Posts tagged with
bowing

Part 2 This is the second half of my discussion of the piece I recorded with Hollywood Scoring, where we look at the melodic section of the piece from bar 32 onward. Be sure to check out Part 1 so everything here makes sense. Main Theme I recently bought a new piano and walk past it on every trip to the kitchen. I remember as soon as I got confirmation that this session was happening, I was on my way to make some vegemite on…
Read More

I have been on many rants about the abuse of tenuto in current notion practice. I see scores needlessly littered with them. They can be of use, but in my experience 98.254% of them I see out in the wild are redundant. In my film orchestrating and arranging I rarely use them. I can go an entire 100-minute score and count the number of tenutos on my fingers. I have been trying to work out what they mean in all contexts, and they could mean…
Read More

Introduction My friends at Hollywood Scoring wanted to test out bringing their own recording gear into the iconic United Recording Studio A, which has been 'closed' since the beginning of 2023. They invited myself and a few others to write for a small orchestra. I was also on hand all day to conduct or help in the booth for other composers who conducted themselves. I consulted with contractor Noah Gladstone and engineer Adam Michalak on what ensemble would be best for the day. We came…
Read More

In Part II of my chat with Endre Granat, we discuss some of the mechanics of playing a stringed instrument and Endre demonstrates standard bowing techniques. He breaks them down into three categories. Legato Staccato 'Bouncing' Legato is the default bow stroke; no additional notation is needed apart from slurs if you want more than one note per bow. Staccato is a short, fast stroke where the bow starts and ends on the string. 'Bouncing' is a stroke where the bow starts and ends above,…
Read More

Make sure you have read dynamic relationships before this article. What information do we have here? Three things: a pitch, a duration, and a dynamic. Pitch is not important to this discussion so let's not worry about it; everything we talk about applies for any pitch that is considered to be in the standard range. If we give this information to a computer, it would give us a waveform that looks like this: A rectangle. But what does…
Read More

There are many cool French and Italian terms for different bowing techniques. The texts have explanations of each of the different bow strokes, but these explanations range from excellent to confusing to plain contradictory (just google détaché). These terms refer to things the section does 'under the hood.' As an orchestrator, it is important to understand these, as they are the rudiments of string playing. Remember that in the end, though, the important thing is to know how to notate your intent; the section will…
Read More