Writing pitches isn’t the same as writing words. The approach is drastically different, especially when writing historical fiction. You’ll read pages upon pages of facts. You’ll log them down for future use. Then you start to write. You look at the facts. You consider the scene or situation  you’re writing about, and you back in your chair and stare - at something. Since I write in my studio, sometimes I stare at the monitor. Other times I look out the window and stare at a squirrel. Or I’ll go do something useful and non-artistic like go wash the dishes.

All the while, I’m running the story through my head, visualizing it, and writing dialog. When I’m settled with it, I go back to the keyboard and start writing.

You can do all that work and only come up with one good sentence. Or maybe a good paragraph. Or if it’s a good day, a few good pages with really snappy dialog.

Music doesn’t work the same way other than that you do think about what you’re writing and you do mull it over, especially if you have time to write and you’re not under a whip cracking deadline.

For the past couple of days I’ve been transitioning back to writing notes. It’s not been as easy as I thought it would be. So to get back into the groove of writing pitches, I’ve been working on a project I started for my counterpoint class called Variations on a Theme NOT by Handel. It’s a 12-bar theme in Bb. And even though the blues operate on a 12-bar structure, it’s not a blues. Excuse me, it ain’t a blues.

The idea is to push the theme with basic counterpoint to demonstrate to students the amount of options they have with a single theme, starting by continually rewriting the bass line and so, creating new harmonizations of the same melody.

That’s the first stage.

NOT By Handel starts on the pitch D above high C (a pitch a soprano can easily knock out, but one that an amateur alto might have to stretch for) and ends a major third lower on the Bb.

This provides some rather interesting harmonic possibilities.

In the style taught by Johann Joseph Fux, my D can be part of three triads: Bb Major, D Min, and G Min. Or as a jazzer might appreciate, Ionian, Phrygian and Aeolian.

Oh the melody stays the same
While the bass changes the game

What a clever lyricist to come up with such an astute musical observation.

“Thank you!” I say to myself.

Well, no matter how self-congratulatory it is, it’s true. You can keep the melody the same, and by shifting the bass line into different modes, you change the feel of the theme and what it communicates.

Change can be dramatic or subtle.

Of course, the bass line is just part of the story. The next action is most critical - selecting chords that go with the bass line and melody. Now in this style, for now, you’re restricted to triads. Take, for example, the pitches G and Bb. Since you’re restricted to triads in the diatonic key, there are only two choices. The G-Bb team can either be part of a G Minor triad or an Eb Major Triad.

Heavens to Mergatroid! Only two choices!?

Yes, but it’s ample. Just this simple restriction in 12-bars will easily yield at least dozen different options - again, same bass line, same theme, but different chord choices.

Each will make its own statement. Some with elegance. Others rather klutzily.

Sometimes a klutz is just that. A klutz. A composer can write himself into a corner just the way a prose writer can. As with words, so with pitches and lines.

Sometimes some ideas just don’t lead anywhere. And when that happens - erase. Or start again with a clean sheet of music paper, and keep your un-child for later examination.

This process allows for the wedding of theme, bass line and harmony - without a pre-nup.

Once you’ve completed a series of contrapuntal magnum opai (or is it opuses?), go to lunch. Seriously. Leave the piano (or the electronic keyboard where I mostly work) and befriend a banana. Walk outside, and if you’re not in L.A., breathe deep. Get some real air in those lungs. Shake your head. Jump up and down. Do something so that everyone on your block knows that you’re creative.

There’s a valid reason for this. A recording engineer I know says that by going outside, you “clean” your hearing in a way similar that eating certain types of food at a great dinner cleans your palate before the next course.

It’s true. A little break like that, especially going outside, resets the inner ear so that when you sit down and replay what you just wrote, you’re more much more objective about it.

Here, I believe, is yet another difference between a composer and a prose writer. A prose writer will often have an editor to review the manuscript. The composer has himself, unless he’s fortunate as Gustav Holst was to have Ralph Vaughan Williams as a best friend, so that the two could send their manuscripts back and forth for honest critique without the fear that one would steal what the other had written.

If you lack such a relationship, it’s only you. So you learn to be objective and not to fall in love with your notes.

As you play through them, you’ll find one or possibly more to your liking that you can do something with. If your harmony is in decent shape, and you know your orchestration devices, you can take this first stage theme and variations and score it with integrity.

If you’re fortunate enough to have some decent orchestral sample libraries, you’ll put some early effort in and discover just how far two lines can go in an orchestra. They can actually go quite far.

That’s because you have

1. The melody
2. The bass line
3. The harmony

From these three basic elements you can have sustained harmony following the harmonic rhythm of what you created, and if your theme is pretty good, you can also develop the theme, too.

