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 [...]

In the process of getting out our 50th Anniversary Edition of Joseph Wagner’s Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook, I ran into Lance Bowling of Cambria Music who had been one of Dr. Wagner’s students. Lance is a fountainhead of information. We’ve already spent several hours on the phone. While we were talking about Dr. Wagner, [...]

Mottl assigned the melody to the Violas + Cellos. Both can be in unison in the same register for this passage. Mottll then creates a second counter line using basic counterpoint to create a two-note against one-note rhythmic line. The line’s pitches are entirely those of Chabrier’s theme. It’s assigned to two harps in unison [...]

Being the investigative researcher he is, Max Tofone, who newly engraved Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook, discovered that the Austrian composer/conductor Felix Mottl, who was an expert in conducting Wagner, had orchestrated Chabrier’s Bourree Fanstasque and found the complete score online. I then followed up and found a complete recording of Mottl’s orchestration on iTunes.
Here’s [...]

Today I started scoring the Bourree Fantasque excerpt for strings for the 50th Anniversary re-release of Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook by Joseph Wagner. Here’s a screen shot of it:

For the first six and a half bars, the melody falls into the range allowing for Vlns 1 + Vlns 2 + Violas + Cellos. This [...]

For the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook by composer Joseph Wagner, we’ve been doing a major overhaul of the book including having composer friends of mine orchestrating eleven bars from a piece by Chabrier called Bourree Fantasque.
Besides myself, two other composers have gotten their examples in: Billy Martin [...]

Briefly, Project SAM’s Symphobia 1.1 update is good one since it not only fixes stuff, but adds new content along with the new Kontakt 2.2.5 player. Note that the 2.2.5 player works with Kontakt 3 and Kontakt 3.5 but does not work with Kontakt 2. 
I saw reports that 2.2.5 was having issues in both Steinberg’s [...]

We noted that John Williams uses the C-Trumpet in his scores. One of the best references available on the C-Trumpet is from the Vienna Academy at the Vienna Symphonic Library web site.
Read. Learn. And hear demos under PLAYING TECHNIQUES.
The Vienna Academy is a great resource so be sure to bookmark it.

Reading the preliminary test results from other composers on the Kontakt 3.5 update beta that’s just been released suggests that the Mac Pro Nehalem is now the dominant music computer with the oft wished request of being able to do it all on one system, pretty much here.
The new 64-bit Kontakt 3.5, in standalone mode, [...]

This is the opening voicing in John Williams’ Liberty Fanfare (which you can download from iTunes): Trumpets - Trombones + French horns. The “formula” reads that the trumpets are doubled an octave below by Trombones and French horns. Musically, the D triad is in root position doubled down an octave. The top stave [...]