Orchestration Recipes (with Philip Johnston)
production music film composing music composing composition library music film music
If you’ve been watching my videos for any length of time you know I love to use metaphors to break down complex topics, and I have found a kindred spirit in composer and concert pianist, Philip Johnston of Orchestration Recipes, who joins me to unpack how he makes advanced musical concepts much l...
https://www.buzzsprout.com/rails/active_storage/representations/redirect/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCRmU5cGdRPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--71e669b5e9844e5176671d6b7b8d72a39a964863/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaDdDVG9MWm05eWJXRjBPZ2hxY0djNkUzSmxjMmw2WlY5MGIxOW1hV3hzV3docEFsZ0NhUUpZQW5zR09nbGpjbTl3T2d0alpXNTBjbVU2Q25OaGRtVnlld1k2REhGMVlXeHBkSGxwUVRvUVkyOXNiM1Z5YzNCaFkyVkpJZ2x6Y21kaUJqb0dSVlE9IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJ2YXJpYXRpb24ifX0=--1924d851274c06c8fa0acdfeffb43489fc4a7fcc/52%20Cues%20Podcast%20Cover_2023.jpg
Buzzsprout
Speaker 1: 0:50

So the same thing with the recipes as well. Yes, there's lots of explanations there and help and chef's notes and whatever else, so that you kind of get your head around how it all works. Or you can ignore that and just follow the steps, so that the videos are deliberately very short for those who are impatient, just want to get on with it, and so you got your DAW open over here. Recipe over here. I'm hoping that people will stop listening to me very quickly and just want to go and try it.

Speaker 2: 1:24

What is happening, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the 52Q's podcast, your weekly insight into all things production and library music. So whether you're simply curious about the industry or working towards a sustainable career with better placements, then you're in the right place. My name is Dave Croff and I've dedicated my career to writing and teaching production music, so it is so good to have you with me today. And if you find this video helpful, then give it a thumbs up or a five star review in your podcast app and be sure to subscribe, because I talk about library music every week. Today's episode wouldn't be possible without the incredible support of our member subscribers at 52Q's, who not only keep the channel alive and thriving, but they also get exclusive access to community features like career and industry workshops, music production live streams, office hours, queue breakdowns, feedback sessions, hundreds of hours of video archives and even opportunities to write for real music libraries. So if this sounds like you and you're really ready to take your career and creativity to the next level, then head over to 52Qscom. Joining the community is completely free and membership start at around four bucks a month. Well, if you've been watching my videos for any length of time and, lord knows, the folks over at 52Q's and my full sale students can attest to this.

Speaker 2: 2:52

I love me a good metaphor. I mean I love breaking down complex topics using imagery or situations which are much more relatable. And I may have found a kindred spirit in Philip Johnston of Orchestration Recipes, who joins me today to unpack how he takes advanced musical concepts and makes them much less threatening. I am so excited to welcome Philip Johnston of Orchestration Recipes and if you've not heard of Orchestration Recipes, just pause right now. Go subscribe to that YouTube channel because, as I mentioned in the intro, this is an entire system and Philip has found a way to make complex musical ideas digestible, friendly and, more importantly, non-terrifying. So when I saw Orchestration Recipes, I knew within the first 60 seconds of that first video that I had to bring you on the podcast. So, philip, welcome, welcome, welcome to the 52Qs podcast.

Speaker 1: 4:00

No, dave, I'm pleased to be here, and I don't like driving much. I like it a whole lot more when I'm listening to your work too, so I'm glad to be here.

Speaker 2: 4:07

Thank you, you honor me, you honor me and we're gonna talk about Orchestration Recipes and I wanna talk about some of your educational philosophies. But first, everybody's career in music and it takes a different path and everybody's on their own career journey. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Your background, maybe experience, education? I know you're a concert pianist, which is fascinating. I'm a drummer and a percussionist, so I can't play any more than like two fingers at a time, or four if I'm feeling saucy with my marimba mallets. But tell us a little bit about yourself.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Yes, was chasing the whole concert pianist thing and the way I'd characterize it is I was very, very good in a field where you need to be very, very, very good and sometimes the extra very on top of that, and so it rhymes with the experience of most other people chasing that. So there was lots of practice and conservatoriums and competitions and really the way I'd describe it and what got me composing is as a classical musician you are a cover band in the whole time.

Speaker 2: 5:12

You're a cover band? Yeah, great.

Speaker 1: 5:14

And so you're spending all your time interpreting other people's notes, and not even just interpreting other people's notes.

