One of the most important things I've learned since starting the channel almost six months ago
is that if one person has a question a lot of people probably have the same question.
So today I thought I'd go through a selection of
comments and questions that you guys have left on the videos.
So Geno said "I liked your article on changing to a distant key from Envatotuts,
maybe you could revisit that idea here."
So yes, I definitely can and this is the best way to get the kind of videos that you want to see.
If there is something you want me to make a video about, leave a comment, let me know.
I read all my comments. I will see it.
So if there is a specific topic that you like and you want to see more of,
or you see something that I haven't covered, this is how you're going to get it.
Leave a comment and tell me.
Marcus Lawson says (Hey Mark) "I was curious about the orchestration sketch phase.
hHw detailed do you get going from piano sketch to full orchestration, middle steps."
So I am a huge fan of the Orchestrating the Line course from Scoreclub.
It's just outstanding, the best way to learn orchestration that I have ever found.
So what I usually like to do is start from a lead sheet.
I'll go with melody and chord symbols and if I can get that right
then I feel like I'm in pretty good shape.
I move to a four line sketch and try to get as detailed as I can with accompaniment parts
and bass lines and fills and counter lines and kind of like every single note you're gonna hear,
try to fit that into this four line sketch.
If I need five lines fine, but try to get it all worked out in as condensed and simple
a space as I can before I worry about the specific sounds, the specific instruments.
I will deal with that after I feel like this phase is pretty strong.
Jamie asks "For library music do you have a schedule of how many you aim to do
per week or month?"
I do not. I have libraries that ask me to do tracks for them, that's when I do it.
So making youtube videos has taken up a lot of my time this year, so usually I'll just
wait for a specific library to say "Hey, you've done such and such for us before.
We need more of it. Can you give us this many more tracks by such and such date."
I don't have a quota that I try to fill.
If you are starting out in library music I think it's actually a pretty good idea
if you don't have a big catalog of tracks ready to go and you need to build that up.
I probably would do some sort of weekly quota. It depends on your own speed.
For me that might be like a track a day just try to,
at least on top of everything else, get one track a day done.
If that's too much, even a track a week will help you build up over time.
After a year you'll have 50 tracks that you didn't have if you weren't doing it.
So yeah for me now, I mean I've been doing library music so long I have a lot of tracks
out there. I don't really necessarily need to be doing that every single day.
But I do think it's a good way to start.
Boinzy says "Based on your B theme comment I assume you can
mix period and sentence forms within one piece."
So yes absolutely. The period and the sentence are just two different ways to structure melodies and
there are all these kind of gray hybrid forms in between and you can absolutely go period,
period, sentence, or the other way around, or only use one form.
Something I really like to do is listen to pieces and try to figure out
what form are they using in what certain moments.
So for example a lot of Mozart symphonies might start with a sentence and then the B theme is in
the period form and usually the in between parts, the transitions are sentence form.
So I like to kind of look at that how does he balance using those different forms,
why do you use one form or the other, what are kind of the differences
and what are the different effects that he gets from doing that.
All right, pistacchio asked "Isn't this called chromatic mediants and chromatic sub mediants?"
So I think this is in reference to my chords by thirds Hollywood harmony video,
and yes chromatic mediants is the proper term for using chords that are a root third apart.
It's just not that user friendly a term.
I think chords by thirds just kind of immediately makes sense, chromatic mediants is correct but
a little too technical I think.
Luco says "I'd be interested in your steps for library or synth music.
I find it harder than traditional library tracks."
I find that interesting because I find library and synth music to be
way easier than orchestral tracks.
So this is definitely kind of another place where if you want to see a certain video leave it in the
comments because this answer requires probably a full video more than what I can say right here.
I will say that for library music don't overthink it.
Remember that the voice over or the video or whatever it's going on is the star,
is the melody, is the main thing that your client is going to be using that track under.
A library track is a background track.
