Robin Hoffmann

The Unpredictability of Work Load

One thing that I have learned over the past 15+ years that I am working in this field is that it is usually impossible to predict or schedule anything work related more than a few weeks in advance.

I have to admit that for many years this problem was causing me a lot of stress and it took many years for me to be more relaxed about it. I was always stressed out about things like "Ok, I will finish this project in two weeks, but after this I have nothing new to do. I need a new project to...

Notation and Engraving for Scoring Sessions - Part 5 - Shorthands and Efficiency

After we had a look at Dynamic markings and general layout issues with notation for scoring and sight reading sessions in the last few parts of this series, we're having a closer look today at a few notation issues that are very specific for the films scoring session world.

I'm talking about notation short hands and abbreviations. A lot of these have their orig...

This Patreon - Table of Contents

Composition Screecasts:

Brother Commercial (Scoring to Picture) (with Audio Commentary):

• Part 5 (More Detail Work on the First Third of the Piece) 
• Part 4 (Starting Detail Work on the Orchestration) 
• 2021-03-16 18:12:29 +0000 UTC View Post

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.17 - M6 (Part 2)

In this part, we will continue looking at the climax cue from the score. I will use a mixture of condensed score sheets and excerpts of the full score according to what makes more sense to understand the musical idea.

All the previous parts of this series are available here.

We're looking at the heroic climax part starting at 2021-03-15 09:05:59 +0000 UTC View Post

Practice Routines

Since I started this Patreon page, the question about my past and current practice routines popped up in the comments and direct messages a few times already and the reasons why I haven't adressed these things yet was that I first needed to think about which ones of my habits I would consider as such. 

As you can guess from that statement, I never really followed a strict regiment of "excercises" that I felt I needed to do and repeat in order to improve certain things. While compos...

The Unglamorous Side of the Film Scoring Industry

I originally wanted to write an article about a completely different and more music related topic today but after a series of incidents on social media over the last weekend, I feel like I want to address a topic that is relatively uncomfortable to talk about but unfortunately ever present.

So what happened?

In a relatively harmless discussion on facebook, the joining in of an A list film composer caused a considerable escalation of the situation with the consequence that a hobbyi...

Composition Screencast - Returning Home - Part 6

Here's the last part of the ongoing composition screencast for my piece RETURNING HOME that is taking place in Dorico. Today, we add some finishing touches and layout optimizations before we move with it to the DAW for the mockup process in the next part.

I'm still trying to understand Youtube's encoding procedure as at the time of writing this, the video seems not yet avalable in 4K but has been processing for more than a day. So if you want to watch in 4K, I would recommend waiting a ...

Agreeing to a Revenue Percentage Deal

In the no/low budget and also in semi pro productions, it is quite a common practice to "pay" the cast and crew in percentages of revenue. It goes effectively something like "You get x% of any revenue this film/game/project generates after release".

At first glance, this seems like a better deal than working for nothing but oftentimes there is no real difference. Of course, there might be this lucky punch project that unexpectedly generates a lot of income but personally, even after bei...

Reharmonisation Part 4: The Power of Secondary Dominants

Welcome to the next part of this tutorial series about (re)harmonisation strategies. All the previous parts can be accessed here.

When I first learned about Secondary Dominants, I was not quite convinced that they would be a useful tool in my pursuit of "the film music sound" as I felt they sounded quite jazzy which I also liked alot but didn't feel like I could implement...

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.16 - M6 (Part 1)

In this part, we move on to the final (and climax) track of the score for the short film HERO.

All the previous parts of this series are available here.

The sequence in question starts at 10:19 in the video.

Other than usually, in this and the next part we will not be using short scores as there i...

February 2021 - Wrap Up

I'm very happy to see that we keep gaining more new patrons in the last months and are now close to 100 people which is an insane number that I would have never expected to reach when I started this thing. So let me first start by welcoming everybody who's new here and thank everybody who has been supporting this patron site for a while now. I really appreciate your support!

As we're all pretty much still locked down hoping that the vaccines will finally make life easier again in the ne...

The Film Music Age of Sampling

I have written a few posts already how technology has changed media music and how changing the tools (from score sheet writing to DAW production) has changed the music.

As this is a very multi layered phenomenon several aspects arise from this development that are worth discussing and worth questioning. After all, even if one doesn't creatively follow every current trend in the media music wo...

The Emancipation of Note Releases

One of the most challenging things to notate for orchestral musicians without using additional verbal instruction is a long isolated note that doesn't decay in volume/presence over its length. Write a whole note with a forte and you get a forte with a decrescendo. For every orchestral musician, this is the absolute default. 

To put it more broadly, every note that is being produced in an orchestral context is being played like an attack with a release tail that is selectively longe...

Composition Screencast - Returning Home - Part 5

Here's the fifth part of the composition screencast for my piece RETURNING HOME. In this part, we sketch out the piece to the end and start again from the beginning with the detail work.

All the previous parts of this series are available here.

Hummable Melodies

It seems like one of the unquestionable rules even among composers is a mandatory relationship between a good melody and it being singable.

Even in professional discussions, this relation is often used as a knockout argument. "I'm sorry, but your theme is not hummable" is often synonymous for "It is not good". Also, you get these "John Williams is the master of melody writing, just think about all his themes that are super hummable." comments quite regularly.

While of course there...

