# How did they score the older Cartoons?



## Mistro (Sep 25, 2022)

Back 100 years ago, it's not like everyone had access to a DAW where you can put in animation footage into Cubase and score the film. Live orchestras was used. Anyone know what the process was? Did they do the animation first then a plan for composition and timing then to the musicians in a studio?

I'm mostly thinking of Tom and Jerry but there are other cartoons where it's the music that's articulating the action of the animation. I'm just curious about how it was done so beautifully. I watch Tom and Jerry almost every day btw. and the more I get into music the more I appreciate what I'm hearing while watching it. I find myself focusing on what instruments are being used in a chase scene for example and how the mood changes with different sections etc. Thoughts?


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## kgdrum (Sep 25, 2022)

Interesting question and thread,the only thing I can add is mentioning the phenomenal Carl Stalling imo a true genius and legend.


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## ScoringFilm (Sep 25, 2022)

The 2 CD discography is a valuable reference resource:











In some of the tracks you can hear the producer commenting on the retakes. As far as I know it was all performed live, voices, SFX, orchestra; all in one take!







Quite apt that this method of scoring is now called 'Mickey Mousing'!


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## José Herring (Sep 25, 2022)

They recorded it in phrases. In essence what we would call loops today. Short gestures then they would edit them together as the cartoon was being developed.


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## JDK88 (Sep 25, 2022)

The music was done first. Then the cartoons were animated to the music.


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## devonmyles (Sep 25, 2022)

A very long time ago, I remember reading an interview with a retired Violinist.
He mentioned, that when a saw a Tom and Jerry session (or several) looming in his diary, he would have a real moment of terror.
Whether or not that was true, or he was just romanticising, I don't know. But it was very funny.


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## ScoringFilm (Sep 25, 2022)

Back (year's ago) when I did my Master's in Composing for Film & TV one of the assignments was to score a student's animation using only a sax quartet, no sfx at all. It was quite a challenge, especially conducting to the live video. I employed the 'Mickey Mousing' technique. All looks (and sounds) a bit dated now!


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## Mistro (Sep 25, 2022)

JDK88 said:


> The music was done first. Then the cartoons were animated to the music.


How did they know how to time the music? There had to be a script or stroyboard for the action first no? I can imagine what a nightmare it was if they had to do edits somewhere in the middle of the story.


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## JDK88 (Sep 25, 2022)

They used a sheet like this.


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## R.G. (Sep 25, 2022)

The music was not done first.

The animation and editing itself had its own timing grammar, frame tempos were used a lot, especially when it was obvious the music would have to be score with a regular beat, such as with characters marching, skipping, dancing, et cetera. They didn't go willy nilly since the whole affair is a synchronized ballet of sorts.

The M.E.'s delivered meticulous timing sheets and the composers used all the old school sync-scoring techniques.

Cues were split into manageable chunks at logical start-stop points, *very roughly on average* about 30 seconds.

Composer's had sheets of music snippets that they traded with each other and used as quick references they would adapt as needs be to make the process more efficient.

I am told it was not for the faint of heart, and some composers only did it once and that was enough. The style was restored back in the early 90's by Bruce Broughton and his crew on Tiny Toons.


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## Mistro (Sep 25, 2022)

R.G. said:


> The music was not done first.
> 
> The animation and editing itself had its own timing grammar, frame tempos were used a lot, especially when it was obvious the music would have to be score with a regular beat, such as with characters marching, skipping, dancing, et cetera. They didn't go willy nilly since the whole affair is a synchronized ballet of sorts.
> 
> ...


Do you know if there was back and forth between the composers and animators? 

I'm guessing back then, theater was a big deal for either motion pictures or plays. There was no color TVs in every living room and everyone used to dress up to go out to the theaters for entertainment. Even to watch cartoons. I grew up watching cartoons on black and white TVs. It's no surprise musicians put their backs into things back then we may take for granted today. Even doing the animation was super tedious I can imagine. But, I'm still trying to wrap my head around how it all came together from animation studio to the orchestra. Manageable chunks seems to make a lot of sense.


