One of the greatest if not vastly under appreciated services to come out of Film Music Magazine is its annual Salary and Rate Survey that’s been ongoing for over a decade. The most current version was released at the end of Second Quarter and it’s an eye opener, especially for those of us who’ve been [...]

Now that we have Audiobro’s LASS, EastWest’s Hollywood Strings, the Vienna Symphonic Library, and the soon-to-be-released Miroslav Vitous String Ensembles, we’ve arrived at the place in music technology where the composer really must know string bowings and how to plan them. Previously, we really didn’t have this option. At best, we had available a sustained [...]

I’ve been going through Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. There are too many good lessons not to share. I’m starting off with the combination of Violins and Flutes in ppp. The Dynamic Equivalents guideline is that at p one department of strings absorbs one (1) flute. Is this true? Yes, and it [...]

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. [...]