The Sampled Orchestra: Part 6

Brass and horns ignite the fire at the heart of the orchestra.

Having taken a detailed look at strings and woodwind over the last four articles, it’s time to turn our attention to the tremendous sonority that is orchestral brass. For casual listeners, the jet-engine roar of brass in full flight epitomises symphonic grandeur and power — given their capacity for tumultuous, high-decibel delivery, it’s no wonder that trumpet fanfares are associated with cataclysmic events like bringing down the walls of Jericho, or sounding the final trump on Judgement Day (does the MU have special rates for those gigs?). Apocalyptic duties apart, quietly played brass instruments can also sound beautifully rich, warm and expansive, making this the most dynamically versatile section of the orchestra.

The four main orchestral brass instruments are trumpet, trombone, tuba and horn. While pop and jazz so-called ‘horn sections’ usually contain a mixture of brass and wind instruments, in orchestral circles a horn invariably means a French horn, that complicated assembly of coiled tubing with a distinctive flared bell attached. For more details on how this instrument works, I recommend you watch Katy Woolley’s excellent demonstration at www.philharmonia.co.uk/explore/instruments/horn, where you can also see the rest of the orchestra’s brass team in action.

A common orchestral brass line-up would be four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and one tuba, but depending on the nature of the piece and ambitions of the composer, section sizes vary wildly. Stravinsky scored The Rite of Spring for eight horns, while Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder demanded 10. (The latter work requires a total of 150 instrumentalists and 200 singers; not the sort of thing you should attempt to stage in your local village hall.) When budgets permit, film composers also go over the top — Joel McNeely’s bombastic score for the 1998 film Soldier called for 18 horns, 12 trumpets, 12 trombones and six tubas, arranged into three separate sections so their performances could be dramatically fanned out across the stereo speakers.

Noting its enduring popularity in action movie soundtracks and trailers, sample library manufacturers have jumped on the ‘cinematic brass’ bandwagon over the last few years. One company even described a horns preset as a “good pirate program”, which baffled me until I realised it was a reference to Pirates Of The Caribbean’s brass-rich score — a bit of a disappointment, as I’d enjoyed the thought of a group of scurvy seadogs practising horn pieces below decks, cursing each other in salty language for minor irregularities of intonation. Regardless of their suitability for accompanying big-screen piratical hijinks, all the current pro-quality orchestral brass sample libraries are listed in the ‘Orchestral Brass Sample Libraries’ box.

Trumpets & Trombones

As with the woodwinds, the principal brass instruments are augmented by a variety of models which extend each section’s pitch and timbral range. Standard trumpets (usually built in Bb, but C trumpets are increasingly common) are occasionally boosted by the bright, piping tones of a piccolo trumpet, prominently featured in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 and, 250 years later, the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’, both of which show off the small instrument’s precision in the top register. At the other end of the scale, the rare bass trumpet plays an octave lower than the Bb instrument. The flugelhorn, a popular jazz instrument notably played by the late Kenny Wheeler, operates in the trumpet register but produces a darker, more mellow tone; some orchestral works also feature the cornet, the lead instrument in British brass bands, said to sound halfway between a trumpet and a flugelhorn.

Trombones have been an orchestral fixture since the early 19th century, though the instrument’s history stretches back into antiquity. Unlike the rest of the brass, orchestral trombones don’t have valves, but instead use an extendable slide to alter pitch — this allows precise control of tuning, and can be a great source of ribald glissandi (as amusingly heard at the front of the David Rose Orchestra’s 1962 single ‘The Stripper’).

In the orchestra and elsewhere, it’s common to find tenor trombones accompanied by a bass trombone, whose stentorian, rasping tone was highlighted by British composer John Barry in his Bond film scores. The 40-piece brass section assembled for Danny Elfman’s 2001 Planet Of The Apes music featured 10 bass trombones — to further max out the low end, six of the players doubled on contrabass trombone, a larger instrument designed to provide a solid bass register to a four-part trombone section. The higher-pitched alto trombone is little used in orchestral performances nowadays, but is still available to the resourceful sample user.

Another instrument of note is the cimbasso, a tall, floor-mounted contraption with a striking ‘bent’ design. Technically part of the trombone family, cimbassos are fitted with valves rather than a slider, and their aggressive sforzando bass notes have become a favourite sonority for some film composers — however, they also work well for warm-sounding quiet supporting parts. Tuba player Doug Tornquist discusses the instrument in Cinesamples’ online Composer’s Workshop at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwMjrmfZ63M (the cimbasso makes its entrance at 10.24mins).

Principal instruments of the orchestral brass section. L-R (top) trumpet, (bottom) trombone, French horn, tuba.