Something that's been really kind of a surprising side effect of making these
YouTube videos is learning from the client side what it's like to choose and use library music.
I always write it, I've never had video content to use it on.
So I found that surprisingly the less a track changes for a long period of time the better.
I've always had my library tracks kind of like building and building,
thinking it needs a shape, and you know it's worked pretty well for me.
But from the customer side I'm finding I wish a certain track would just sustain
for two or three minutes because I don't want it the track itself to tell a story.
I just kind of want it to fill the space in the background.
So back to the point of don't overthink it, just you know find a groove or a feel or a
cool little pattern that works and just see how long you can just sustain that.
Instead of going from like a one to a ten
just try to go from like a one to a three or from a four to a six.
Just kind of maintain a consistent cool vibe and that's going to be a good track.
I will make a longer video about library track at some point in the future.
Javier says "I'd like to subscribe but my English is not very good,
I'm from Argentina, if you put subtitles I will."
So thank you for that comment, because of that I started putting subtitles on all my videos.
Turns out 20% of my audience is using the captions which feels like a lot to me.
I was pretty surprised, so thank you Javier for requesting that because
that has helped more people be able to access the videos.
And once again if you want to see something ask for it.
All right Dimensions Tomorrow says "I'm looking forward to seeing the
whole series," (I think this is about the orchestration) "can I ask what VST you use."
So I think he's asking "what is the playback engine" or "what are the instruments that
I'm using from Sibelius," and that would be Note Performer.
So Note Performer is a plug-in, it's like a third-party thing.
It's compatible with Sibelius, it works with Dorico,
it just makes the default sounds so much better.
So I harp on people to focus on the notes and worry about the sounds later, but
the reality is is that when it sounds good it's more fun to write.
So I love Note Performer, getting Note Performer has made writing in Sibelius so much more fun
for me and I'm much more likely to want to do orchestral music in Sibelius where it sounds good.
So yeah totally totally worth it, love Note Performer.
"This isn't pertaining to the video but what do you think about Dorico?"
So this comment is one of the ones that inspired me to make my Sibelius versus Dorico video and the
writing for orchestra in Dorica video, and those have been
some of the more popular videos on my channel.
So once again, you know, these comments inspire me!
So what do I think about Dorico?
I've been getting asked this a lot, waiting for my follow-up video.
I will make that video,
time has been a little crunched but at some point soon I will make my ultimate decision.
Am I staying with Sibelius?
Am I going with Dorico?
Just have to wait a little bit longer on that one.
thevfxwizard says "is there a particular
reason why you focus on chords that are separated by major and minor thirds?"
Why I think chords that are a major and minor third apart
sound good here is that there's no functional relationship.
So when you go from a I chord to a V chord, we have these expectations.
Our ears are like "oh I feel dominant, I feel a need to go back to the I chord."
When you do chords a third apart you go from the I chord to the III chord,
you don't have that kind of circle of a 5ths pull.
It's just kind of another color.
So moving a third apart, moving roots a third apart like Cm to Ab, they don't..
they're so distant and they feel smooth because they share common tones.
But at the same time they're functionally distant
that you don't really need one to pull to the other.
So I think that's partly why they work so well for film music.
So Wallace asks "I'm curious about something,
where did you get the Sibelius score for for Tchaikovsky's fourth?"
So there's this amazing website imslp.org.
It has tons of classical music scores, orchestral and chamber music and solo music.
So what I did for that video was go to imslp.org,
downloaded the Tchaikovsky and input the notes myself actually into Sibelius.
So it was a little bit time consuming but I wanted the playback and I wanted to be able to hear it
and I also thought it was a good way to make sure that, you know, I was saying that this Tchaikovsky
used this texture but I wanted to make sure I was getting into the music and really making sure
that I was accurate and I was giving you guys accurate information.
So that's a great website.
Ed asks "Can you share the plugin you use
that fast forwards time and does the writing for you, looks very useful."