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## R.G. (Sep 25, 2022)

Mistro said:


> Do you know if there was back and forth between the composers and animators?
> 
> I'm guessing back then, theater was a big deal for either motion pictures or plays. There was no color TVs in every living room and everyone used to dress up to go out to the theaters for entertainment. Even to watch cartoons. I grew up watching cartoons on black and white TVs. It's no surprise musicians put their backs into things back then we may take for granted today. Even doing the animation was super tedious I can imagine. But, I'm still trying to wrap my head around how it all came together from animation studio to the orchestra. Manageable chunks seems to make a lot of sense.


Most of what I know about this I learned from a composer I studied with a little more than a decade after he worked on the Tiny Toons series at Warner, which was straight-up Stalling style. He was Bruce's favorite and he scored a good number of episodes. There was another guy who did one episode and likened it to holy hell and never did another.

Back in the 40's and 50's, all of the animation was done in Burbank. In the early 90's with Tiny Toons, key frames were done in Burbank, and tweening was done much less expensively by tweening houses in South Korea.

The composers will typically hit keyframes, not all of them, but many. The animation collective in Burbank (Warner, Disney, Hanna Barbera, etc.) had books of pretty well established standards they had to go by since the animation and the music were two sides of the same coin and it all had to fit like a unit. But sometimes they deviated for whatever reason, and it could cause problems.

One such time happened with Bruce himself, when there was an explosion and a bunch of houses were falling intact on the ground and forming a neighborhood as if by happenstance. The hit-gags he wrote for each house landing weren't lining up as well as the Bruce and the M.E. preferred and there was nothing to be done on the stage, so the hits were recorded separately then and there and layered in by the M.E.

The only music that was recorded before the animation was the musical set pieces where a known piece of music (Tom and Jerry's Liszt routine, etc.) or other source music was featured and the animation had to be synced to it. And for the marches and dances the animators had to make sure everyone was on the correct foot. Dialogue was of course recorded before everything.


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## JDK88 (Sep 25, 2022)

Thanks for clearing that up.


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## David Cuny (Sep 25, 2022)

I see from http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Stalling/Stalling.htm (this interview with Carl Stalling) that the music was often recorded to a click track, sometimes before the animation was done, and sometimes afterwards. Obviously, if there was a pre-existing song a character was singing to, the timing was known prior to animating:



> *MB: *You invented the "tick" system of recording music for animated cartoons, didn't you? Do you recall the circumstances that led to that?
> 
> *CS:* The "tick" system was not really an invention, since it was not patentable. Perfect synchronization of music for cartoons was a problem, since there were so many quick changes and actions that the music had to match. The thought struck me that if each member of the orchestra had a steady beat in his ear, from a telephone receiver, this would solve the problem. I had exposure sheets for the films, with the picture broken down frame by frame, sort of like a script, and twelve of the film frames went through the projector in a half second. That gave us a beat.
> 
> ...


Ub Iwerks worked out a system that used a horizontal line before the click track was popularized:



> *MB: *Wilfred Jackson has said that there was another line system that Ub Iwerks worked out, based on your system. He said that Ub animated a horizontal line rising and falling, and that the line was photographed at different speeds so that the complete cycle of rising and falling took eight frames, or twelve frames, or whatever the beat happened to be. He said that these loops of film would then be projected on a screen that the orchestra could watch as they recorded the music.
> 
> 
> *CS:* Yes, we did that for a while. We used the line moving up and down for the fifth and sixth Mickey Mouse cartoons, _The Op'ry House_ and _When the Cat's Away_, and then we started using the "tick" system on _The Skeleton Dance_.


