next problem is that he notates the active pedal change early, before the string it applies to. You can’t do it this way, because if the pedal change happens early, any strings from that string class that are still audibly ringing will pop out a nasty artifact to pin on string, plus a mini-gliss, so the pedal change has to happen
as that string is plucked.
I’m going to ignore everything else and shoot straight to the Chaloupka issue. Stanley Chaloupka was a top shelf harpist, mainly for the LA Phil and studio work. His book is good. Very wise in most places, but dated in others, and he made an understandable “error” of omission at one point, on account of his personal finger spans are those of a man, and mistakes happen in every book of a technical nature. So, the finger spans he gives require clarification, without which will result in problematic passages for at least 2/3rds of harpists.
Here is the relevant screenshot from Chaloupka:
He has the max range from f1 to f4 as being 11 strings, but doesn’t advise that this is for
rolled chords only. And a note should have been added that even this is pushing it a little for a majority of harpists, so “be careful and keep it to an absolute minimum, and give a breath for placement". He’s giving his personal limitations, as a male harpist. And only then after, in the next list item he specifies that for
non arp. chords, the maximum advisable span is 10 strings. (And I should mention here that on an ordinary basis, for maximum ease of placement and execution, you really should stick to chords with a max limit of an octave, with only brief excursions up to a 9th or 10th, even for rolled chords. This will be suitable and most effective for most harpists.) The larger spans of 11 strings, and even 12 in some cases, you may come across in the harp literature tend to be early 20th century, when male harpists were dominant, and guys like Salzedo and Grandjany were writing a lot of their own harp music.
Now a screenshot from 9:12 of the video:
This is obviously a paraphrase of the Chaloupka book, if you compare, and with no additional scoring advice from personal experience, but since the presenter doesn’t understand harp writing—at least at the time of this video—he left out Chaloupka’s tardy clarifying note, which is crucial. So, following the advice from the video will cause you problems with most harpists.
To sum, maybe don't be such an easy mark. And try to ignore people on forums who presume to guide you in your thinking but are in no position of expertise to do so. They are all about, this thread included.
That's it for me then. If this is not enough detail, then it'll have to be not enough detail.
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