This, of course, is the old way. But it works pretty good.

The newer way is to just create your theme, harmonize the melody, and then work out the bass line. Then reharmonize the melody and rework another a set of bass lines.

I switch between the two depending on the writing situation. But of the two, I tend to like the “older” method the best because in the end I find it yields more interesting choices to with from and ultimately, to score from.

At any rate, I find the process and the discipline reinvigorating. And when no one is looking, I occasionally drop in a chord from another mode.

Just to stir the juices, of course.

It was with great pleasure and relief that I posted, today, the final lessons in my Marketing Your Music and You class. What started out to be a “simple” four-lecture class turned into a major extravaganza going for nine lessons and lots of unplanned hours of preparation and teaching.

What prompted me to expand so much?

The question is really, “Who prompted me to expand so much?”

Jim Collins. I have to blame it on him. He wrote this book called How the Mighty Fall. After guzzling it down in 24 hours, I knew I had to rewrite everything I had previously planned. Jim Collins’ books have that kind of effect on me and have since he first wrote Built to Last and Good to Great.

OK, they’re both business books, just don’t call me a suit.

I burned my pinstripes after I left marketing for good and moved to L.A. to make it in Avocadoland as a composer. Thus far I’ve not looked back at all with regret on that move since it allowed me to dress coolly (a look combining Timberland, LL Bean, and the Oakland Raiders sports shop).

Little did I know how much having a marketing background after music school would help me in Once Upon An Orange Grove. I would love to just focus on my art and label myself as a classical composer as John Adams did in one post in his blog.

But I know too much.

I knew long ago that radio stations computerized their play lists and so the need to do sweeps might not really have been, be, or are necessary. I knew that certain types of music rarely/never got airplay, like film music, most classical recordings, a majority of Christian music, jazz, broadway show tunes, or just any other music genre you can imagine.

I had my own reel of TV commercials and I’ve done more than a few radio spots where I also did the voice overs.

Long ago I learned who got paid and who got asked, or told, to work for free, or they’d find someone else to work for free just to get a credit on the resume. I also had one other distinct advantage, a debt to which I clearly owe to my father who was a math teacher - I could work a slide rule, which meant, I could also work a calculator to figure out the deal.

The idea of taking control of your composing destiny came across to some I knew as a heresy, from academia to Hollywood. There’s this business thing we’re not supposed to talk about, which I found rather amazing considering the kind of negotiations you have outside of music where everything is discussed down to the hair follicles on your head. But this kind of talk seemed and still seems to be taboo.

To some, it was an affront that a composer would ask such basic questions as:

1. How much money am I making on a digital download?
2. Why aren’t I earning money when that movie I scored shows up on cable?
3. Who decided it was OK for me to make 30% less on my music on iTunes?
4. Etc.

All of these are fair business questions. That so many are afraid to ask them points out that like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, we have done a poor job of listening to Papa Leopold and remembering that composers are entrepreneurs, just like actors. We are afraid of rejection. We are afraid that if we speak up the creative marketers will dismiss us and get someone else who will be more malleable and do exactly as they say.

Here’s the hard reality I was able to teach my students: if you want to stay in the game for a lifetime doing what you love, you have to accept that the most money is made by the companies marketing the creativity, not the creators themselves.

You change the game by marketing your own creativity by building a business that markets you and your works.

That means you’re a business person. Sorry dude, them’s the facts.

It’s the reality I had to face, and it’s the reality others, some very late in the game, are now beginning to face, accept and speak up about because their fees are dwindling and getting paid is getting harder and harder.

Now think about this for a second.

Talent like Mel Gibson, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Tom Hanks, Kenneth Branagh, and others, produce themselves. Wagner, Handel, Puccini, and Britten (to name four), produced their own works. How many country and rock artists produce themselves?

So what’s the problem with composers?

I can tell you in a word that echoes throughout academia and the composing community as a whole: commercial.

To take control of your composing destiny, as you hear it so often explained, is a betrayal of the composing muse. There’s just something inelegant about writing and marketing your own music, and making money at it. But what I’ve found that’s inelegant about it, is that the composer or artist who would promote themselves is moving ahead of those who lack the inclination to put out the same self-determinative efforts. The result is that their colleagues, to be blunt about it, are jealous. Of course, no one wants to admit this. What’s more popular to do is to divest yourself of the angst of self-promotion by saying you’re too busy doing other things (meaning you’re artistically above it all) while letting your wife (or husband) do the marketing work for you.

I was very candid about these subjects in this multimedia class I taught. Maybe too much so. But I find it troubling that so many want to be successful with their music but fear in setting out because of concerns of what their peers might think or say.