As mentioned in other posts, cartoons were scored in sections. Carl Stalling noted that musicians seemed to look forward to scoring cartoons, as they tended to have some of the more interesting music:


> *CS: *The musicians said they enjoyed the cartoons more than anything else. They looked forward to coming down to record the cartoons. It was screwy stuff, you know. A cartoon score was usually made up of about ten sections. We'd run through a section once or twice—usually just once—and then record it. We had a wonderful orchestra at Warner's. It took about three hours to record a cartoon score.


Incidentally, the term Mickey Mousing refers to a music score where the music is timed to match almost all the action happening on the screen. Disney pioneered this technique, but eventually the novelty wore off and it was generally avoided.


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## David Cuny (Sep 25, 2022)

I'll also note that scores had to be created at an incredibly rapid rate.

If I remember the liner notes from the CD, much of Carl Stalling's music is a clever mash-up of existing themes. (There are other animation composers than Carl Stalling, but I haven't seem much about their actual scoring technique written, despite having a couple books on the topic).

Since Carl began his career playing music to silent films, he already had a method for approaching scoring. Film accompanists had books of themes that they could reference for creating underscore.

However, for animation films, he was limited to using themes that Warner had in their music catalog, which - fortunately for him - was fairly large.

That's not to say that none of Carl's music isn't original. But there are a lot of practical reasons why "borrowing" themes made sense.


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## NekujaK (Sep 26, 2022)

This is all very interesting - I appreciate all the detailed info folks have provided.

Several years ago, I made a music video for a song of mine by editing together various clips from old Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons (for my own use, not commercial distribution), and I was surprised to discover the cartoon clips synced nearly perfectly to the tempo of my song. I went into the project thinking I'd have to alter the speed of the cartoons to achieve some level of synchronization with the music, but it wasn't necessary at all.

This led me to speculate that there was an ideal tempo that animators like to work with, and by extension so did the composers. It was just sheer luck that my song happened to use that same tempo.


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## PaulieDC (Sep 26, 2022)

This is bizarre. I was getting dressed yesterday morning and I had Bugs Bunny on the TV (Saturday morning cartoons of course), and asked in my head "I wonder how they did that, did they storyboard, then write music cues, then illustrate to that?"

And here y'all provided amazing info on it all, thanks!

FWIW, I bought the Carl Stalling Project CD set... um... er... 32 years ago... still have it of course. Was that really 32 years ago???





*Ooooo, I'm dyin' again!*


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## PaulieDC (Sep 26, 2022)

WHOOMP, there it is...


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## Mistro (Sep 26, 2022)

Some great info! Thanks!. Is there a name for scoring to "action" like a musical art that spills over to this day? I'm interested in checking out how to communicate action with music using different tambres and mixing different sections with timing. I'm guessing it's a form of theory? Or is this kind of thing just done creatively as you go along?


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## David Cuny (Sep 26, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> This led me to speculate that there was an ideal tempo that animators like to work with, and by extension so did the composers. It was just sheer luck that my song happened to use that same tempo.


From "The Cartoon Music Book":



> Stalling's tempos, like the action's, were always of the 1/24 second it takes a frame to pass a projector, and he and animators could and did sync music and visuals down to small fractions of a second.







Mistro said:


> Some great info! Thanks!. Is there a name for scoring to "action" like a musical art that spills over to this day? I'm interested in checking out how to communicate action with music using different [timbres] and mixing different sections with timing. I'm guessing it's a form of theory? Or is this kind of thing just done creatively as you go along?


Film music borrows heavily from the contemporary music of the day. The fact that film composers studied the works of particular composers and studied under specific composers is also a factor.

And obviously, while the language of film has specific idioms, you've got to take into account that the people seeing the films are conversant in that language.

There are a number of books on film scoring - for animation, see "The Cartoon Music Book" - but they tend to end up citing musical influences rather than giving deep insight to the language.

Recognizable style comes from repetition; cartoons have cliche actions which may be scored similarly. Live films are similar, with film composers treating similar actions with similar melodic or harmonic devices. House styles come from other composers imitating styles.

