Your favorite MIDI orchestration tip

Jett Hitt said:

Just for an instant, I saw the topic by Jay Asher, and I thought he was back. But no. . . .

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AFAIK he is banned here. I don't know why. But it should be reconsidered imo.

jadedsean said:

Why where is he gone?

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Admin explained this some month ago…..
In the end Jay left the forum, if I remember right.
An other forum member, who knows Jay, told Jay is fine.

I also had good help and inspiration from Jay.

Jay is still active over at KVR Audio and TheSoundBoard.

Apologies if duplicative, but as an orchestrator and conductor I run into many composers who've worked mostly in the box and are not yet aware of the dynamic nuances of a live orchestra. This becomes a particular problem when samples are balanced in unrealistic ways in the mockup. Conversely, a composer familiar with orchestral realities might either build their mockup with a more authentic balance, or rely on a good orchestrator to make the adjustments when translating the mockup for live players. If the latter, the composer must be amenable to some distribution changes, etc. Ironically, sometimes to sound most like the mockup, which some composers really do want, the actual orchestration must diverge a bit from the MIDI input. Hope this helps.

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www.MusicalProblemSolver.com

My favorite orchestration tip is ‘wait’, because the weakest part of many orchestrated pieces isn’t the orchestration itself, but weak harmonization.
And if you figure out that you should have chosen a more interesting chord progression after you have spent a lot of time orchestrating, you may have wasted some valuable time.

Talking about how he dreamt the Yesterday melody, Paul McCartney illustrates how important chords are in this clip:

insanely useful thread.

I don’t know if this counts as a MIDI tip, but when I compose out of the studio (at the piano, or even at the local coffee shop, with pencil and paper) and the piece is finished and I start to build the MIDI mock-up sometimes I’ll record an audio track of me singing freely the main melody, with all the tempo fluctuations it dictates. Then I’ll make a tempo track using this guide, and carry on from there. One of the things I find most revealing of sample vs. real instruments is unnatural tight tempos. Of course this varies a lot with the genre, orchestration, etc., but on more lyrical pieces I found this to work for me very well.