So I put it on the table for thought and discussion.

Back to Jim Collins. His book so entranced me, the first two lessons were about failure. Why did people fail in the music business? That’s where we started, because if you understand why some failed, you could understand why some succeeded. Shortly after the class started Michael Jackson died. It was surreal looking at Jackson’s life compared to Jim Collins’ check list. We moved through principles of music marketing, how to plan, quality control and producing yourself, your web site, and a few odd ends.

I finally finished recording about 4:30PM, maybe closer to 5. Can’t remember. What I know is that it’s done. Finally. And I’m glad this first wave of students stuck with me as I revised, rewrote, and re-recorded. And I feel spent from it. Once I shut off recording, I could feel the “low” setting in.

After I had finished, Caroline came in and told me the Christmas tree was up and the lights were on it.

The other day I did my first review of LASS (L.A. Scoring Strings) at Sonic Control.TV. I said it was the new workhorse string library and I meant it.

When I first listened to it I was really taken aback as I was, frankly, expecting a much more warmer sound after hearing all one of the demos for several months. I wasn’t overly impressed with the newer demos either as they didn’t exactly spotlight the string section the way I wanted to hear it.

So far I’ve done two tests that really stress string libraries.

The first, since LASS is billed as being able to do divisi, was to start with divisi examples. In short, will this library let me move to an advanced level in writing electronically that more accurately mirrors the way I’d write for live orchestra.

It will or it won’t.

First test was with a copy I had acquired of Nelson Riddle’s arrangement of Unforgettable for Nat “King” Cole. This arrangement in places had 9-part vertical harmony. It was written for a smaller studio-sized string section, one that because of how LASS was recorded, I could potentially emulate. What I really wanted to see was how well LASS would handle 4-part triads in the violins in the upper registration. By four-part triads, I mean the line is voiced down in triads with the melody an octave below.

If LASS could do that, even if I have to “freeze tracks” to record the entire string section, I’d achieve with one library what typically takes several to do - over a period of days and weeks, not minutes and hours.

Well, I was shocked! LASS pulled it off. No buzz and no funny organ sound that you often get when just working with a single sampled string library.

The next step was adding in the low strings. That gave me 9 parts. LASS worked as did Logic 8.02. No crashes.

My next test came from my book How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite where I used the opening to The Fairy Garden. Fairy Garden opens with the strings in four-part vertical harmony, using four-part counterpoint with just Vlns 1, Vlns 2, Violas, and Cellos. This is one of my acid tests for individual string libraries.

Once you get sampled strings into vertical harmony passages, you find out quickly what the library will and won’t do. Most of the libraries I’ve tried previously have all tanked on these opening bars.

Well, LASS pulled it off.

Mercy me!

Mark Northam has added the Professional Orchestration blog to the home page of Film Music Magazine. Caroline and I took a break last night and went to the movies to see Julie and Julia. The movie spoke to me on many levels, particularly Julia Child learning French to read French cookbooks and to learn French cooking.

This is almost what it’s like studying orchestration from the Koechlin books which are all written in classical French. Even French people have a hard time translating it. So I’ve been trying to translate parts of that plus Durand’s book on Composition using Google translate. Oh it’s so slow.

But I learned from the French, apparently, that their attitude is that if you want to learn from them, learn their language. In many areas the French are pinnacles of instruction, especially music and cooking. And they’re terrible at wanting to see American translations of their works.

The movie was also a good instruction set about blogging.

For the Professional Orchestration blog, I’ve felt the burden of doing mini-reviews, recommendations, comments on orchestration, et al. It felt more like a burden than a joy. So early this morning, after taking a break during July, I deleted all my categories except one.

Since for many of us orchestration requires using sample libraries and loops, too, I’ll just lump into one big verbal vat!

So there you have it: one category to rule them all!

I decided to ask Caroline for a graphic favor that I was sure would only take an hour.

And it did. Plus three additional hours for a total of four. If tonight I were a dog, I would not be comfortably sleeping by the fireplace. Instead I’d be outside flicking mosquitoes with my tail.

To explain. We publish a document called the Strings Position Booklet. So I thought, “How hard could be it be to colorize the strings on the violin to match the Spectratone chart?”

It was four hours hard. And it was four hours hard because I kept asking, “Could we…?”

We could. And Caroline did so with great grace.

So what I got after four hours was a test document showing the Spectratone chart colors for the violin printed out in 4-color in the first position.

We’ll see what we see!

It’s July 4th and I got up late today. We fixed an easy meal on the grill and settled in to watch the concerts. Which of course reminded me I hadn’t spent any time with the Spectratone chart in the past few days.