Speaker 1: 5:19

There's a fair bit of pressure to recreate pretty much as exactly as what's there as you possibly can, and the cynical part of you well, cynical part of me started to feel like I wasn't entirely sure what I was for, as I was being what I knew was. I mean I was. I say Beethoven Piano. Snata, you practiced it really hard, you performed it, but you're one of 10,000 people who performed it that year, and if I'm starting a crescendo at bar seven, it's because bar seven says start a crescendo. And so the part of me that likes to make things up balked at that a little bit and annoyed some teachers along the way, because I wanted to change things up and spent most of my practice time because you really shouldn't be messing with Beethoven's notes but spent most of my practice time taking little ideas and figurations and then making up your own things built from that, and so that's really where all that started. It was a frustration with what felt a little bit like paint by numbers, and I'm saying that knowing that there's a lot of very, very good classical musicians where that absolutely is not their experience, and part of how they bring it alive is it's just not that at all. But a big part of being a student is compliance with the dots on the page, and I didn't enjoy that so much. So that's where that all started and started working in original compositions into various concerts, which not many people were doing. If you're playing piano, playing listern, chopin and Rachmaninoff, and the irony there is, of course, that all of those pianists were playing their own works alongside of the peoples when they were playing back in the day as well, and then down the track I did a recording for Warner and they, like lots of other labels, have lots of pianists, but I was the only one at the time, I think, who was doing, who was mixing these kind of originals alongside Chopin and Listern, whatever else, and I'd like to say that was a sparkling recording career. It lasted exactly one album but it was good to do it and it was a point of difference and it really got me thinking about composing.

Speaker 1: 7:23

So that's the kind of traditional side of things, and on the technological side of things, that's kind of my father's fault, and I'll explain. I was of the generation where the kids at school had little game and watches where you could play games, and I desperately wanted one. He was heading overseas and he was gonna come back with a present from time to time. And he came back not with a game and watch, but with a little PC. It was an Oric, it had all of 16K of RAM, and I was the first kid in my school to have seen a PC of any sort. And the message from him was if you wanna play games, that's fine, you gotta code them. And in that PC was a little app where you could write your own music as part of that.

Speaker 1: 8:07

It really wasn't very sophisticated, and so if you wanted to indicate what note to play, that was a number one to 12. You wanted to indicate what octave it was in, that was another number you had to type in. And then there was another number that indicated how long the notes were, whether it was polyphonic or not. And the point here is that at the end of all of that, your composing was really it was debugging. It was a page full of numbers and it might play happy birthday or something like that at the end of four or five hours of work. And it was the beginning of what I think has been an inversion between the effort required to get something done as a composer and an output waiting at the end of that, and the ratio of how much time you're spending wrestling with the technology to get it to do anything at all and then getting some sort of output that you can forward on to other people. And so that's a pretty extreme example.

Speaker 1: 8:53

Where it's numbers, you forward a little bit, and you'll remember this too, where we had four track recorders and you could plug that into your synth and now you could actually play what you meant rather than representing it with numbers. But again, it's destructive editing and all of that, and so you really had to be very careful with every take, and certainly incredibly careful with every musical decision. And then down the track, we got the miracle that was Giga Studio and that the early vias. I think vias was probably the very first of those and it was the first one that I played with, and prior to that, the synths we were using. If you were playing a French horn, the reason you knew it was a French horn, because you had to read the thing, because maybe it was an oboe and you couldn't really tell. And now you could tell the instrument sounded like the instruments and for the people who are watching this now, who are maybe in their teens, early 20s, yeah, I'm frustrated with you out of the gate because now everything just works right.

Speaker 2: 9:45

Yeah, you press a key and it sounds like a pit stop. Yeah, it just goes.

Speaker 1: 9:47

And so the barriers to entry in terms of not just in terms of price, but in terms of how long you have to spend fighting with all of this stuff to get the music made that you wanna make. It's a complete turnaround, man, I can hardly wait to see what the next 10 years brings, although there's a conversation where I'd have it now about AI that has me a little scared about what the next 10 years might bring as well.

Speaker 2: 10:06

Yeah, it kinda feels like the boulder chasing Indiana Jones, you know, it's just like we all see it coming. It's just how do we avoid it and how do we get paid on the other side of it?

Speaker 1: 10:15

Fortunately the music has been not very good so far. But you know, count to 10, slowly we'll see what happens, right?

Speaker 2: 10:20

yeah, it's only a matter of time. What I think is fascinating is, you know, getting into like what are now the modern iterations of what would be like a tracker, like a tracker software, where you're composing using grids and numbers. It divorces music theory from a keyboard or a fretboard or you know, and it almost turns it into a series of intervals and parameters and I see that concept reflected in your educational philosophies as they are presented. Do you think that that kind of deconstructing music theory and deconstructing music into its base parameters like you're seeing the code in the matrix early on do you think that that gave you a unique perspective?

Speaker 1: 11:10

Well, I certainly think that what you've characterized there is an alternative way of representing music theory, and it acknowledged me out of the gate that there are lots of alternative ways that we could be representing music theory and so the system that we've inherited it has a lot of advantages. It's. I don't believe a UI designer if you were designing it from scratch now would design music notation the way we have it.

