Arranging Music for a story.
- Alexandra Louise Harris
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Transcript from Creating Stories through Music week 2.
Click on the image above to watch on YouTube.
This week I started working on arranging the music for the story. In the past, I’ve used GarageBand. Both to record and as a kind of brainstorming tool, but this time I wanted to try using Ableton Live. For the other Violetta albums, I’ve used this to check the levels and do a bit of end editing, but I’ve only really touched on the basics. So it means a lot of learning. Luckily there’s plenty of tutorials online, and I’ve done quite a few of those, but I’m very much at the beginning stages.
It’s always good to try new things and this week I’ll be sharing some of my process for arranging the music. But first, there was a bit of editing of Chapter 2, a bit of drawing and we’ve had such beautiful weather I thought I’d work outside. It’s still four seasons in a day as you can tell by my hat and ugg boots, but the perfect time to admire the beautiful autumn leaves.
A bit of practice, this admittedly has been sporadic, but I’m also hand writing out a lot of the parts this time as it’s quicker and easier to brainstorm. I’m also wondering if it might be more visually appealing in the end to have something like that in a book? Hmm…more ideas!
The music for the first chapter is based on Bartok’s Swineherd’s Dance. Unfortunately he didn’t write anything about a wallaby, but it’s so great in many ways because it already has an ostinato in the accompaniment. That means a repeated pattern like this.
It could continue for the whole piece, but I quite like that Bartok, and this violin arrangement, has a change in the harmony. You can see that here in the piano part. Therefore, I’ve written another Ostinato part for the introduction only. The reason I’m so keen to have these easy to remember lines is that I have an idea for students to dress up as animals and appear from the snowy woods.
Next, I researched how to enter the piano notes in Ableton. I’ve chosen to use a celeste and woody marimba sound, but the other cool thing I discovered is that you can use it like a looping station or a DJ mixing desk. They are referred to as scenes, so it actually makes it easier to start from a particular bar and record just that section. I’m still figuring out how to edit it all properly, but that was a fun discovery.
Garageband is a bit more intuitive. A lot of the things I found just by investigating and I’d still encourage people to start there. It’s also free with Apple products so that’s a big bonus, and if you want to see how I use it, I’ll put the links in the description below.
I’ll show you a bit more next week on how I record next week, but in terms of arranging, it’s always a bit experimental. I mentioned before that a creative student did some improvising over this ‘fox’ theme by Bartok, and came up with things I didn’t think of. I hadn’t considered the movement of the fox, fast and jittery, something like this so I’ll be adding that to the introduction I think.
Oh and on the weekend, the birds were going crazy in our backyard which gave me an idea to add some real life animal sounds. I walked up into the bush and gathered this crow cawing for the next scene. I’ll have to see if it works, but I’m looking forward to trying it.
Arrangements sometimes look like this in the end (Violetta's music book) but here’s my scribbled out an arrangement which combines Bartok’s Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste, and the Dance of the Princess and the Dance of the Trees from the Wooden Prince. Very appropriate I think, but that’s what I’m thinking of adding the bird sounds to.
I also drew the crows for the next scene and kept thinking of costume and mask ideas. I went to a medieval masked ball on the weekend which was so much fun. I wore a butterfly mask and so many people asked about it that I’ll put the link for that down here too.
Anyway, next week, I’ll talk a bit more about recording. I have to say it’s the part I often procrastinate over. I struggle to get the end result to sound like I hear it, but all we can do is try to get better and improve! It’s been great trying Ableton though and hopefully by next week I’ll have learnt a bit more about editing.
Until then, Happy Creating. Bye for now.
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