Ouch that hurts
10-22-2007, 05:53 PM
I recently landed a quite big job arranging all the music for a review concert. The concert will feature a large choir singing arrangements of various popular songs. They have already rehearsed them with piano, and I have to flesh the given piano parts out for a small band, and play one of the keyboard parts.
The music is very wide-ranging but mostly a combination of (a) synthy 70s & 80s disco-type songs, and (b) old-style 40s "studio orchestra" tracks, some with a slightly trad-jazz or dixieland feel. There are also a couple of songs from musicals with larger orchestral accompaniment.
The director has said he wants the arrangements to sound "as close as possible to the original tracks". (ie, "make these nine musicians sound like fifty".)
So the idea is to use a couple of keyboards playing sampled sounds for the strings and orchestral stuff, in combination with a rhythm section and a few live melody instruments. My first job is to decide on the exact instrumentation, and I'm finding this difficult. They have pretty much as a given:
Piano
Bass
Drums
2 Keyboards
They specifically want the acoustic piano as well as the keyboards for various reasons. They also are adamant they don't want to use backing tracks.
To that I can add probably three players, to get some live melodic lines in there. I'm thinking of either:
Trumpet
Sax doubling clarinet
Trombone
ie, standard small funk/soul horn section, plus clarinet doubling for the more trad numbers, or:
Three saxes: one doubling clarinet and one doubling flute
...and use samples for the brass.
Now before anyone jumps out of their skin, I should add that most of the brass stuff is very covered within other orchestration. It's all section work: stabs, riffs etc, no solos at all. One reason I'm unsure about the first lineup is that it isn't really that kind of funk/soul sound. The disco tracks don't actually have much brass in them, and the older tracks have actual big band brass with a whole trumpet section and trombone section, which that lineup wouldn't really capture. As I say though, it's mostly in the background and pretty standard cliched hits that a sample library COULD do.
I am used to using Quantum Leap Brass etc for playing funk brass lines from my keyboard in function bands. For this gig, I'd consider buying Screaming Trumpet to improve the trumpet sounds a bit, and it's paying me enough to absorb the $200 (though not enough to justify Broadway Big Band).
I'm thinking with a full three-piece reed section I could get some nice things moving around that, and having both the clarinet and the flute could be lovely for the orchestral things. Some of them are very contrapuntal, and I don't fancy trying to work them all within the hands of two keyboard players.
Who thinks this could be made to work?
Who thinks I should go for the more standard brass/reed small section, and avoid sampled brass altogether?
Who's got any other bright ideas?
And who thinks I'm mad to accept a task like this in the first place?
The music is very wide-ranging but mostly a combination of (a) synthy 70s & 80s disco-type songs, and (b) old-style 40s "studio orchestra" tracks, some with a slightly trad-jazz or dixieland feel. There are also a couple of songs from musicals with larger orchestral accompaniment.
The director has said he wants the arrangements to sound "as close as possible to the original tracks". (ie, "make these nine musicians sound like fifty".)
So the idea is to use a couple of keyboards playing sampled sounds for the strings and orchestral stuff, in combination with a rhythm section and a few live melody instruments. My first job is to decide on the exact instrumentation, and I'm finding this difficult. They have pretty much as a given:
Piano
Bass
Drums
2 Keyboards
They specifically want the acoustic piano as well as the keyboards for various reasons. They also are adamant they don't want to use backing tracks.
To that I can add probably three players, to get some live melodic lines in there. I'm thinking of either:
Trumpet
Sax doubling clarinet
Trombone
ie, standard small funk/soul horn section, plus clarinet doubling for the more trad numbers, or:
Three saxes: one doubling clarinet and one doubling flute
...and use samples for the brass.
Now before anyone jumps out of their skin, I should add that most of the brass stuff is very covered within other orchestration. It's all section work: stabs, riffs etc, no solos at all. One reason I'm unsure about the first lineup is that it isn't really that kind of funk/soul sound. The disco tracks don't actually have much brass in them, and the older tracks have actual big band brass with a whole trumpet section and trombone section, which that lineup wouldn't really capture. As I say though, it's mostly in the background and pretty standard cliched hits that a sample library COULD do.
I am used to using Quantum Leap Brass etc for playing funk brass lines from my keyboard in function bands. For this gig, I'd consider buying Screaming Trumpet to improve the trumpet sounds a bit, and it's paying me enough to absorb the $200 (though not enough to justify Broadway Big Band).
I'm thinking with a full three-piece reed section I could get some nice things moving around that, and having both the clarinet and the flute could be lovely for the orchestral things. Some of them are very contrapuntal, and I don't fancy trying to work them all within the hands of two keyboard players.
Who thinks this could be made to work?
Who thinks I should go for the more standard brass/reed small section, and avoid sampled brass altogether?
Who's got any other bright ideas?
And who thinks I'm mad to accept a task like this in the first place?