Speaker 2: 11:34

I don't think that I feel Devitri had modern technology, that he would change things up a little bit.

Speaker 1: 11:39

Yeah, I think there'd be meetings to be had, and I think we can probably do that better. I understand why it's resistant to change and all of that, but what's interesting about that, though, is it means then, if there are alternatives possible, then it's certainly worth exploring those alternatives and acknowledging that each of those alternatives will come with certain benefits and disadvantages. So we'll go back to the core of your question, which was looking at music theory itself, probably how it's currently represented. I think it's been designed to be retrospective. There's certainly no way that, if we're looking at capital C, classical music theory, that there's no way that the likes of Mozart and Haydn were thinking in those terms when they were composing, and so it's a way of analyzing things afterwards, and it's a way of rendering it explainable, and it's reductive, and it feels a little more like science than anything else.

Speaker 1: 12:31

We're trying to characterize a system in a way that's comprehensive and that is then transmissible, if you like, and it does that pretty well. There can be inconsistencies, so, for example, you can end up with three or four different ways of describing exactly the same chord, and everything is numbers and letters with all of this, and so, for example, the three following chords are exactly the same if you picture them on the piano A C major with an added flatten. Ninth is the same as a C sharp, diminished with a major. Seventh Is the same as a D flat major, minor. Seventh with a flatten fifth. And so I mean that really sounds like that ought to be three very different things, but if you go and nut those out on the piano, that's it's the same chord.

Speaker 1: 13:18

And so part of what I was wondering, there's got to be other ways of explaining this that are perhaps a little more, a little more relatable, and are not designed so much to characterize systems but are designed to communicate to students. Here's what I need to play, here's what I need to look for, here's what it looks like on the keyboard, which is what I'm using all the time. And so that's where the theory side of orchestration recipes. But it didn't start off as a theory thing. So the first couple of volumes of orchestration recipes were entirely about orchestration and there was nothing at all deliberately nothing at all about harmony. But then I recognized that I couldn't keep not talking about that.

Speaker 2: 13:57

Yeah, I think for some folks music theory looms large like marching hammers in a Pink Floyd movie. Right, it's just something that just gets hammered into you and it feels big and scary. And I know we have listeners and viewers. Right now we have folks in the community who don't necessarily read music, and so understanding music theory beyond just a set of rules and guidelines and everything and just a bunch of things you have to memorize, I think it's super important.

Speaker 1: 14:28

Dave, you're talking to one for the longest time, because I started piano really quite late. I was in high school when I started playing piano and then everything happened really fast and so three years after my very first lesson, I was performing for my first concerto and it was all too fast for me to get across reading the way I should and no one knew at the conservatoriums that I was struggling with it, and it was a big part in the end of why I ended up making up my own things, but also illustrative of the fact that there'll be lots of people listening to this who are making phenomenal music and don't read, because there are other ways of communicating that information.

Speaker 2: 15:02

Well, because you don't like, I don't read music on the daily. I mean, I can read music, you know, my master's blah, blah, blah, but when I'm composing I'm thinking shapes, harmony, textures, sound, you know, mix, EQ, all of those things, none of which have to do with me. Putting a dot on a staff, you know, but it's internalized because I'm creating in the DAW and so I think that orchestration, recipes, and again we're gonna talk about this here in a second it's no surprise hearing how you came up through like programming where it removed the notes on a page, dots on a staff from. I feel like it kind of untethered those things in your mind and to be able to look at complex ideas through more abstract kind of thinking.

Speaker 1: 15:58

Nonlinear thinking, I guess. And let me just clarify, I can read music now obviously, and I can read quite well, but it's been a fight, and boy have I looked for other ways of doing the same thing. So and back when I was teaching piano, was sympathetic to and had an unusually large number of students in the studio who didn't read music, weren't interested in learning to read music. We're very interested in playing and those two things are absolutely not mutual exclusive. That's right.

Speaker 2: 16:23

Absolutely. Another thing before we move on, one of the questions I had for you because you're coming from the educational world, you have educational books published like Alfred Publishing. You're a published concert pianist but I have struggled with this balancing act of not feeling like I'm enough of a composer because I'm not like doing it full time and thinking that I'm somehow less than pro, and I struggled with that for quite a while until I kind of made peace with the fact that I can be both. I can be equal parts professional composer and educator. Is that anything that you've struggled with, especially coming through the conservatory, where that can be really really brutal, where if you're not spending eight hours in the practice room then you're not really true to your art.

Speaker 1: 17:12

No, no, I do understand and I think it's based on mythology that musicians are supporting themselves not just out of the gate, but supporting themselves at all, primarily with music, and that if you can't do that then you are, you're failing somewhere. And just the way things are structured, it's very likely that for extended parts of your career it's not going to be keeping the lights on. However, boy is it not musical, exclusive working on things? Let me just run some names past you now by the way just to address this for a moment.

