From Piano Sketch to Orchestra

One of my favorite things to do as a composer is to find a narration track on HitRecord and score it as if it were the scene from an audiobook. The first step is to clean up the audio as needed and turn it into a mono track. Then, I write an orchestral sketch for that scene using the piano only. Doing this way helps me not to overwrite or create a muddy sounding score. Our canvas is from 20Hz to 20kHz and using one instrument to sketch out the score keeps that canvas from getting trashed with too much paint. Once I get the result I’m looking for, I take the sketch and orchestrate it.

This video features both steps; piano sketch and then the orchestrated version.