Tubas & Horns

The largest and lowest-pitched member of the orchestral brass family, the tuba is often used for bass parts, but is sufficiently agile to carry melodies and fast lines. Tubas are made in various sizes: the standard orchestral model is the bass tuba, and there’s also a contrabass version which shares the contrabass trombone’s ability to descend to Ab0 (just over three octaves below middle C), a stupendous low rumble which Sound On Sound’s men in white coats tell me vibrates at around 26 cycles per second.

Also found in film scores and orchestral sample libraries is the so-called Wagner tuba, conceived by the composer in the mid-19th century as a new instrument with a noble, horn-like sound geared for heroic, solemn and stately themes.

Built in tenor and bass sizes, the Wagner tuba is usually played by French horn players — you can see it demonstrated by Gabrielle Finck of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgfqe4XHA78.

While orchestral trumpets, trombones and tubas are known as the ‘heavy brass’, horns fall into a category of their own. In the classical repertoire, horn players spend much of their time playing alongside and blending with the woodwinds, which cultivates a certain air of musical refinement; on the other hand, some composers like to exploit the instrument’s brassy side (as heard in the braying, high-pitched riff at the front of John Barry’s ‘Goldfinger’). Ultimately, though the players may regard themselves as separate from the brass section, horns are generally viewed as the bridge between the woodwinds and the brass, which corresponds to the position on the page horn parts normally occupy in an orchestral score.

Brass Extras

Another instrument that defies exact pigeonholing is the saxophone, traditionally (and somewhat counter-intuitively) classed as woodwind, due to its sound being produced by blowing into a reed. In jazz big bands, saxes play a different role from the brass, often operating as a self-contained, smooth-sounding melodic section in contrast to the agitated brassy stabs of the trumpets and trombones. Saxophone sections began to creep into symphonic works in the late 19th century, and solo saxes remain a popular choice for some contemporary composers.

Baroque instruments such as natural trumpets and horns have begun to crop up in sample libraries, which may be of interest to media composers engaged to produce period scores. Built without valves, these early instruments have a pure, open sound which provides a nice contrast with modern orchestral brass. In the present day, brass bands and military-style marching bands have their own array of instruments that fall outside the scope of this article: suffice it to say that euphoniums, helicons and sousaphones are all types of tuba, the last resembling a boa constrictor wrapped around the player’s body, with a large flared bell positioned above the victim’s head.

Diagram 1: The playing ranges of the trumpet family (middle C marked in blue).Diagram 2: Playing ranges of the trombone family.Diagram 3: Playing ranges of the tuba family, including the horn-like Wagner tuba.Diagram 4: The playing range of the French horn.Diagram 5: Playing ranges of the four main instruments of the saxophone family.Diagrams 1-5 show the broad playing ranges of the aforementioned instruments, as found in today’s sample libraries (the range limits may differ from product to product). Composers should be aware that the depicted top and bottom notes might be problematic for many players in real life — if you’re planning to hire live players, it’s advisable to check that any extremes of range that occur in the score are manageable by the musician in question. That said, if your track is destined to stay in the sampled domain, don’t be afraid to occasionally stretch an instrument’s upper and lower ranges by a few semitones if it suits your musical needs. Purists might complain, but if it sounds good, why not do it?

Bugle Call To The Stars

Simple, historic brass instruments like the Roman cornu and military bugle have no valves, finger holes or slides; pitch variations are achieved entirely by breath and lip control, which limits the instruments to notes within the harmonic series. This gives the familiar, rousing ‘bugle scale’ of C4 (middle C), G4, C5, E5 and G5, sounded in various permutations in all bugle calls. It follows that canny composers looking to stir up war-like, atavistic emotions will write trumpet fanfares incorporating these intervals. A classic example is John Williams’ Superman theme, based on C4, G4 and C5; Fanfare For The Common Man, written by Aaron Copland to help the American war effort in 1942 and later paraded in front of rock audiences by Keith Emerson and ELP, uses similar, triumphant-sounding major-chord figures.

Diagram 6: The opening fanfare of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, better known as the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme.The bugle call to end them all must surely be Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, better known as the theme music of the 1968 sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. It opens with four trumpets in C playing the first three notes of the bugle scale in ascending order, heralding a mighty ‘ta-da’ from the whole orchestra. You can see the brass parts notated in Diagram 6: note that the two loud accented chords are simply C major to C minor, played in close harmony by the trumpets and horns with wider-voiced trombone chords underneath. The bottom low C of the trombones is doubled by tuba.

Escape Velocity

Having figured out how to use tools and weaponry (apparently encouraged by the mysterious monolith seen at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey — I never could quite work that one out), it remained for Mankind to master the ultimate skill: the ability to fly a bicycle up into the sky. Here again, we humans were given a valuable leg-up by a helpful extraterrestrial species, in this case the phone-loving alien from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Diagram 7: The triumphal main theme of John Williams’ ‘Adventures On Earth’, played in octaves by three trumpets (upper part), two trombones and a bass trombone (lower part). Transcription by Dave Stewart.Written to accompany the exhilarating bicycle chase near the end of the film, John Williams’ ‘Adventures On Earth’ features a triumphal brass theme, which I’ve transcribed in Diagram 7. The theme (written in C major and incorporating a bugle-scale phrase) is played by three unison trumpets, doubled in the lower octave by two trombones and bass trombone.