Speaker 1: 17:45

So we got, we had Borodin, so that we have the Russian composer with his large statue of him in Russia, and the statue of him is for his services to chemistry Doesn't even mention the fact that he does music. Charles, I was selling insurance until he won a Pulitzer Prize when he was 73, I think is when his overnight success story started. So he clearly been doing other things before that. John Cage was working as a graphic designer, gustav Holtz was famously working as a teacher and there's been lots of obviously musicians who do that.

Speaker 1: 18:13

Rinsky Korsakov was just as proud of his career in the Navy as he was of his composing, and Philip Glass, famously, was driving cabs in New York City even when he was successful. So there's, certainly there can be these parallel lives. You don't hear at one stage that the JS Bach was teaching Latin or something and ruling his own manuscript paper and a whole bunch of things that he probably shouldn't have been doing and composing instead. But yeah, so I think there's the idea that you're not a proper whatever that means musician unless it is paying all the bills and you're doing it 24 seven. But you know, there's other careers where people don't do it too.

Speaker 2: 18:49

Yeah, I totally agree, you can do more than one thing. Moving on as far as your approach and we've talked about music theory, and you have a real uncanny ability to make these complex theoretical concepts which, on paper, just like you rattled off those different chords. I know that some of our listeners they were like oh my God, I'm just like saying sharps and flats and diminished things. I was reading those from my notes by the way.

Speaker 2: 19:21

No, hey, you don't have to know how the sausage is made. But why do you think traditional school you know whether it's high school or college, university or whatever. Why do you think they're so just kind of stuck? Like, why aren't more music theory teachers like you? Because I think your approach is rare.

Speaker 1: 19:43

I mean I can't speak to what look most music theory teaching. I think you've got a responsibility to impart broadly understood music theory, and so the downside of some of the representations that I make in orchestration recipes is that if you weren't familiar with that term because you'd actually done the course, the terms can be meaningless. Now, once you are familiar with the term within those, within that, it's then very useful afterwards because it means you can condense a very complicated idea into a phrase or so. Oh, look, in the civil philosophy is there things I didn't want to have to explain more than once? And so that, with the idea that the people who would be using this would be using this, then they're not trying to understand things in abstract terms or be able to unpack a system. They've got a keyboard or a guitar or whatever in front of them and at the most basic level they're trying to answer the question hey, what do I play next to get this particular sound and music theory in its defense? Really, I mean, it does that quite well. It's just that it wasn't designed out of the gate to do. That is all, and I'm certainly not proposing that it gets proposed. But if the if the point of the discussion in the first place is to answer that question hey, what am I supposed to play next?

Speaker 1: 20:58

My argument is that you should be starting with what's in front of them and what they're probably already familiar with and comfortable with. And so, as soon as we're in the realms of we start talking about flattening notes and and fifths and thirteenths and elevenths and whatever else, if you're from a jazz background, you'll be thoroughly comfortable with that. You just do that in your sleep. If you're not that bewildering enough that you can just pass it off as this is something I'll never do, and you just lose interest. Now if, instead, you've got chords that that most pianists, for example, are familiar with pretty much out of the gate.

Speaker 1: 21:30

So just simple major and minor chords, and then you're using that as as a jumping point with. Here's the tiny change you need to make to the thing. You already know that that's easy to impart and easy to remember. So that's, that's the logic that I'm certainly not seeking to replace things. It's not what orchestration recipes was was designed for when it, when it first started. It's just that there and I'm happy to talk about that in a bit too, but there were a lot of people who were sending in questions about hey, what are these chords that you're using in these particular orchestrations that gives it that particular sound? And I realized that sooner or later I had to address that and tried to address it with music theory and then really realized quickly that a lot of people just we're going to cheat out.

Speaker 2: 22:14

Right, well, let's talk about orchestration recipes. And for me, and in my teaching and when I teach production music, I I talk in metaphor nearly constantly Because it's a way to connect unknown abstract concepts with, with situations and arrangements. So I talk about how we're chefs. I use cooking metaphors nearly every single person on your podcast.

Speaker 2: 22:38

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm a chef, I'm, I'm, I'm. I've talked about you know, we're just baking cookies and whatever cookie and to approach it from, like, the artisan mentality and all of that. So this is again. This is when I felt like we were kindred spirits, separated by, you know, 24 hours or so or 12 hours of time zones. But let's talk about orchestration recipes and talk about the different volumes at its core. What are your orchestration recipes?

Speaker 1: 23:06

Okay, look, it's a thing I actually built for myself. I never intended originally to be distributing at all, and it was because I was trying to improve my own orchestration and had done that the the ways that were recommended, and discovered that at least for me, but I suspect for a lot of the people, it doesn't quite work the way we're hoping. So I'll give a couple of examples now. So one of the things I tried to do was was like so many people do, is that you say well, what I'll do is I'll start with some master orchestrators and I'll deconstruct it, I'll kind of work backwards, and so you know, you load up your right of spring and some John Williams and some reveal.

