Robin Hoffmann

Budget Options for Recording Orchestras - Part 4: Berlin, Vienna, Sydney etc.

After having a look at recording Orchestras in London/LA which in every regard are the peak of quality that you can buy for money, we're looking at what I would consider as the second row of recording locations today.

My personal experience in this segment includes only recording in Berlin and Sydney but from what I've heard from colleagues, you could also include major cities with great orchestras from the U...

Action Piece - Composition Walkthrough Pt.11 - Strings Mockup + Stems + Midi Files

This is the final part of the Walkthrough for WE HAVE TO SHAKE THEM OFF! It has been brought to my attention that some people don't know yet about the Tag filtering system here on Patreon. I try to tag every post properly so you can find it again over the Tag system. For example, if you want to re-read all the individual parts of this Walkthrough series you can do so by clicking on the appropriate Tag above or use this link:

2020-05-25 07:52:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Pastry Party - World Map - Multitrack and MIDI Download

As promised, here's another multitrack session. This time it is the recording of the main titles for my score for Pastry Party. As I was mentioning already in one of the previous posts about this project, we recorded a symphony size orchestra together with a jazz rhythm group.

The score was performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded at Smecky Studio Prague.

Here...

What to Include in Written Agreements for Composers

Negotiating a deal with a client can be a sensitive topic. On the one hand you want to have some security regarding the work that you're doing but on the other hand you don't want to come along as overly suspicious by micro managing every detail of the engagement and requesting tiny details to be written into the contracts.

However, particularly when working together for the first time it should be in mutual interest to cover all bases while when working with a client in a long term rel...

Making V-I More Interesting Part 1: The V Side 1

A V-I cadence (e.g. a Gmajor triad followed by a Cmajor triad) still is one of the strongest harmonic devices in music. As I've written in my tutorial about voicings the duality between tension and resolution is a fundamental concept in music.

And particularly the V-I cadence is a century old prototype for this concept. In fact, when you look at many pieces from the classical period (e.g. Moza...

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.2 - Concept and Thematic Material

As mentioned in the last part, the general idea of the score was pretty clear from the beginning. We were aiming for a traditional orchestral score. Of course, one reason for this was that the imaginary scenes the kids lived through were all hommages to movies and genres from past decades. 
As an exception to this one might see the car chase sequence which had a "Fast and Furious" feeling to it, however as all the other sequences clearly all referenced movies that had a traditional sc...

Channeling Your Creativity

For every freelancer, especially the ones who work in a creative field, it can become very tricky to be productive "on time". Often, when creativity hits, it doesn‘t really matter whether it is 3am in the night or 3pm in the afternoon. Especially people who struggle with getting into a creative mode in predictable patterns will often sacrifice a structured day for these moments when they are productive.

However, everybody who works in such a field for a few years will come to the conc...

Orchestral Voicings Part 8: Quartal and Quintal Voicings

While until now, we mainly looked at chords that basically were triadic harmonies (even if they had a few extensions), it is essential to understand that this by no means should be considered as the ultimate default that every chord should have. Structures that don't rely on stacking thirds can have a very fascinating quality, however often have the property of being harmonically ambiguous. This means if you look at them with a traditional harmonic approach, they could have different root not...

Pastry Party - Feed the Customer - Score Sheet and Recording

Here's the next score sheet and audio file from my score for the mobile game Pastry Party.

As a little side note, the Jew's Harp that is notated in the score sheet was cut from the final recording.

Gazing At The Night Sky - Session Video

String Line-Up Sizes

As soon as you're dealing with recording real instruments you will most likely run into the dilemma of needing to balance between budget and line-up.

A very often seen approach to save money is to reduce the string line-up as from a certain point onwards, adding more instruments to the string sections will only marginally influence the sound and substance.

Still, it is important to know what is to be expected with the line-up you're planning for and whether you need to adapt your ...

Action Piece - Composition Walkthrough Pt.10 - Brass Mockup

Here's the next part of the Mockup Walkthrough for WE HAVE TO SHAKE THEM OFF.

The Brass Audio stem as well as the score sheet is attached below.

How Exactly Do You Need to Place a Musical Hit Point?

From my earliest attempts at writing music to film back in the days when work prints were delivered as VHS (God, I feel old) I was wondering how exact do I need to be with hit points.

Back then it was technically extremely tricky to sync any video to music as normal computers were not powerful enough to run both at the same time plus video files were still way too big to handle comfortably let alone send over the internet. So I needed to do all calculations by hand referencing the visua...

April 2020 Wrap-Up

So here we are again and it seems like the longest April of our lives has finally come to an end. First of all, I hope all of you are safe and healthy.

I had a few lengthy talks with a few friends and colleagues working in the music industry over the last few weeks and while it seems like the composer community isn't affected as badly by Covid just yet, for many musicians the situation is really frightening, often losing both sources of income: gigs and teaching.

In spite of many ...

Budget Options for Recording Orchestras - Part 3: London & Los Angeles

London and Los Angeles are the absolute best locations to record any film or game soundtrack. The level of musicianship as well as stylistic understanding of such music as well as technical level are the best in the world and the results you get from recording there are beyond anything that you might get anywhere else.

However, of course, these recordings come at a price. The budget you need to plan in for such a recording are significantly higher than anywhere else.

Another thing...

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.1 - Introduction

In 2017 I had the honor of writing the score for an incredibly sweet short film by Andrew and Nate Garcia, called HERO. We recorded the score with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. You can see the final movie above. The score sheet for the score is attached below.

Since then the movie gained quite a bit of attention, winning several festivals. Based on a poll I did a few weeks ago, most of you guys would like to see a composition walkthrough for the title track Hero....

