3 lessons from studying orchestral music

Several years ago I hit a plateau in my music production. I had mostly been focused on electronic production.

So I decided to study something new: Orchestral music.

I bought courses on orchestral composing and began breaking down reference tracks.

And my world was blown open.

I learned more about composing well-crafted ideas in a few months than I had in the previous few years... and I thought I was already pretty good!

Today I want to talk about 3 big lessons I took away from this study that helped me with every track I produced in any style.

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Lesson 1: Write Better Concepts By Limiting Your Note Choices

I learned that everything can come from your chord progression.

By limiting your note choices to only notes that are inside the chord you are currently on, it can actually make you more creative and help you craft concepts that work every single time.

If you only get 3 notes during this bar of music... how will you use them creativity?

You need to use melodic phrasing, note length, arpeggiation, rhythm, call and response…

This is how orchestral music forces you to learn strong writing - you don't get to hide behind novel sounds.

Instead, you have to rely on well-structured compositions and thoughtful arrangements.

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Lesson 2: Connect With The Personality of Sounds

Orchestral music has a time-proven and clear sound palette:

Strings, Brass, Piano, Woodwinds, Percussion.

Of course you can add anything else, but these instruments form the core.

This means that you have to learn how each of these instruments feels and the emotions they are great at evoking.

For example, the brass is powerful and strong, often having a place as the final instrument in a piece that can bring us to a climax.

Strings are royal and beautiful, a flexible “base” component to almost anything.

This is an extremely important connection to make, especially if you are used to electronic production.

In electronic production, we have an almost unlimited palette of sounds.

So when you are forced into this kind of limitation, it helps you think differently about each sound and get more in touch with their emotions.

This actually helped me a ton when it came to sound design for electronic music too because it gave me a new way to “connect” with the emotions of my sounds.

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Lesson 3: Dynamics Are The “Lifegiver”

Write a chord in a string VST and it will sound pretty bad.

Add volume automation to make that chord “swell” in and out, and all of a sudden, it sounds alive and beautiful.

Play a piano chord arpeggio and leave all the velocities the same, and it will sound pretty bad.

Create “performance” by changing the velocities of each note, and all of a sudden, it’s emotional and vibrant.

This is the power of dynamics.

In electronic music, I could “hide” behind interesting or novel sound textures as an excuse to not need dynamics. But in orchestral, you cannot do that - dynamics become everything.

Having to practice this made me a better electronic producer too because it gave me a new dimension to think in.

This is part of why today I can make basic “init” patches in Serum sound full of life… because I know how to program them with dynamics to make them come alive.

Dynamics are the secret to making “stock” sounds better than the most expensive plugins in the world.

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I hope these lessons inspire you with new perspectives when approaching your next project, or to spend more time with orchestral!

There are lots of great free VSTs you can download if you’re lacking tools. Just search Google.