Speaker 2: 23:38

Yeah, I pulled down the Rimsky Korsakov's orchestration book. I'm like yep, well, there's that that's yeah and I got way in over my head. Yeah, what'll?

Speaker 1: 23:47

happen with scores is that you can. You can certainly see things have become evident. So, for example, it might be John Williams where you'll hear a particular woodwind run. You'll think, oh, that's fantastic. And then you'll unpack it and you can represent it in terms that's easy enough that you think, well, hey, I can do that. But what is not apparent in that moment is that that that run has been set up by a whole lot of other magic and alchemy and things that were not evident from that that moment in time. And it's a little bit like trying to teach yourself chess by loading up a transcript of a game by Magnus Carlson, for example, and then jumping to the end and then saying, aha, I see, so if you move your bishop to squares diagonally here, it's checkmate. Next time I play, I'm going to look for an opportunity to move my bishop to squares diagonally, and so I mean that's not completed. A context like that, it's nonsense, and when you try to use the woodwind runs without all the rest of it, it ends up being clunky and it doesn't make sense. So so working backwards like that didn't work for me.

Speaker 1: 24:45

You cited some texts before and I've got someone on the shelf behind me. We've all read them, and the piston and the Adler and the Rimsky Causke, often all of that and I emerged. I think I would have been thoroughly expert if I'd memorized it all and I didn't. But if I memorized, I'll be thoroughly expert on the history of the trombone and the exact range of every single instrument, the orchestra and testatures and the works. But then if I had a trombonist sitting in front of me saying, hey, what do I play now? It didn't actually help me get ideas for that, and so this then keeps coming back to well, the person that's in front of you, what are they trying to do right now? And so I was picturing that the tremendous blank slate that is your DAW when you've got your sample library you've paid a fortune for and it's probably not your first one you've probably bought a dozen of these because it never sounds the way you're hoping right.

Speaker 2: 25:35

So you just keep on buying more and you get the email with the sale that you have to have. I mean, oh, you have to have, you have to have Black Friday.

Speaker 1: 25:42

The demos are composed by wizards and so that they sound absolutely phenomenal and what you're writing doesn't, and so the clear way to fix that is just to buy another one. So and I've talked about that before and ended up having the epiphany that if you regard instruments, and libraries for that matter, as being ingredients, then what we really need here, if you want to learn to cook with them, is not textbooks on the art of chefcraft or the history of the yam or whatever. What you want is somebody who can actually give you a recipe and say look, if you can buy in these instruments, these ingredients, in this way, you'll get this particular sound, and then, to whatever extent that sound is useful or not is a judgment that you can make. But the point is now, if you understand that you can summon that sound whenever you want. And it occurred to me I'd be much better off collecting recipes like this than I would be collecting yet another. You know piano library and God knows I've got lots of those. So that was the thing and I started collecting these.

Speaker 1: 26:42

I'm not vain enough to be pretending to come up with these recipes. I'm absolutely harvesting them from classics and from film schools and wherever else. But there's a reason that these combinations are used over and over again and they work. And if you do reproduce the instrumental combination, you do reproduce the sound. And that's not orchestration, recipes, wizardry, that's just the common sense of following instructions. So it's a collection of these. Are these instructions, if you like?

Speaker 2: 27:11

And there are four volumes. But by the way and I got to know before moving on, yeah, I so appreciate your sense of humor Tell me you're a Monty Python and or a Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide fan, of course of course, but isn't everybody know?

Speaker 2: 27:26

I noticed that again, the first 60 seconds of your first video, your seven minute walkthrough and we'll have a link to that where you're like, well, here's your library, now you're going to be perfect, and well, what about this next one? Ooh, this next one, yep, all that's missing is, like the picture of, you know, a God with the little moving mouth. That's like about all that's missing there, but anyway, so there's four volumes to orchestration recipes, and the first two volumes are a little bit different than volumes three and four. Can you kind of break down the difference in those volumes?

Speaker 1: 28:01

Sure, I mean I didn't know there was going to be volume. I didn't know there's going to be volume two when I was starting all this. But the first two are that they're just straight up recipes and so they're common. I really try to keep it to four steps or so, maybe up to six, so we're not reproducing the right of spring here. But but in that way you can. Then you can assemble whatever it is you've just listened to, fairly quickly follow the steps and then the key thing is go away and experiment with it.