In some cases, those styles may originate from classical music an migrate to film. In others, they may be a cliche that's become a shorthand.

Like most music theory, by the time a musical style has been standardized enough to describe, it's likely to no longer be descriptive of current practices. Music theory typically comes after the fact - it can inform composition, but it's not typically the driver of composition.


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## R.G. (Sep 26, 2022)

Mistro said:


> Is there a name for scoring to "action" like a musical art that spills over to this day? I'm interested in checking out how to communicate action with music using different tambres and mixing different sections with timing. I'm guessing it's a form of theory? Or is this kind of thing just done creatively as you go along?


If I get the overall gist of your question, Scott Bradley and those guys studied what was for them fairly recent ballets and other meticulously descriptive music. Tom and Jerry is basically animated ballet, but with action instead of dancing. Looney Tunes as well, but with dialogue too.

Their initial influences were the harmonic language and active scoring techniques of Stravinsky and Ravel, mainly, but not only them.

Petrushka intermittently has a number of moments like the following one scattered throughout, from about 10:04 to 11:25.



There's lots in L'Enfant et les Sortiléges, but you have to listen past the voices to the orchestra. Here's one example from 3:28 to 4:25.


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## Mistro (Sep 26, 2022)

Is there a way to choose instruments the same way we might choose modes (on top of actually choosing the expression through chords etc. of course)? Like how modes can have typical usage for mood expression? I'm wondering if there's a developed catalog of instrument combos for certain purposes. I think I get the jist of it when I hear sections of an orchestral piece being added for texture for example. Even if not for animation, having the ability to "talk" or tell a story to an audience sonically is very interesting to me. I know we do it all the time with our mouths lol, but you know what I mean.


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## fretwalker (Sep 26, 2022)

I studied film scoring for my composition degree at Berklee in the 70's. That was at the dawning of digital so everything was based on 35mm film.

A key take-away was how to come up with a way lay out your score for each music cue in the film. There are mathematical formulas that gives you the number of beats/measures at specific tempo for a given time period.

35mm film runs at 24 frames per second so that is a constant. Using a stopwatch, you calculate the length of the cue. Then you determine the BPM for the music you plan to write. You then plug that into a formula to find how many beats you need at that tempo. Then based on the time signature(s) you plan to use, you then lay out the measures on a blank score.

If there are points where the music has to sync with an action on the screen, using the formulas you can determine the exact beat where that occurs in the music. A stopwatch is also used for this.

A lot of what I learned may be obsolete with digital video. But some of it still seems applicable with digital editing since not all of the formulas were based on 35mm. For example, the one I found most useful is for determining the number of beats at a specific tempo to fill a given time. The formula is: B = (M * T) / 60.

Specific to the older cartoons, most of the music seem to be inspired by Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks." It is an orchestral cartoon.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 26, 2022)

Streamers and punches, and/or timings written on cue sheets and then the score. 

There must be info somewhere on the Newman system.


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## bryla (Sep 26, 2022)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Streamers and punches, and/or timings written on cue sheets and then the score.
> 
> There must be info somewhere on the Newman system.


My thought as well but I can't seem to find any info about the history of streamers and punches. I'm curious to know if anyone knows because this seems to be the easiest way to have done it.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 26, 2022)

bryla said:


> My thought as well but I can't seem to find any info about the history of streamers and punches. I'm curious to know if anyone knows because this seems to be the easiest way to have done it.


It was easy if you had a music editor to make detailed cue sheets of everything that happened in the scenes, then prepare the streamers and punches for projection.

There were also mag film loops of different lengths when constant tempos worked. The Project Tempo book had charts of the times every beat hit at different tempos (in frames/fractions per beat).

And then came the UREI digital metronome.

I actually published The Beats Per Minute Click Book in the '80s when MIDI sequencers first appeared. It was a copy of the Project Tempo book, only in BPM rather than frame tempos.


