Orchestral Sketching – Accelerate Your Composing Speed
Orchestral Sketching is the art of creating rough mockups of your musical themes with only a handful of tracks. It can help you capture the essence of your theme in as little as a few minutes.
But it also forces you to pay attention to the core building blocks of your theme, exposing your flaws, and making it easy to see where you should improve.
This course will take you through the process of crafting your own orchestral sketch template, picking the right libraries and sounds, as well as processing them to sound awesome right out of the box. So that you can just input your melodies, chords, and background elements and get solid sounding mockups in a matter of minutes.
Through 5 hours of video content, you will not only learn how to set up your sketch template and record musical ideas faster than you could ever imagine, but also how to turn these theme ideas into full track structures at lightning speed using simple techniques.
It is a course aimed towards helping you write both clearer, stronger, and faster.
Here’s What You’ll Learn
- Why orchestral sketching is such a powerful tool for composers
- How to successfully incorporate the crucial elements of an effective sketch template
- How to set up your own designated sketch zone from scratch
- Recommended libraries, plugins and patches for each element of your sketch
- My tips for processing and mixing for a great sound out of the box
- Fundamental orchestration tips for more powerful sketches
- How to take a simple theme, and sketch a full composition outline from it
- Optimizing your template to save RAM and get more out of your system
- Transferring your sketch into your main template effortlessly
- How I approach recording full sketches from scratch
Module 1: Introduction To Orchestral Sketching
We are starting off the course with some fundamental knowledge, mindsets and essential concepts around the topic of sketching.
We will explore topics such as:
- Why you would want to learn this skill
- Important principles to make this work
- The impact these principles had on my work and career
- What sketching is and isn’t
Module 2: Preparing Our Sketching Tools
In the second module of the course, we will get into the practical aspect of assembling our sketch zone, ready to begin working.
We cover topics such as:
- General considerations for setting up your template
- Step by step setup of your sketch tracks
- Picking the best libraries and patches
- Balancing the tracks for an ideal mix
- Processing the sounds to sound clean and powerful out of the box
- Testing our template by recording our first musical idea
Module 3: Basics Of An Effective Sketch
In the third module, we start diving into the important aspects that make our sketch successful.
We cover the following topics:
- Essential arranging principles to follow for a solid orchestration
- How to test out multiple musical ideas for a single project
- Picking our favorite theme and transferring it to our main template for completion
- Structuring our theme into a full composition using simple, effective methods
Module 4: From Theme Ideas To Full Tracks (Bonus)
After we have covered all the fundamental aspects of creating solid orchestral sketches, you will be able to watch the instructor craft 3 full theme sketches from scratch.
In this final module you will see:
- A track sketch composed from scratch that originates in a simple chord progression, and becomes a full track outline with all the essential elements.
- A track sketch composed based on a piano pattern, from the initial idea until the full composition structure is laid out.
- Writing, roughly arranging and structuring a classic film theme-inspired theme that came to me as I was doing something completely different. I just dropped everything I was doing and hit record. This will allow you to watch me create from scratch in real time with no preparation, just a pure over-the-shoulder unfiltered view of my workflow when an idea comes to mind.
