Robin Hoffmann

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.20 - M6 (Part 5)

We're approaching the end of the cue and the score. In this part, we will look at the End Credits music of Hero which was specifically composed for them and not compiled from earlier cues.

The reasoning was that with that last shot that we had in the movie, we were having that classical Western visual and we wanted to carry that over into the credits, also to have some "emotional afterburn" after that quite intense ending of the movie.

We clearly wanted to reference the classical ...

Media Music Can NOT Be Unpolitical

Music has always been political. From Shostakovich with his hidden regime critizism, to propaganda march music or political songs, it has been a vehicle for political standpoints over centuries.

However, there were also a lot of composers who chose to create music as an absolute art without any political implications but simply for the esthetic and/or rational value.

If you write music out of any audiovisual context, you can still approach music today without any political implica...

Reharmonisation Part 7: Avoiding Standard Cadences 1

When learning the first classical pieces, no matter on which instrument, we also learn a few standard harmonic paths that get quite deeply engrained into our musical understanding. For instance the authentic cadence going from Dominant to Tonic is one of the fundamental cores of classical harmony. A similar core fundamental is the structural placement of the Tonic chord. The common understanding is that the Tonic chord serves the purpose of a "harmonic home base" and structually appears at th...

Opening the Portal - Score Sheet Video

Here's the score sheet video for OPENING THE PORTAL! It's quite hard to read but you get the idea. A proper PDF and Audio Stems will be made available for download soon as well as more parts of the composition screencast covering the work on this piece.

Composition Screencast - Returning Home - Part 9

In this part, we're nearing the end of doing the mockup for this piece and I talk a little about the mixing approach that I'm taking including the microphone balancing.

Performances and Instruments with "Character"

Fortunately, we now live in times where the strict separation between "entertainment music" and "art music" is slowly but surely dissolving. 

For me, it is fascinating to observe how that dissolving separation influences music itself and film or media music is a great indicator for this as it very often stands more or less exactly in the area where the (former(?)) border between the two worlds was. And while we make a lot of progress in this field (for instance, many music universi...

Opening the Portal (Mystery Track from Composition Screencasts)

Here's the Patreon exclusive early access download premiere for my piece OPENING THE PORTAL. It is the piece that I have written to cover the entire process from inception to finished mockup in the ongoing series of Composition Screencasts exclusively on this Patreon. While the last video that I posted shows the piece in its very early stages, you can already listen to the final piece here and see how it developed.

I will be posting the score sheet, audio stems and Midi files in the fut...

Opening the Portal - Composition Screencast Part 2

In this part, we're talking a bit more about concept and approach and start to lay out the first few bars.

April 2021 Wrap-Up

I'm optimistic. Life seems to be slowly coming back and it seems like we're all slowly waking up again from more than a year of sleep. I'm particularly happy about the fact that there are live events being planned again. Over the last couple of weeks I got booked to arrange three live shows over the next few months which I am very happy about but even more about the fact that there is a serious chance that these will actually take place as scheduled. So it seems like things are finally pickin...

Vocalizing Articulation Options

One of the things that all the teachers that I ever had in Jazz Arrangement were telling me is to sing the phrases that I was currently writing with different articulation approaches (changing which notes are short, which ones are long and which ones are accented) to find the articulation pattern that felt most idiomatic and stylistically correct and then write the articulations accordingly. The differences can be drastic when you write things for instance for Big Band and two different ways ...

Innovation in (Media) Music

For centuries, the subject of innovation has been a central element of every art form. Artists from all disciplines tried to find new ways of expression and thought provoking concepts to explore and expand the boundaries of their art form.

The target has always been to express something new while standing on the shoulders of the past without being derivative.

In a way, this premise seems really logical. The desire to say something new through one's own art that hasn't been said be...

Rite of Spring - Dorico Files for Download

Just as a little service post for all of you who are working with Dorico. In case you haven't noticed, someone took on the mammoth challenge of inputting the enitre Rite of Spring in Dorico and make these files available for download. It's really worth getting them, even just to be able to solo individual sections/instruments in the playback.

Downloads at the Link

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.19 - M6 (Part 4)

In today's post we have a look at the climax of that cue which at the same time is the climax of the movie. In a way, this sequence is the conclusion that the entire movie has been working towards. I mentioned already in several instances what an enormous joy it was to have been given the chance for the music to be the protagonist of that sequence. From the beginning on, the filmmakers planned this entire movie with the music as a lead character and this sequence is the culmination of that co...

The Sample Spiccato Conundrum

I've talked on this platform quite extensively in several posts already about the fact how technology shapes media music. This goes even as far as changing the expectations about what an ensemble can do in comparison to their sampled counterparts.

And I'm not talking about the uninformed newbie in the field who just bangs on their keyboard in ways a real orchestra musician could never play it. I'm talking about specific instances where what we're used from samples has shifted the way of...

Composition Screencast - Returning Home - Part 8

Here's the next part of the composition screencast for my piece RETURNING HOME. In this part, we continue with the mockup covering Brass, Percussion and some Strings.

The score sheet to follow along is attached below

100(+1)!

I'm absolutely overwhelmed! Last night, we welcomed two new patrons pushing this site over the 100! I would have never thought that this would be so well received when I started this little idea a little more than a year ago!