Later in the piece, the theme reoccurs in the new key of E major — this time the tune is pitched eight semitones lower, placing it within the comfortable playing range of the horns. Consequently, the composer wrote it as a unison (not octaves) part for three trumpets and four horns, which produces a noble, heroic sound; had the tune been in the original key, horns would need to be written an octave lower, thus creating the classic and majestic orchestral brass sonority of trumpets and horns playing together in octaves.

Diagram 8: Typical eighth-note ostinato rhythm patterns for horns, trombones or trumpets — such rhythmic phrases work well when played as simple chords at around 140bpm.Earlier in this series I spoke about how rhythmic pulse can be generated in orchestral music by simple rhythm patterns known as ‘ostinatos’. This time-honoured device works with strings, woodwinds and brass, and is arguably easier on the ear than clobbering taiko drums! Diagram 8 shows some typical ostinato eighth-note rhythm patterns which sound great played by sampled brass — when executing them, use a staccato patch and play with a light ‘bouncing’ action, leaving a short gap between each note. Such patterns work well at around 140bpm but, if necessary, you can temporarily slow the tempo of your track when recording the parts. I’d advise against hard-quantising the MIDI notes (too mechanical-sounding), but a ‘soft quantise’ of 80 percent will tighten up the rhythm while retaining human feel.

Though I’ve notated the rhythms as single notes for simplicity’s sake, composers very often write such patterns as repeated three-note chords, for example (from the bottom up) C4, E4, and G4 (C major), D4, F4 and A4 (D minor), or C4, F4 and A4 (F major). Such simple triads can be spiced up by (say) alternating one bar of C4, E4, and G4 with a bar of a suspended chord like D4, F#4 and G4 — try it! The C4-A4 register works well for bright-toned chordal horn ostinatos, and you can write as low as G3 (G below middle C) for deeper, more mellow-sounding horn voicings. If you want to go lower still, use trombones, for which I’d suggest a pitch range of C3 up to F#4. You can also successfully apply this technique to trumpets up in the C4 to E5 register, though that would tend to clash with a high-pitched melody — however, it could work very well over a bass-register tune played by low strings and woodwinds!

Brass Harmonies

Diagram 9: Softly played horn chords create a sombre, melancholy atmosphere in Thomas Newman’s ‘Voluntary Retirement’ cue from the film Skyfall. Transcription by Dave Stewart.As mentioned earlier, softly played orchestral brass can be a beautiful texture, either for supporting parts or for stating a quiet theme. Quiet sustained horn chords are particularly effective: you can hear this sonority at work in the opening measures of Thomas Newman’s ‘Voluntary Retirement’ (from the film Skyfall). Played by five horns, it features a simple, descending three-note motif supported by lower harmonies, creating a haunting and melancholy atmosphere. I’ve transcribed the horn parts in Diagram 9.

Diagram 10: Trumpets and trombones also sound great playing melodic chordal movements at quieter dynamics. A nice example occurs in Gustav Holst’s ‘Saturn, The Bringer Of Old Age’. Trumpets and trombones, traditional purveyors of pomp and ceremony, also sound great playing melodic chordal movements at quieter dynamics. A nice example occurs in Gustav Holst’s ‘Saturn, The Bringer Of Old Age’, the fifth movement of the British composer’s The Planets suite. As shown in Diagram 10, a trio of trombones (two tenors and a bass) plays a stately theme in the key of B minor for two bars, then three trumpets take up the tune while a lone tenor trombone continues underneath, doubling the high trumpet part down an octave. Pizzicato cellos and double basses (not shown in the diagram) pace out a steady descending B, A, G#, E repeated quarter-note figure underneath, adding harmonic movement to the upper parts’ static B minor tonality.

Our last musical extract is an outstanding example of brass harmony: Diagram 11 shows an extract from ‘Song Of Titus’ by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, a brilliant musical all-rounder who composed symphonies and operas, performed as a jazz pianist and wrote sophisticated soundtracks for films and TV, including the BBC’s mini-series adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. The latter project spawned a piece of music of rare beauty, based on a surreal poem chanted nightly by the schoolmasters of the ancient, decaying castle in a bizarre post-supper ritual.

