Tutorial No.1.    Orchestration with scales on different instruments, in unison or an octave or two apart.

The great composers obtain  richness and variety of sound timbre from the symphony orchestra in several ways. Of course, each individual instrument has its own distinctive sound. Then a mass of violins in unison makes a totally different sound from a solo violin. Another useful technique is to blend together the sounds of different instruments, playing in unison or an octave or two apart.

In this tutorial, we will discover how we can obtain a new timbre by blending massed violins with a horn, a favourite timbre for the melodic line in many romantic compositions, such as the Blue Danube by Johann Strauss.  (Listen to this on Musical Discovery).

  1. Open the Diatonic and Chromatic Scale Generator from the main MENU  
    Create ->  Scales and Passages -> Scales and Arpeggios.
  2. Under Key, set the drop-down box to D, and leave the option button at Major, as out key will be D major.
  3. Under Instrument Family set the drop-down box to String Family, then set the instrument to Strings.
  4. Set Octave to 5.
  5. Leave all the other settings at their default values (tempo=allegro, time-signature=4/4, How many octaves = 1, starting on 1st degree).
  6. Click the green button Play Scale at the foot of the screen, to hear this scale on massed violins.
  7. Click the orange button Save as fragment for use in composing board.
  8. A fragment name dialog box will appear, filled with "ScaleD major". Type a 1 at the end of this, (because all saved fragments must have unique names),  and  type "Massed High Violins" in the description, then click OK.
  9. Repeat steps 2 to 8, except in step 3 set instrument family to brass and instrument to French Horn, in step 4 set the octave to 4, and in step 8, name it as ScaleD major2, with description= "French Horn".
  10. Open the Musical Discovery Composing Board from the main MENU :-
    Create ->  Compositions -> Composing Board.  There should be two icons at the foot of the screen with your descriptions of massed violins and French Horn. Listen to each fragment separately, by  right-clicking each icon to bring up a dialog box with information about the fragment, then click the green button Play fragment (all tracks).
  11.  Drag the violins icon into the first square on the top row, which is track 1, then drag the French Horn icon below it into track 2.
  12. Click the orange button Assemble fragments on the board into a new tune.
  13. Click the Play button to hear the blended effect.
A similar procedure can be used to experiment with other combinations of instruments, such as the following suggestions:-
String/woodwind pairs that go well together:- Brass/Woodwind pairs that blend well when played pp (because the woodwind reinforces the higher harmonics of the brass):- An orchestral tutti involving most instruments of Brass, Woodwind and Strings, uses all the following together.