Thank you so much! Thank you to all the people who were here right from the beginning, thank you to all the people who came in over the last year and thank you to the people who just recently joined! Your (continuous) support is extremely appreciated and I'm workin...

Returning Home - Score Sheet and MIDI

Finally, here is the score sheet and Midi file for RETURNING HOME, the piece from the composition screencast.

All the parts from inception to mockup can be watched here.

Unpleasant Work Keeps Coming Back

One of the painful truths in the media composer world that I needed to learn over the years is that once you accept a job that you don't enjoy and only do for the money, chances that you will get asked again for a similar job later on again are relatively high. 

This business works very much on word of mouth and follow-up projects. I'm not sure whether this is true for every composer, but at least for me, I tend to be able to track back quite clearly where my projects are coming fr...

Reharmonisation Part 6: "Butter Notes"

One strategy of reharmonisation is to place key moments of the melody into a "special" harmonic context and take this as a starting point for the rest of the reharmonisation.

What do I mean by "special harmonic context"? I don't think there is a official term for these harmonic situations but I like to call them "butter notes". These are the key moments in a melody that you long for and ideally send a shiver down your spine or cause you to tear up. Ideally a melody has several of such m...

The Marvel Symphonic Universe

With all my recent posts about the development of film music and movies in general over the last couple of decades, this video is worth watching if you haven't seen it yet.

While many of the things covered in the video are completely agreeable, I find the opening premise of "Can you sing a tune from franchise x?" as a quality standard for film music problema...

Opening the Portal - Composition Screencast Part 1 - Concept, Theme & General Approach

Welcome to the start of a brand new piece! I haven't written a "mysterious" track in a while and wanted to give it a go. For this piece, I recorded the entire process from inception to fully fleshed out mockup as many of you have requested so the parts will get considerably longer than on the last piece for the composition screencasts.

The piece in the end will turn out quite challenging with a lot of octatonic, hexatonic and clustery shenanagans, so if you're into diving deeper into th...

Intonation Struggles

For practically every orchestral instrument, intonation is a huge deal. People who come from a piano background or work mainly with samples are usually not aware of the relevance of this topic and might be unpleasantly surprised once they get the chance to work with real musicians.

Intonation in general means to hit the right pitch and not be slightly too low or too high on it. What seems like a really trivial concept has much more to it than meets the eye. Talking about this issue in d...

The Percussion Section in Modern Scoring

I have talked in several posts already about the changes in film and media music that are caused or at least favored by the technical developments. There are implications from the movies themselves but also from the way that composers create music.

One effect that we didn't talk about yet is how recording technology influences the music. One of the best examples to document this is the use of the (orchestral) percussion section in "modern scoring".

In traditional orchestral music,...

The Recent Evolution of Film Music - Part 3

It has been a while since I last wrote about that topic but nevertheless there is one essential part missing in our discussion about why current film music is the way it is compared to how it used to be.

In the previous parts, we were looking at the technical disruptions that have changed the industry and about how the upbringing of media composers nowadays differs tremendously from just a few decades ago. 2021-04-02 09:01:08 +0000 UTC View Post

March 2021 - Wrap Up

We have a Table of Contents! If you remember, last month or so, I was complaining about Patreon making it very tricky to find older posts and I wished there was a table of content. Well, they didn't change anything on that but I manually created one which you can access at the link above and which is also pinned as the first post when you access the site. I've sorted it all neatly into categories so...

Legato on Strings

There is a very common misunderstanding and misconception about how legato on string instruments work and it is sometimes even seen in the works of seasoned orchestrators. This whole issue is something that I would put in the Top 3 of the most common errors that happen with learning orchestrators and composers.

Now even if a lot of the things that I'm going to say in this post apply to notating music and score sheets, understanding the background behind it is also benefitial in the virt...

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.18 - M6 (Part 3)

In this part, we will have a closer look at the buildup towards the big climactic conclusion of the theme (and the movie) which starts at around 12:23 in the video.

All the previous parts of this series are available here. As always, Midi, Score Sheet and Orchestral recording attached at the bottom of the pos...

Avoiding the Organ Effect

One of the most fearead phenomenon by learning orchestrators is the so called "organ effect".

Basically, it means that the orchestra loses its instrumental definition and transparency and harmony sounds like it is played by a cheap organ. This phenomenon exists in the real and also virtual orchestra world but there is a higher danger of it happening in virtual productions.

The cause for this unpleasant sound in most cases is a harmonic overload in the middle registers, mainly in t...

Reharmonisation Part 5: Sustaining Harmony I

This post is part of a multi-part tutorial series about Reharmonisation. The previous posts can be accessed here.

One of the situations where (re-)harmonisation makes the most sense is when the original harmonic idea sustains for longer on the same chord. If you want to create interesting music, it might not be the most attractive way to sustain in one static harmonic sit...

Composition Screencast - Returning Home - Part 7

In today's screencast, we switch from working in Dorico to the DAW (Studio One) and start with the mockup process. Unfortunately, I had a small audio driver issue during recording which compromised the quality of the voice recording, so sorry for that. It will get better in the next part again.

Also, this video was recorded back in January so by now, an update of Studio One has brought some features that I mentioned to be lacking in this video.