Diagram 11: A brass-only extract from ‘Song Of Titus’ by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, as featured in the BBC TV series Gormenghast. Orchestration by John Wilson, score extract reproduced by kind permission of the composer.Given the doomy Gothic setting, I imagine most composers would respond with dark, dirge-y music laden with groaning low strings and contrabassoons. Not so Richard Rodney Bennett — his arrangement starts out light and airy, sung by a boy soprano and underscored by sweeping, heartbreakingly lyrical strings. Producer Estelle Daniel described it as “music of dreamlike quality which plumbed the undercurrents of the soul”. The composer was knighted for Services to Music in 1998 — I’d have given him a knighthood on the strength of this piece alone.

As you can see, the instrumental brass break of ‘Song Of Titus’ features dense, complex harmonies, but you can grasp the music’s essence by playing the trumpet top line over the (greatly) simplified chord sequence I’ve indicated. While the mood of this passage is stately and grandiose, its regal fanfares incorporate fast 16th notes which require precise rhythmic articulation — see the ‘Masterclass Tip’ box for advice on how to best render that with samples.

Playing Styles

As noted throughout this series, today’s sample libraries greatly benefit from the interval-based ‘true legato’ sampling introduced by Vienna Symphonic Library in 2002. This joins up melody notes in a lifelike manner, smoothing over transitions so that you hear an unbroken line rather than a series of disconnected bumps. It sounds very agreeable when applied to soaring brass melody lines and works equally well for ensembles and solo instruments, so I’d encourage users to always try a legato patch for their heroic trumpet and horn tunes.

In addition to the legato, sustain, portato, staccato and staccatissimo styles normally provided for strings and woodwind in sample collections, brass instruments have their own particular traditions and vocabulary of playing styles, which can energise a sampled arrangement. As described in last month’s article, double and triple-tongue performances work well for galloping rhythms, rapid note repetitions and hunting-horn calls. Horn rips (energetic, fast chromatic runs up to a short target note) are a great, rousing ear-catching delivery, and for maximum power, the horns’ ‘bells-up’ style (performed, as the name suggests, by tilting the bell upwards towards the audience) produces a louder, brassier and more immediate ‘blaring’ sound.

Though a great resource for humorous effects, trombone slides are not well supported in orchestral libraries. Such uninhibited non-classical deliveries are more likely to be found in a pop or jazz big-band horns collection, along with trumpet ‘doits’, falls and shakes. Some pop styles do creep into orchestral collections, though; it’s not uncommon to find over-the-top Mexican mariachi vibrato trumpet performances, and one library even includes a ‘Zampano’ molto espressivo strong vibrato style, named in honour of the brutal trumpet-playing anti-hero of Fellini’s La Strada (who would soon be shown the door if he wandered into a classical concert hall). On a more subtle note, most orchestral libraries include a light vibrato option for their brass instruments, which can help to make solo lead lines sound less formal.

The Inception ‘Braaam’

On a less subtle note, some of you may be wondering how to create the big, so-called ‘Braaam’ slamming low brass racket, which has been gleefully over-used since Inception used it to scare the life out of film audiences. One critic described it as being “a massive blast of indistinguishable brass, like an alphorn next to an amplifier”. To my ears, it’s a combination of low orchestral brass samples — bass trombones, tubas, possibly a cimbasso or two — and layered, ambient big drum hits of the type now found in many ‘cinematic’ percussion libraries. The brass sounds detuned, and the percussive elements are also heavily processed. You can get a similar effect yourself by using your sample player’s ‘tune’ knob to down-tune the samples.

Apparently, this monstrous, blatting noise can now be heard ad nauseam on virtually every action movie trailer. A depressing thought, but one consolation is that it might indicate media composers are finally beginning to tire of plagiarising Thomas Newman’s cues!

Coda

A few words on musical expression: the crescendos and diminuendos that occur in some extracts (marked by ‘hairpins’ in the score) may look fussy, but are actually a vital expressive device. As mentioned in the first article of this series, most contemporary orchestral sample libraries offer users real-time control of dynamics via a nifty feature called Velocity Crossfading, whereby the timbre of instrument can be heard changing as its different dynamic layers are crossfaded. This control is commonly assigned to the keyboard’s mod wheel, and mastering the art of dynamically ‘riding’ your MIDI performances is one of the key factors in creating a lively, organic-sounding arrangement. This has become something of a mantra for UK orchestral sample company Spitfire Audio, who advise their customers, “On long notes, make sure you always use your mod wheel”.

I look forward to regaling you with more musical suggestions in Part 7, when our journey through the sampled orchestra continues with an examination of percussion, harp and keyboards.

The Sampled Orchestra: Part 1 Getting Started

The Sampled Orchestra: Part 2 Basic String Writing

The Sampled Orchestra: Part 3 Essential String Playing Styles

The Sampled Orchestra: Part 4 Basic Woodwind Writing

The Sampled Orchestra: Part 5 Into The Woods

The Sampled Orchestra: Part 6 The Brass Family

The Sampled Orchestra: Part 7 The Kitchen Strikes Back