Speaker 1: 28:25

And so the recipes very deliberately come with with two examples the one that we're kind of cooking together, and then there's a second one just to make the point that look, here's completely different set of notes. It's the same instructions Note. It's ballpark, the same kind of sound, with some of that sound again. Then the message there is now go away at your own notes and harmonies and whatever, and you know you can kind of add this to your collection of recipes and that your, your usefulness to other people as a composer, which is really what you're trying to chase, if you're trying to make this commercially viable you got to be useful to other people is really limited by, and you can then expand upon how many recipes you've got. And I'm not doing this as a way of please buy all mine. I'm saying that collect them from absolutely from wherever you can. So I got these in the first place by, you know, going through scores and harvesting, and you can do that too. This just saves you a bit of time.

Speaker 2: 29:16

Yeah, and I should say you're not sponsoring this episode. I reached out to you. I bought these you didn't, you didn't gift me, you didn't comp me.

Speaker 1: 29:24

It wasn't nice to you at all.

Speaker 2: 29:26

No, no, you're, you're terrible, I mean, and I'm only doing this, I'm kidding, no, I plunk down my cash because I think this is absolutely worth it. I would love to play a clip from one of these recipes. A little, a little clip from that. Would that be okay? Yep, sure, okay. And so here is here's an example of how these recipes work. Yeah, I knew, I knew instantly, like again, the recipes, the idea that these are flavors, these are textures, these are sounds, these are, this is how these things get put together. And I don't know, it was like it's so obvious, it's so obvious, and yet it took, like you, to come along and say you know, this is how these things are assembled and I instantly usable. So those are the recipes, volume one and two. Those are the recipes, and so it's video content, but there's also some downloads and everything for those, for those volumes as well.

Speaker 1: 33:47

It's a MIDI files. Whatever. I think of the people that want to go and play with it like a giant sandpit afterwards. So, yes, so that they're available as well.

Speaker 2: 33:55

And the idea with these, the recipes and we'll talk about the spices here in a second the idea isn't to, like you said, isn't to just wholesale copy these and stick them in and call it a day. How do you see folks getting the most mileage out of these recipes?

Speaker 1: 34:12

That you've got to go and play with them like anything else in music. We were talking before about trying to get a head around theory, and so, if the theory concept, you're trying to get a head around this whole tone scale, it's one thing to sit down and to, you know, to talk about the intervals and the fact that it's mirrors in every possible direction and whatever else, and again, they're all abstractions. Sit down at a keyboard and compose some things for a couple of days and you'll look at whole tone scales in a whole new way because you'll hear them. And so the same thing with the recipes as well. Yes, there's lots of explanations there and help and chef's notes and whatever else, so that you kind of get your head around how it all works.

Speaker 1: 34:47

Or you can ignore that and just follow the steps so that there's the videos of it, deliberately very short for those, for people who are impatient, just want to get on with it. So you got your DAW open over here. Recipe over here. I'm hoping that people will stop listening to me very quickly and just want to go and try it and build a few of those. My argument would be just like if you cook with a recipe a few times. You don't need the recipe after that, and my hope is that people are not returning over to what I've done, that they practice a few times and then I'm nicely redundant after that.

Speaker 2: 35:18

Yeah, well, and then you start adding your own ingredients and say well if I'm making cookies? What if I use dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate? What if I switch out the sugar to brown sugar? And how does that affect the flavor and all of those kind of things?

Speaker 1: 35:31

Yeah, their idea start us.

Speaker 2: 35:32

Yeah, absolutely so. Let's talk about volumes three and four. They take a different approach. You're calling volumes three and four are spices, so talk a little bit about how those are different from volumes one and two, and and then we'll. We'll listen to an example here in a second.

Speaker 1: 35:50

Yeah, sure. So spices came about because the volumes one and two were harmony agnostic. I was trying to make the point that if you stick to the instrumental combinations, insert your own melodies and harmonies and you know it's still essentially get the same sound. But, as I said earlier in the interview, that I did get some people saying, hey, those particular harmonies you're using here, gee, it seemed to suit that. How does that work? And it was getting my head around trying to explain that without glazing over eyes immediately with areas that they just wouldn't be comfortable with.

Speaker 1: 36:21

The other reason, by the way, that I use metaphors there is that I've got I've got a pretty unholy collection of backgrounds for people coming into this. So I've got people who have been, you know, jazz lecturers at university, right through to people who I had one person to contact me complaining because they can't read music and they can't play the keyboard and so they're having trouble following things. So I guess there's kind of a base point where you'll need some skills before you can use it. But the point is that everywhere in between, and so we've got people coming in from a rock background or a classic background or whatever, and so I can't make assumptions about what sort of harmonic language they're familiar with. And so I went through the classical school where we thought we knew a thing or two about music theory, until I went and visited the jazz school and it's a whole, whole other thing. And so the music theory that we do is like mathematics in year three, you know, versus university level mathematics for the jazz people. So I'm steering clear of all of that.

