6/6/2023 0 Comments Horn arranger![]() That is, listen to music critically and study as many scores with audio as you can. WORK, WORK, WORK! What I’ve learned and try to pass along to my students is that the key to getting to those “aha!” moments is to simply do the hard work. Do you commonly give your arranging students any standard bits of advice that tends to lead to exponential improvement? How do you turn on those “a-ha!” moments in arranging class? In my case, I didn’t have a computer to write with, so I had to learn what particular voicings sounded like first on the piano and then with live players. Again, this often happens because it seems to sound okay in the notation software. Another common mistake that is related happens when the writer puts too much space between notes anywhere in a voicing. So, a student will drop a note in the voicing one full octave when it shouldn’t have been. The thought being that the bass clef is further away than what it really is. However, if needing to place the “A” pitch below middle C in the bass clef, the student often places it an octave lower to the first space of the bass clef. One of the biggest mistakes beginning writers seem to make is in the understanding of the way the treble and bass clefs are separated. However, when you get to the session or rehearsal you quickly find out that the small number of horns you wrote for in your computer doesn’t sound as big and fat as it did coming out of the speakers! What are the common mistakes that novice arrangers make, regarding horns? ![]() When using a sample, you can be fooled into thinking one or two horns is full enough for the sound you are looking for. When creating mockups or demos that in the end become live players, this can be a real problem if you are not aware of it. There is a real immediacy as to how the sound gets to our ears from the speakers with synthesized sound. JERRY: Synth horns or samples tend to be a thicker or fatter sound than live players. How does arranging for synth horns differ from using real instruments? His recent book Arranging for Horns was just released, and in this interview, he gives some additional insights about that process. He has taught at Berklee since 1993, and was one of the key contributors towards developing the arranging curriculum both at Berklee’s campus and online. Jerry Gates’s work as an arranger, orchestrator, composer, and producer has been featured worldwide, on the concert stage and for TV shows and commercials.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |