Overview

Orchestration is a resource-intensive activity.  When composing symphonies, I manage thousands of different musical ideas across hundreds of instruments.  To support this challenging process and to simplify my workflow, I leverage computer software known as a digital audio workstation (DAW).  This program allows me to organize my musical ideas and listen to them using virtual instruments, which affords greater productivity and musical foresight than composing with only a pen and manuscript paper.

What resources are being organized?

When composing a symphony, the main resources I organize are instrument tracks.  A track represents a musical instrument.  It is an entity that contains information about the instrument and its score, and it also hosts a virtual instrument that brings the score to life.  Instrument scores are sequences of notes, where each note has a position in time, a notation (i.e. solfege, or pitch), a duration, and a velocity (i.e. volume).  Organizing instrument tracks entails specifying their display order in the DAW and assigning them colors.

I could choose a more specific entity as my primary organizing resource.  As an alternative to organizing by instrument tracks, I can organize by the instrument scores within each movement of my symphony.  For a 50-track composition with 3 movements, this would increase my number of resources from 50 instrument tracks to 150 instrument-and-movement-specific instrument scores.  I could then assign specific color shades to each movement, or create time markers to quickly navigate to movements I am working on.  I typically consider this to be too granular though.  With three times more resources to manage, this makes my organizing task more time consuming and generally not worth the effort.

Why are the resources organized?

Music composition is a long and winding creative process that requires as much organization as possible.  My symphony can have over fifty tracks, each of which contains dozens of musical ideas.  Because tracks are listed sequentially in the DAW, as my symphony grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of every instrument.  Principles for ordering and grouping instruments allow me to save time when interacting with my resources.  I also find it important to organize my resources in order to facilitate any eventual collaboration process with other composers.

How much are the resources organized?

Organizing tracks first requires me to define an ontology for my musical instruments.

At the least granular level, my ontology classifies instruments by orchestral family: Woodwind, string, brass, or percussion.  Afterwards, within each family, I classify instruments by instrument family.  Woodwinds can be subdivided into Flutes and Reeds, and Flutes can again be subdivided into alto flutes, bass flutes, and more. The end result is a hierarchical classification.

After defining my ontology, I can use it to specify the display order of my instruments in the DAW.  Instruments that are the closest siblings and that have the most granular intrinsic properties are kept together (e.g. alto flutes and bass flutes) and are ordered according to pitch (e.g. alto flutes are displayed above bass flutes).  Afterwards, all instrument tracks that are part of the same orchestral family are assigned the same color.  For example, all percussion instrument tracks are highlighted in red, string instruments in blue, brass instruments in yellow, and woodwinds in green.  This allows me to quickly identify a broad category of instruments that I wish to work on.

Some of the difficulties of organizing by ontology is that not all instruments have clear-cut families.  The famous example is the piano, which is considered to be both a percussion and a string instrument as a result of its key-controlled hammers that hit strings inside the instrument’s body.  The problem is compounded as more diverse instruments are introduced into the composition.

An alternative to organizing by instrument ontology is to organize by instrument score.  The ontology only takes into account the static intrinsic properties of an instrument track, but this is sometimes less useful than its dynamic extrinsic properties.  The instrument score is one of those properties.  The piano, which often plays a lead role in the orchestra, is better positioned at the top of the DAW with its own color instead of with other string or percussion instruments.

When are the resource organized?

Organizing typically takes place when a track is first created, but it can change as a track’s role in the music evolves or when its relationship with subsequently-added tracks strengthens.  Tracks that contain important motifs – recurring melodies or musical ideas – may have once played only a supporting role in the piece, and now need to be grouped with other lead instruments.  Similarly, while adhering to the instrument ontology as much as possible, I attempt to position tracks that are invoked earlier in the music above tracks that are invoked later, but a track’s role in a piece is not always known at the start.

Who does the organizing?

I am usually the sole composer of my digital symphonies, and thus am the only person who organizes instrument tracks.  However, it has happened before that I work with other composers, and in those cases my collaborators would also organize.

Other considerations

A final important aspect of organizing includes giving names to my tracks.  Assigning my resource an extrinsic static property allows me to identify tracks more quickly in addition to a track’s order within the DAW.  Difficulties of naming include uniqueness, where multiple violin tracks for instance need to be differentiated.  In these cases, properties of the instrument score are included in the name, such as “Violin Lead” or “Violin Movement I”.

In conclusion, I always organize tracks as much as possible.  I find that the time I invest in determining a new track’s placement and color is well worth the time I save when referring to it hundreds of times throughout the life of a project.  Generally, organizing my music projects greatly enhances my creative workflow, and allows me to spend less time tracking my existing ideas and more time coming up with new ones.