Speaker 2: 37:18

Yeah, and this was the thing that excites me as a media composer are volumes three and four. These were instant buys for me. Volume four, as we're recording this, volume four recently came out. I've already picked it up, I'm already halfway through it, because you're talking about harmonic spices. You're talking about if you're wanting to get this effect and just like volumes one and two are harmonically agnostic, volume three and four are instrumentally agnostic and as someone writing synth based texture of our tension cues or somebody writing something like a ukulele hand clap, glockenspiel cue, you know I can instantly get get out, get ideas, get inspiration and unpacking these complex theoretical concepts in a way that I somebody with a masters and I'm like wow, that's so mind opening. So I would love to play an example. So this is from volumes three, three and four and this is an example of the space palette.

Speaker 1: 38:47

Now the cue you just heard. You can get most of the way to reproduce in just by copying the orchestration. But that particular sound does also depend heavily on a particular harmonic technique.

Speaker 1: 38:58

Now the technique is called dislocated tethering. It's a variation of chromatic medians and it doesn't matter if you have no idea what I'm talking about at the moment. The point is that once you know how to think with dislocated tethering, its thing is that it's really really good at taking whatever orchestration you're using and making it sound exotic and otherworldly. So you hear it a lot in science fiction cues.

Speaker 1: 39:19

Now dislocated tethering is an example of a spice, which are harmonic techniques that add color and flavor, and one of the really powerful things about spices is that one spice can be used to flavor many different orchestrations. In fact, ultimately, you can use spices to come up with orchestrations of your own. So a second example same spice, dislocated tethering, different instrumentation, different planet. You've definitely heard cues like this before. Or again, same spice, different orchestration. Again we get this Now. The shift in focus of Volume 3 required a rethink as to the best way to present all of this, and that meant an entirely new format. There's no chef's notes or PDFs in the Spicers series. You won't need them this time. Each volume in the series is more than two hours of fully narrated videos. It was just easy to present all of this when I could actually talk about it and use animations or session captures or whatever.

Speaker 1: 40:41

Now it's still orchestration recipes at heart, so these videos are still packed with orchestrated examples and how to build them. It's just that everything's viewed through the lens of harmony this time, rather than just instrumental combinations. So rather than the focus just being on woodwinds, brass, percussion and strings, we'll also be talking about contrails, sunken miners or bisected tents or serial parallel fifths or harmonic splats. And if you don't know what those techniques are, don't worry, because the videos explain them all and then show you walkthroughs of multiple orchestral builds for each.

Speaker 2: 41:10

I got to tell you one experiment I think I want to do. The reason I haven't started is I'm not brave enough to start this yet is I want to take each of these spices and write a cue based around one spice, but I'm a little intimidated because they're so good and so. But yeah, like dislocated tethers and Lydian terraces. First of all, your naming is, as somebody who enjoys good titles, chef's kiss. Oh hey, chef's See, anyway, I'm so doing that. So are there any caveats? Somebody approaching you to the recipes, or either the, either the spices or anything that you think folks should watch out for when using these, like how to best use them responsibly.

Speaker 1: 41:59

Oh look, I'll go back to what I was saying before, that you can't just read through them and then declare that this is now part of your repertoire. You've got to go and use them like anything else music, practice based, composing, hugely practice based as well and, yes, so that that would be the key thing. And I've got lots of courses which I've signed up for and never looked at. I've got courses that I've signed up for and looked at but never really practiced, and 0% of those courses are my across the content. But as soon as I go and play with things, then then it becomes part and then you can reuse it.

Speaker 2: 42:34

So until you don't need it, and the last thing I want to touch on, which is your perspective as primarily a concert composer art and I've said on the podcast that what we're doing isn't necessarily art with a capital A, because we're making music that's going to go underneath a cooking show or a slap fight on basic cable or whatever. That's not to diminish what we're doing, it's just to kind of keep perspective. But do you have any advice for media composers looking to incorporate these things and looking to incorporate orchestral recipes or any? Just I don't know the best way to approach these from a media film, tv composer standpoint.

Speaker 1: 43:24

Yeah, look, I mean it probably sounds a little soul serving, but you'd need to go well beyond recipes. In any case, you've got to be useful to other people, and so I can maybe use ago my very first job. I got a job playing piano in a restaurant and I wasn't very good at that, that style of piano playing. But anyway, my second night there the guy who ran the joint said he was having expecting the Venezuelan high commissioner was coming in, and he said I think the guy who ran the joint from me was an evening of Venezuelan dance music or something, because they liked to dance as well, and I had a book of Billy Joel, and actually that's all I had. I had a book of Billy Joel, so and so that at that point for the rest of the evening I became useless to him.