Generating Expectable Feedback

There's the occasional project where you have a customer who seems to be requesting changes on every first version you show them, often feeling like they're requesting changes just for the sake of it.

This is often due to a lack of experience or a misunderstood hierarchical structure where they feel that they need to justify their position by "having to add something to the music". Most commonly you get this phenomenon with customers who don't often work with composers.

Particular...

Pastry Party - World Map - Score Sheet and Recording

In 2015, I wrote the score for a mobile game called "Pasty Party". The whole game was built around a back then very popular concept like "Candy Crush" just with French pastries. Naturally, I wanted the music to have a French idiom, so I added a small band consisting of Accordion, Upright Bass, Drums, Acoustic Guitar, Percussion to the Orchestra.

Unfortunately, the company was bought ot and the game was on the market only for a few weeks. Nevertheless, it was great fun writing the music ...

3D Audio Formats in Film Scoring

Recent years have shown quite dramatic technical advancements regarding immersive playback of movies. And while the 3D projection seems to have been a phase that hasn't been as enthusiastically received by the audience as the manufacturers might have hoped for there has been quite a development regarding sound playback.

More and more cinemas as well as home theatres are being equipped with so-called 3D audio formats. All have in common that from the two dimensional plane of a 5.1 (or 7....

Orchestral Voicings Part 7: Surrounding Context

Up to this point, we were looking at voicings from a quite microscopic perspective observing individual voicings in an empty space. In the last part we were putting them into a little more context, talking about tension and resolution. However the focus remained more on the individual voicings.

But of course, voicings never exist in an empty space but always in context of their surroundings. In fact, most decisions considering the voicing of a chord are based on its surrounding.

U...

Budget Options for Recording Orchestras - Part 2: Custom and Shared Sessions

In order to calculate a budget for a recording session, it is necessary to know how much time you will actually need to record with the orchestra and what would be the best option to not end up with paying for session time that you don't use.

The general approach to booking an orchestra for recording would be on a "per session" basis. This means that you can only book them in blocks of three or four hours. In eastern European countries, four hour sessions are pretty common while in west...

Gazing at the Night Sky - Mix Walkthrough

Two weeks ago, I made the entire multitrack session of the orchestral recording of GAZING AT THE NIGHT SKY available for download.

If you missed it here it is again: 

http://patreon.robin-hoffmann.com/GATN/Robin%20Hoffmann%20-%20Gazing%20At%20The%20N...

Practice Small Emotions

One thing that can often be observed in student or amateur movies is a heavy emotional overscoring. Scenes that are sad are scored in a desperate way, slightly tenseful moments sound like horror scores etc. So while the general direction of the music might be right it often just goes way too far down that road. 

Often this has to do with the composer lacking the experience or the musical vocabulary to create the emotion in a more subtle way. Of course, everybody who starts out and ...

Budget Options for Recording Orchestras - Part 1: Fundamentals

Standing in front of an orchestra hearing one's music being played by actual humans for the first time is an incredibly rewarding feeling and can be highly addictive. Personally for me this is one of the reasons that keeps me going at writing music. The payoff feeling of an orchestral session is way higher than what any DAW sample mockup could ever provide.

I was fortunate enough to be working with professional orchestras since a very young age and had the opportunity to gain experience...

Action Piece - Composition Walkthrough Pt.9 - Woodwinds Mockup

Here's the first video of a series about the mockup of my piece WE HAVE TO SHAKE THEM OFF!

This instalment deals with the mockup of the woodwinds and focuses on specific passages in the piece and how to approach doing a mockup of them.

Attached to this post you can find the Score Sheet of the piece, the Midi Export from Dorico and the Woodwind audio stem. The other stems as well as the Midi Export from the DAW will follow in the next parts of this series!

Orchestral Voicings Part 6: A Closer Look at Intervallic Constructions

In the previous parts of this ongoing series I was putting quite a bit of emphasize on the avoidance of minor ninths in voicings. The bottom line of this observation was that chords that are supposed to create some sort of stability might become quite instable and tenseful by using unfortunate voicings that include a minor ninth.
However up to this point I deliberately excluded one essential factor in this: chords that are supposed to have tension.
Music lives from the duality between t...

A quick word on Patreon payment cycles

As there have been some misunderstandings in the past, I'd like to clear up a few things here. I've set up my Patreon to always charge my patrons on the 1st of each month. So if you join on April 2nd, your first charge will be on May 1st. I've chosen this payment modality over paying right when you join and the again on the next 1st of Month to not give a disadvantage for people who join quite late in the month to be charged twice in a very short time. 

Unfortunately I can't set up...

Gazing at the Night Sky - Now available for Streaming

As this track was very well received by you guys, I decided to make it available for streaming on all platforms. So in case you want to give it a listen, head over to:

 https://song.link/i/1503251022 

Why to write for instruments that can't be heard in the mix anyway?

Any learning composer will sooner or later get to the point of asking themselves why to put effort into writing parts for instruments in passages where they will be inaudible in the mix anyway.

In fact, every brass section playing a fortissimo with a "film score attitude" will drown out almost any other instrument except for maybe percussion, high flutes/piccolo and high strings so the question why to actually spend time and effort writing a part for instance for the 2nd Clarinet is def...

March 2020 Wrap-Up

Since I wrote my last Wrap-Up article four weeks ago, many things have changed and most likely everybody here is in some form or the other affected by this pandemic.

Last month I wrote I would be documenting my work on a short film from writing to orchestral scoring session here on Patreon, however as with many other film projects, this project has been canceled due to what's currently going on. In fact, the entire orchestral recording session industry has come more or less to a stop. M...