Sso this is a question I've been wrestling with since I've started.
Do people want to see the noodling and the mistakes and kind of the the long time it
takes sometimes to create these things, or do you want to see it get to the point.
You want to see just what are the specific steps that move it forward.
Because there's been some tracks I've written where I'll go for half an hour, for 20 minutes,
and scratch it and completely start over and decide everything I'm doing is wrong.
To me that seems like a really boring video but to some of you maybe you want to see that,
maybe you want to see why I've decided to scrap it and how I got led the wrong way.
So I need your feedback, I need you to tell me "yes I want to see that"
or "maybe once every 10 videos I want to see that" or "I never want to see that."
But let me know, that is something I'm still wondering about.
Mark asks "would you still look to avoid parallel 5ths and octaves as you would normally?"
So I think this was this is on one of the orchestration videos.
In general I want to avoid parallel 5ths and octaves whenever I can
when I need some independence between the voices.
So if I have a melody and a bass line I am very consciously trying to avoid
parallel octaves and parallel 5ths because what happens is you get this kind of weird phenomenon
where your independent voices all of a sudden, for just a brief moment, feel like one voice.
The way I think of it is it's kind of like going from stereo to mono but only for like one
note or one beat, and not in an intentional cool effect way, but just as things are flowing along.
And it's not something people might even
necessarily notice happens, but it will just kind of disrupt their flow a little bit.
So I don't think people hear it, I don't think people are
going to call you out "hey you used parallel octaves there for one beat!"
I don't think anybody really cares, but you're kind of subconsciously interrupting the flow,
just kind of dropping stereo to mono in a way that's going to kind of hiccup people and be like
something just didn't quite feel right there.
So I try to avoid them whenever possible, except if the voices don't need to be separate.
So if I have block chords that are intentionally moving as a block, as kind of like this triad
pattern that's just kind of flowing through things,
then they're supposed to sound like one voice.
One kind of fancy voice but I don't need separation of
lines so I will not worry about it in those cases.
Orin asks "is this a motive as you're calling it a motif. I'm familiar with motif pronounced motif."
So this was on how to come up with a motive, what is an idea video, and I looked this up because I
was curious and apparently motive and motif are both equally accepted terms for the same idea.
So you can use motive, you can use motif.
Somewhere somehow when I learned this I learned it as motive and either one is fine.
focusmr... I don't know how to say this.. focus...
Mr Focus says "has anyone used this method, how did the progress go?"
So I think this is on the video where I talked about how to get Mozart as your private
composition teacher and using this method to study a piece of music that you want to learn from,
write your own and kind of compare it against the original.
So I asked in the comments, you know, has anyone written? how's it going?
Mr focus here asked the same thing, "has anyone done it?"
I haven't heard yet! Nobody has said "hey I've tried this out."
So let me know, have you tried this method?
It's pretty intimidating. I'm not really that surprised honestly
that nobody has done this yet because I think it's kind of a hard thing to do.
But yeah please share your stuff.
And this actually raises another question is would you guys like some sort of community,
a discord or a forum on circle, some sort of platform where we can kind of
explore these topics a bit further and people can share their music.
Saying "hey I watched your video on chords by thirds,
here's my piece of chords by thirds," and the community can respond.
That would be a good place for something like this. "Hey I tried this Mozart
study method and here's what I came up with," and we can kind of listen to it and critique it.
If that's something you guys are interested in let me know.
And that's kind of the overall theme of this video is communicate with me,
let me know what is a video you want to see, what are you struggling with.
What is it that when you sit down to write a piece of music you're just
banging your head against the desk because you're so frustrated, or makes you
get up and give up or stops you from starting to write in the first place.
So tell me how I can help you with writing music and that will help
this channel grow and help you get what you want.
So thank you so much for watching so far.
It has been a crazy six months and hopefully it will be another crazy six going forward.
Thanks guys, I will see you in the next one!