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## bryla (Sep 26, 2022)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> It was easy if you had a music editor to make detailed cue sheets of everything that happened in the scenes, then prepare the streamers and punches for projection.
> 
> There were also mag film loops of different lengths when constant tempos worked. The Project Tempo book had charts of the times every beat hit at different tempos (in frames/fractions per beat).
> 
> ...


Do you know when these techniques came to be?


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## R.G. (Sep 26, 2022)

The Earle Hagen books cover all that.

The guys in the early 90's used those techniques too, but their punches and streamers were video generated rather than scribed onto the film, and they used a computer program called Auricle to help with the timing. I don't know anything more about it than that since I was just a wee lad in the early 90's and wasn't there, so I'm just going by what I was told.


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## R.G. (Sep 26, 2022)

Mistro said:


> I'm wondering if there's a developed catalog of instrument combos for certain purposes.


I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for, but the Brandt book might interest you.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 26, 2022)

R.G. said:


> The Earle Hagen books cover all that.
> 
> The guys in the early 90's used those techniques too, but their punches and streamers were video generated rather than scribed onto the film, and they used a computer program called Auricle to help with the timing. I don't know anything more about it than that since I was just a wee lad in the early 90's and wasn't there, so I'm just going by what I was told.



Scoring to picture isn't over when the budget allows.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 26, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> This led me to speculate that there was an ideal tempo that animators like to work with, and by extension so did the composers. It was just sheer luck that my song happened to use that same tempo.



You're talking about something different, but above 1/8 note = 240 everything in a scene falls on a beat (* because a hit is within about 3 frames, or 1/8 of a second).

That's why what you don't hit is as important as what you do.

Also, "Mickey Mousing" means hitting everything, and it's obvious where the term came from.

* Actually, 2 frames early and 3 frames late is a more common rule. ±3 frames was the rule they taught us at Berklee when I was there.


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## R.G. (Sep 26, 2022)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Scoring to picture isn't over when the budget allows.


I missed your meaning.


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## PerryD (Sep 26, 2022)

One of my favorite BBC Proms videos! Strings are flying toward the end!


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## Nick Batzdorf (Sep 26, 2022)

R.G. said:


> I missed your meaning.


I just mean that video-generated streamers aren't gone - as far as I know, anyway.

Another aside: the unfortunately late Ron Grant, who worked with his brother Richard Grant to develop Auricle, was my high school music teacher early in his career.


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## JJP (Sep 26, 2022)

Carl Stalling was actually at the forefront of pioneering some of the techniques for scoring to picture. As mentioned above, he was often writing to cue sheet timings as the animation was not yet finished. I think I remember reading a bit about him also being one of the pioneers of scoring with a click, long before the UREI. I had to do a bit of research for one project in a similar style, and went to the WB archives to review some of the old scores and parts from his sessions.

I came into this business right around 2000 when a lot of the old techniques were disappearing as everything became digital. A number of people were still doing things the old way on paper with the timecode for hit points written above the staff for sketching and then copied over to the score for orchestrating. I spent a lot of time updating timings on scores when new picture edits came through before sessions. Marking and punching film was archaic at that point because streamers and punches were now digital. (People remember Auricle operators on sessions?)

Once you know the timings of the things you want to hit, you can calculate a tempo that catches most hit points. That's because well-edited scenes usually have a rhythm of their own. Once you find that, a lot of things fall into place. From there, you can sit down and start writing on paper. It's not super complicated, but does require a bit of math and the ability to actually think musically in terms of bars and beats.


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## Mistro (Sep 26, 2022)

R.G. said:


> I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for, but the Brandt book might interest you.


Is that William Brandt? https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/william-brandt/703651/



PerryD said:


> One of my favorite BBC Proms videos! Strings are flying toward the end!



This is the best thing I watched all day! Thanks for this. Tom and Jerry are my favorite and it feels good to know they got quality treatment. I was imagining a compilation of some of my favorite scenes while listening. Very fun to watch. I also appreciate being able to see some of the instruments being used for certain actions.