I decided to start out with Professional Orchestration 2A - Orchestrating the Melody Within the String Section. I started out on page 5 with Elgar’s Enigma Variations example for Violins 1 + Violins 2 in unison. Caroline bequeathed me her colored pencils. So I’m set up in the den with a bright light behind me.

I’m using for my table, a mini-server table thingey that’s wide enough for a plate, a glass, and the ultimate power tool in the universe - the TV remote. On the floor next to me - a chilled Diet Coke. I’m stylin’.

I plow forward working out the coloration of the string section. Lange’s principles come roaring through as I work out this first section. However, I have to admit that with my own book, I prefer the PDF version for analysis since all I have to do is print what pages I need. And if I screw up looking worse than I did as kid in Romper Room, I can print out another clean page!

Why do I say this? Because I have these dysfunctional little colorized Rorschach-like blobs in my orchestration book, that’s why.

OK, so I orchestrate better than I color. Shoot me!

Because the Violins are sul G, Lange’s insights come alive as you see through colors how the intensity builds as you go higher up the overtone series on the G-string.

Coloring the violas, cellos and basses brings up another observation - fingerings. Since the Spectratone chart colorizes the intensity on each string, you now observe the different fingering options open to the string player.

Good stuff.

This is my first time in a week where I felt I could breathe a little. Since I’m finishing up Professional Orchestration 2B, I decided to compare what I’ve learned so far from Lange to Rimsky’s range chart where Rimsky breaks the registers into low, medium, high and very high, and then gives some adjectives to describe the colors.

In many places, Lange and Rimsky (both of whom were largely self taught and also geniuses in their own right) agree where the color breaks are, but in many places, Lange is more precise. Lange’s precision comes from covering the saxes when others don’t, brass and their mutes, and the individual strings of each stringed instrument.

It’s like Lange has put a microscope on the sound produced.

Caroline has loaned me a set of her good colored pencils that she uses in her drawings. I’ve colored in the range chart using Lange’s system. So now I have by range and octaves colorized where all the woodwinds blend and can be combined as colors.

What I can see so far, he’s dead on.

It’s 6AM. I’m finally getting up with the sun instead of going to bed with it. I’ve made the coffee and I’m at the kitchen table with the Spectratone chart unfolded and next to it is one of those Professional Orchestration Sketchbooks we sell. And pencils with erasers that actually erase, too.

My objective is to block out on the score pad in the Sketchbook the instruments and their ranges for each color. I’m putting two colors per page. How long can this take? A snap!

TWO HOURS LATER
OK, it wasn’t a snap. And I think I’m getting a buzz from the coffee.

I’m about half way through and I need to stop for a bit. Lange is meticulous. Plus the chart is a little bulky and since the paper has aged (the chart is 20 years old), the colors are darker and so, hard to read unless you’re in direct light.

All the instrument ranges are marked by a numbered piano keyboard. Since this was created in 1943, the pitches don’t follow the MIDI keyboard. OK, the bottom note of the piano is A, it gets the number 1 instead of the MIDI-fied note number 21.

Purple, for example, means mellow. So I have to fnd all the instruments that have purple in them, signifying a mellow sound, then what piano note numbers they fall between, then convert to pitches, then write it to score. Once I’ve done this, I now have, according to Lange, like timbres I can blend to create immediate combinations and doublings.

I’m feeling like the Julia Child of orchestration instruction!

This is tedious, but wonderful. I’m feeling something of what Champollion must have felt while he was studying and trying to translate the Rosetta Stone (the actual stone, not the company). Lange is detailed and precise.

The strings are the most interesting because he applies the colors to individual strings. This is a level of precision no one teaches anyplace.

Composers are always looking for ways to more effective communicate with producers in a language we both can understand. Playing with the Spectratone chart really gives the impression that if you take the time to work out the ranges and see what sounds where, you can play some chords and stuff and say, “Well, if you’re looking for green, these are green colors and sounds.”

I have to try this.

It’s a big chart with the whole orchestra, including muted brass and the saxes, on the same page. So it’s for any style of music I want to write in.

It’s organized by something like nine colors. The colors span the range of the instrument and indicate intensity. So the higher the musician plays up the harmonic overtone series, the more intense the sound and where the intensity changes there’s a new color.

That alone is a great help. But Lange has gone an additional step. Not all the instruments have all the colors. According to the little booklet that comes with it, these colors also symbolize blendability with other instruments. So where you have the range of Purple, for example, you can group all the instruments together to create combinations and doublings. On the other hand. you can write purple for one group then take a contrasting color like yellow and write something with those instruments.