Speaker 1: 44:08

And so if you are a media composer and you spend all your time absolutely nailing what it is to sound just like Howard Shaw, and so essentially you'll probably sound approximately like that, and absolutely every time somebody needs specifically that sound, your hat can be in that ring and you're going to be useless to everybody else for all the rest of the occasions. And so it's about how many styles can you actually sit down and smash out, no matter how bizarre it actually is, which means that behind the scenes in advance, you've got to be across those and you have to practice them first because you don't want to practice them on the first gig. Yeah, so that's the thing, and that's tougher than being a concert composer, where you compose whatever you like. A lot more rewarding than being a concert composer because there is a fighting chance that some people might listen to it. Right, so you know.

Speaker 2: 45:02

Well, I mean, even then. I mean you're still at the end of the day, you're still giving people what they're asking for. I mean you could program a whole night of the most esoteric aleatoric music, but if the patrons don't show up to the concert and they're not buying tickets and they're complaining to whoever the decision makers on are, I mean, at some point I mean even Mozart and Beethoven and Bach was a gigging church musician. It's still kind of trans-laced, doesn't it.

Speaker 1: 45:34

Oh, no sure I mean you're accountable. I think the example you gave before of, you know, evenings of aleatoric music. We had several decades of that where nobody seemed to care that nobody was showing up. Mercifully, that's changed now, and I was going back to before, where I was talking about being jealous of people coming through now that the music composition degrees now just seemed to be a whole lot more practical.

Speaker 2: 45:57

So yeah, yeah, I agree with that and I think it's just, that's responsible. You know, if somebody is getting a degree in music, I think as a music educator myself, you know I want to make sure that I am positioning students to be able to make a living. I mean, if that's the goal of getting the music degree is to get a job, then I need to do everything I can, and for me it's teaching them applicable skills, which means you're going to be in a doll, you're going to know how to wrangle a piano roll, as well as as well as you know, you know actually notes on a piano, so that's really good. Any plans for volume five? I know volume four just came out and you're probably like you know what I don't know.

Speaker 1: 46:39

No, it's all well underway. I mean, the challenge with all this is that orchestration is just kind of this colossal ocean, and I'm trying to be reductive of all this, and I'm trying to be reductive without making the whole thing trivial and not useful. So there are some circles to square there, but there's a lot of topics that I would like to cover that we haven't touched on yet. The biggest problem I'm going to run out of kitchen related metaphors and tiles at some point.

Speaker 1: 47:06

So spices works Okay, but I'm really stretching for the next one.

Speaker 2: 47:09

Any. Any plans for rhythm?

Speaker 1: 47:13

Well, for example, I mean, it's certainly not going to be complete if we're not talking about that, and yes, so I think it's probably easy to maybe outline the things there aren't plans for. But my capacity to produce all of this is the limitation here. It does take me six months or two a year to produce each new volume because it's got to compose it all and shit, all the videos and whatever. It ends up being a big job. And we were talking about day jobs and borrowed and whatever else. When I spend all day doing orchestration recipes, but the when I'm not doing that, I'm running a large martial arts Studio. Um, uh and.

Speaker 1: 47:50

Canberra, um, which you know, not seems like nothing to do with music, Um, but uh, you know that that's kind of the, the, the flip side of all of this.

Speaker 2: 47:58

No, I, I know I think like centeredness and whole body well-being and consciousness. No, I think it's. I think it's all connected. I think creativity and personal wellness is absolutely connected.

Speaker 1: 48:07

Well, and also, I think, um music is a space that from time to time, you need to shift out of so that when you shift back into it, it's with enthusiasm and gotcha. You know always have a good things.

Speaker 2: 48:17

Yeah, absolutely Well, philip, thank you so much for joining me today. And, uh, you can. Uh, how can people find you if they, if they want to, if they want to take a look at orchestration recipes or if they want to learn more about you?

Speaker 1: 48:29

Oh, just just pop into orchestrationrecipescom. Is, you're fine, but you need there.

Speaker 2: 48:34

Um, yeah, we'll have links in the, in the description and in the show notes. Philip, once again, thank you so very much. It was an absolute pleasure talking to you today.

Speaker 2: 48:43

Dave, it was great to meet you once again, a huge word of thanks to Philip for joining me today on the podcast and, like I said, we're going to have all of his links in the description below. Also, again, a huge word of thanks to the members, subscribers of 52 cues, who really do keep all of this going. See, you didn't hear any embedded ads for plugins, mattresses or meal plans. We are 100% community supported by folks just like you who pay their actual real life money. So thank you so much and we would love to have you joining the community. Again is completely free and membership start at around four bucks a month. Again, that's 52 cuescom.

Speaker 2: 49:23

But that's going to do it for me this week. You definitely want to tune in next week where you see these guitars in the background. Like, I have several guitars but, truth be told, I don't know how to play them really well and I've actually kind of been afraid. So for the last couple of months I have been pushing really hard into learning guitar and, to be honest, I kind of suck at it, but I'm also loving every minute. So we're going to talk about that next week. But I hope that you've had a really good week and just remember, friends, that I know, trust and believe that the universe has amazing plans just for you. Until next time, peace.