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## R.G. (Sep 26, 2022)

Mistro said:


> Is that William Brandt? https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/william-brandt/703651/


Sorry I left out the title and misspelt his name besides. Me sleepy.

Textures and Timbres, by Henry Brant


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## Mistro (Sep 26, 2022)

R.G. said:


> Sorry I left out the title and misspelt his name besides. Me sleepy.
> 
> Textures and Timbres, by Henry Brant



That looks like a great lead. Thanks.


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## The Retroblueman (Sep 26, 2022)

Mistro said:


> Is there a way to choose instruments the same way we might choose modes (on top of actually choosing the expression through chords etc. of course)? Like how modes can have typical usage for mood expression? I'm wondering if there's a developed catalog of instrument combos for certain purposes. I think I get the jist of it when I hear sections of an orchestral piece being added for texture for example. Even if not for animation, having the ability to "talk" or tell a story to an audience sonically is very interesting to me. I know we do it all the time with our mouths lol, but you know what I mean.


I think that's a fantastic question to have asked and if someone wants to tell you you can use a certain combination of instruments to produce a certain emotion/mood (e.g. joy) then I am not going to disagree.

My slight reservation is that I would not agree if someone asserted it was impossible to use that same combination of instruments to produce the exact opposite emotion (e.g. sadness). It might be exceptionally difficult in some cases, but not impossible.

A useful exercise, if you haven't already done something similar, would be the following:

1. Load up BBCSO Core/Pro - doesn't have to be BBCSO but you are looking for something which has the orchestral instruments as soloists with playable "extended legato" patches - i.e. something where you can play shorts and longs together.

2. List out four or five emotions/moods - e.g. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Hilarity and Fear

3. Try and use each instrument to write melody lines that evoke each of the above emotions in turn.

A passing benefit is that, if you do manage to make it all the way from the piccolo to the tuba doing the above, then you will potentially have enough new material for an album/symphony.😀


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## Mistro (Sep 27, 2022)

The Retroblueman said:


> I think that's a fantastic question to have asked and if someone wants to tell you you can use a certain combination of instruments to produce a certain emotion/mood (e.g. joy) then I am not going to disagree.
> 
> My slight reservation is that I would not agree if someone asserted it was impossible to use that same combination of instruments to produce the exact opposite emotion (e.g. sadness). It might be exceptionally difficult in some cases, but not impossible.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the advice! Looks like it's time for me to finally make my first template. I will try this exercise. I don't have BBCSO but I do have the free one and NI Symphony series via Collectors Edition. And whatever I can find in Kontakt.


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## Mistro (Sep 27, 2022)

ScoringFilm said:


> Back (year's ago) when I did my Master's in Composing for Film & TV one of the assignments was to score a student's animation using only a sax quartet, no sfx at all. It was quite a challenge, especially conducting to the live video. I employed the 'Mickey Mousing' technique. All looks (and sounds) a bit dated now!



I forgot to comment on this earlier. Just want to say great work! It inspires me to try something simple with one instrument which ties into the advice I got above from @The Retroblueman


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## ScoringFilm (Sep 27, 2022)

Mistro said:


> I forgot to comment on this earlier. Just want to say great work! It inspires me to try something simple with one instrument which ties into the advice I got above from @The Retroblueman


Many thanks; enjoy the process!


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## The Retroblueman (Sep 27, 2022)

Mistro said:


> Thanks for the advice! Looks like it's time for me to finally make my first template. I will try this exercise. I don't have BBCSO but I do have the free one and NI Symphony series via Collectors Edition. And whatever I can find in Kontakt.


A pleasure - hope you get _at least_ a few good tunes out of the exercise and that, should that happen, you consider it was worthwhile! It has other benefits too - I struggled for ages to pick out the difference between trombones and french horns on recordings and playing them solo in BBCSO really helped my ear on that front.


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