Orchestral Voicings Part 13: What is Balancing?

It is a life long study to develop a feeling and experience how orchestral instruments balance with each other. Especially when you are writing voicings it is essential to be able to balance these out so that there is no accidental element that sticks out or important tone that gets lostin the voicing.

The big problem with literature on orchestration and instrumentation is that they usually focus a lot on explaining the instruments and their possible playing techniques etc. but there hardly ever is a lot of discussion about the instrument's interaction with other instruments or sections in the orchestra.

There is a general tendency to apply simple formulas when balancing orchestral instruments. I mentioned these examples already in a previous part of this series but the formula of 4 Woodwind equal 2 Horns equal 1 Trumpet/Trombone is rather widely accepted as a rule of thumb.

However, it is essential to understand that this is nothing more than a rule of thumb and is far from being universally applicable.

Similarly there is another rule of thumb that says that four instruments of the same kind are twice as loud as one of them (and 16 would be twice as loud as 4). Again this is just a rule of thumb. This rule already fails at the definition of "twice as loud" as it would be similar as asking whether an object is "twice as blue" as another one or whether a smell is "twice as strong" as another one. For our senses it is hard to quantify relations between different impressions. We can notice if something is "more of a thing" than another but really can't accurately say it is twice as much. Yet, this rule has spread over the years. In a technical world we can say that a +6dB boost of a signal creates about twice the energy which probably is the origin of this relative qualification. There is also the factor at play that the human hearing is far from linear over its range. We are most sensitive in the frequency areas that are essential for understanding spoken words which is roughly around 2 kHz with decreasing sensivity in both directions from this point (decreasing even further with age).

Consequentially, creating volume balance in a voicing is considerably more than just following a few rules but should take a lot of factors into consideration, some of which are only learned with a lot of experience. 

One of the most influential yet mostly ignored factor is the acoustic space. Everybody who has experience the difference of recording in a small vs a large studio will know that volume balances behave very differently depending on the space. In a smaller space, anything that is loud in an absolute scale will dominate the sound way more than in a larger space. For instance brass instruments playing fortissimo in a small space will barely leave any room for woodwinds/strings even if they play at the peak of their dynamic range. In a larger space, these things will even out a bit more which can be quite surprising if you aren't prepared for it. Of course a well written piece should work in any space but even with the great masters of the past you can notice a difference in pieces that were written for specific occasions like church masses etc.

Volume balancing however is also a big part of any rehearsal work with real players. In fact observing conductors rehearsing even well known pieces you will get a lot of adjusting balances in voicings. A common practice in orchestral rehearsals is to sustain critical voicings and the conductor adjusting balance and tuning while doing so, sometimes doing this voicing by voicing in critical passages. In the studio/session world, this task usually lies at the responsible person in the recording booth.

The last score that I recorded was technically quite simple and written for a handful of string players and while it was no problem for them to technically play this score, we quite often stopped to adjust balancing in the chords. Just the "human" factor might make it necessary to intervene in a theoretically quite well balanced chord.

On the other hand, when working with live players you should be aware that you are not working with mindless tone generators but with human beings who each have two ears and a musical understanding. Oftentimes, musicians will automatically find their role in their surrounding context, particularly when they are seated well enough to hear everybody else without problems.

This brings me to one issue I see a lot with learning orchestrators and composers which is dynamic micro managing. Writing different dynamics on different instruments in the same voicing to compensate for the natural loudness differences seems like a good idea at first but really defeats the purpose of when such different markings are really appropriate. As written above, players will find their role in the sound and just by micro managing dynamics you will not be able to avoid the occasional "manual" rebalancing of things. Only when you really want to create contrasts of dynamic between sections or instruments, it is useful to use different dynamics, but if you balance out a "normal" voicing, everybody should get the same dynamic.

Yet, you should be aware that dynamics scale differently on different instruments and therefore have an influence on the balance. While a soft dynamic will most likely lead to a quite even volume balancing between most instruments (if written in comfortable range), a loud dynamic will make brass and potential percussion stand over the rest. Trying to maintain a balance there (for instance by marking woodwinds ff and brass mp or mf) will create a specific sounding "hybrid energy" voicing which in most cases would be not fitting into context.

If we dive even deeper beyond looking at the volume only to balance, from the orchestrational standpoint there are three more properties that are relevant for general balancing:

Tone Colour, Fullness of sound and Identical Articulation

If you combine two distinctively different tonal colours, like for instance a clarinet and a muted trumpet, even at similar volumes you will not achieve something that can be considered a "balance" between these two textures. These two elements will always remain distinct in their sound. This can be a desired effect and if you form an easily understandable chord the audience will still understand the chord, however if you form a complex harmony with them they will sound like two notes sounding at the same time, not like an "intended unit".

Additionally, there is a difference in fullness of sound. An open trumpet at piano will still sound more substantial than a clarinet which still might have a quite similar volume and even tone colour. In these cases, the two colours will still "detach" from each other in the overall sound in spite of the two other properties being rather similar.

If you write some strikingly different articulation between instruments, even if the above properties all match there will be a distinct difference noticeable between the two. For instance a slured flute line combined with a detached clarinet line will in spite of very similar textural, volume and fullness qualities create a distinction between the two.

The general approach when targeting for a "balanced voicing" usual means to create a harmonic unit that feels as uniform as possible. This is usually only the case if the four properties discussed above do match. In other cases (even if desired) it is not really appropriate to talk about balance but rather about "mix" as you create distinctively different elements that happen to play together but will be perceived individually.

Of course the more colours you throw into the mix the more the individual qualities will get lost but even a 6 part voicing with colours that don't match will create a feeling of different instruments playing together and not necessarily a balanced voicing.

You see, diving deep into this topic opens up a can of worms with things to consider when writing voicings. 

With more experience and knowledge of the instruments you will develop a feeling for what works and what doesn't. We will however try to approach this in a structured way in the next tutorials.