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Hi fellow CF-ers!

It's been a while since my last post but I've had a shot of inspiration and have decided to write another article on orchestration. This time I'm returning to the woodwind section.

The Current State of Play
I think the first thing to mention here is that my situation with regards to woodwind is different from where it was when I wrote the last article.

Firstly, I now have access to a live woodwind player of amazing capability. She's a genuine world-class player and ha… Continue

Well this is just a quick blog post to say "Wow!"

These arrived last night and they are amazing. I'll go into more and more detail over the coming weeks.

In the meantime please take this demo put together extremely hastily. I will be refining it over the next few nights.

http://www.jamessemple.com/music/lassdemo.mp3

This doesn't even get close to showing what LASS can do but at least you get some idea of the rich and… Continue

Hi fellow Forumlings

Well after my first action music blog post there had to be the inevitable sequel.

So ... my first post had no aspirations to be comprehensive but it tried to cover some of the basics. In this post I'd like to cover a few more tricks that I've used of late. Again there's no effort to cover all bases but more to open discussion. I'm sure I'll have further posts on this subject.

My latest… Continue

Well it's been a while since I wrote anything about composition techniques and I thought it was time to post a new blog.

Anyone who reads a lot of these blogs will be aware that one of the main things I've always loved about film music is the specific harmonic devices employed. To date I've already covered chromatic mediants, tritones, bitonality and planing.

In this blog I want to briefly discuss a fairly simple device which is exceptionally effective for giving a sense of otherworldliness. I… Continue

Ok, so it's been a while and I've been very busy but I thought I'd try and drop in a quick blog post about writing action/fight music.

A brief overview
Lots of action scenes take place accompanied by major themes from a film or even background songs. This is not really the kind of action music I'm looking at here. What I'm discussing in this post is classic action music - frantic, dissonant and often quite bewildering. Think of everything from Jerry Goldsmith's work to modern films score… Continue