Reharmonisation Part 3: Standard Substitutions 1

As mentioned before, this tutorial series is structured in a way that we start with the easy (yet effective) strategies and work our way up to the really deep reharmonisations.

After we had a look at the power of changing bass notes of chords to non-root notes in the last part of this series, in this part, we will focus on the diatonic standard substitutions.

This m...

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.15 - M5 (Part 2)

Today, we're focussing on the "stand-off" part of the cue M5 for my score for HERO.

All the other parts of this walkthrough series are available here.

The sequence in the movie that we're focusing on today starts at 9:01.

As always, we're working with reductions, the score sheet, Midi and orchestr...

Don't Spoil Your Musical Target

There are several "rules" or guidelines in composition that are strikingly simple, like "a melodic leap in one direction should be follwowed by a step in the opposite direction" or "Melodies are very effective if their peak notes move in a series of ascending or descending stepwise motion".

These are rough guides that are very logical and usually relatively easy to implement with a very pleasant musical effect.

Then, there are rules that are similarly simple and logical, but are i...

Pizzicato Pet Peeves

Pizzicato strings are one of film composer's favourite devices for anything comedy. Their use is so clichéd in comedy situations that it has become comedic in itself already.

Yet, we hear it every day in all sorts of "oh that's funny, clumsy or silly"-scenes on practically any media outlet with a particular peak in trashy reality TV.

Besides the fact that some composers default to this texture without thinking much about it, there are a few things to be mentioned about pizzicato ...

Composition Screencast - Returning Home - Part 4

Here's the next instalment of the ongoing composition screencast about my piece "Returning Home".

All the previous parts are available here.

There are 2 improvements in this video over the last ones which is that I added chord symbols and it is available in 4K resolution. (At the time of writing this, Youtube still says that the 4K version is processing but I expec...

Key Signature Dramaturgy Over an Entire Score

A while ago, I saw a Youtube video by a fellow composer who has her fair share of work experience as composer and assistant in Hollywood.

While I agree with many of her statements and find her videos highly informative she was recently making a statement that I found rather problematic.

In a nutshell, she said that when you write a score, you should remain in roughly the same key(s) throughout the entire score, even if it's a feature length.

Now, I can absolutely understand ...

Reharmonisation Part 2: Bass Notes 1

In the previous part of this tutorial, I was talking about the general idea of (re-)harmonisation and why these techniques are relevant, not only from a harmonic standpoint, but also from a dramaturgical standpoint, regardless whether for a film score or a purely musical dramaturgy. 

The plan with these tutorials is to introduce you to a few techniques and strategies to reharmonize and illustrate these c...

Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.14 - M5 (Part 1)

In this part of this ongoing series about my score for the short film Hero from 2017, we have a look at the fifth cue.

All the other parts of this walkthrough series are available here.

As always, we work with score reductions here. I left out instruments that were not relevant to understand the musical intention, like for instancein this case the harp.

The entire score ...

January 2021 Wrap-Up

This Patreon page had its first birthday a few weeks ago. It's great to see how it developed over just one year and I'm very grateful for your contributions and making this platform possible.

I changed a few things behind the scenes. I was observing a few people joining the Patreon,  accessing all the material and cancelling their membership again before the first payment cycle happened. As this was a continuous issue over the last few months, I decided to change the payment so tha...

The "Know Your Music Theory" Argument

There are several arguments in the composer's community that keep popping up in a new iteration every few weeks. Mac vs. PC, John Williams vs. Hans Zimmer are for instance two of the standards.

One more is "Music Theory vs. Using Intuition". This one has recently been fueled again by controversy company number one: Spitfire Audio. They released a new library a few days ago with the advertising claim "Less Theory - More Feeling".

And of course they got exactly what they intended, p...

Notation and Engraving for Scoring Sessions - Part 4 - Dynamics

Notating dynamics for a recording session is considerably different than notating them for a concert work.

The absence of any substantial rehearsal time means to notate as precisely as possible without overloading or cluttering the page with information that is not necessary.

The correct and most effective execution of these notations of course require a substantial understanding of the instrument's properties and playing defaults so this touches again somewhere between  orch...

1st Orchestra Discovery Session - Winners Announcement

A few months ago, I introduced the ORCHESTRA DISCOVERY SESSION that are exclusively happening here on this Patreon. In a nutshell, I'm inviting some of you to record their own music with a professional ensemble. The first session we will have will be with a Woodwind Quintet towards the end of the first half of 2021.

I invited you to ap...

Returning Home - Finished piece from the Composition Screencasts

#SPOILERALERT ;)

If you want to hear how that piece from the current composition screencast series turned out in the end, here's the final audio. There are quite a few more parts coming up to explain how it got to that state including the entire mockup process but I thought I'd show you in advance how it eventually turned out.

Composition Screencast - Returning Home - Part 3

Here's the next part of the composition screencast for my piece "Returning Home". In this segment we focus on the build-up in the middle part and sketch out the following "breakdown section".

All previous parts of this series are available here.

Why You Shouldn't Use Your Primary Instrument for Writing Music

Now of course this headline is a bit over the top and not completely serious, so don't burn your piano or guitar just yet, but there is some things to be considered in this regard:

Being a composer also means to constantly be self reflecting and self critical. You can read in practically every artist's interview that they are their own worst critic and this is just as true for composers.

Besides constantly questioning one's own work (which in extremes can become an obsession that ...