Orchestration [DAW to Sheet Music]
NOTE: This page is for “Orchestration” in the film scoring sense: the process of creating sheet music from a composition in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) such as Cubase or Pro Tools. If you’re looking for the “classical” sense of Orchestration (i.e. arranging an existing work for a new instrumentation), please see Custom Arrangements.
A typical film scoring workflow goes like this: the composer does most of the actual composition fairly late in the movie’s production cycle, when rough cuts of each scene become available. They use these rough cuts as a reference point to write their music into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), which is refined and exported to send to the director. Once they approve of the cue, it is ready to be inserted into the final cut as part of the film’s soundtrack.
However, there are some extra steps when live musicians are involved. In its MIDI format, the music looks like this:
This “piano roll” notation works great for the composer, but it is not legible to a live performer. This is where we come in with the orchestration process.
Whether you are recording a solo instrument or hiring an entire orchestra, we are experienced in high-quality music preparation within the tight constraints and deadlines of the film scoring industry. More than just a simple conversion process, orchestration entails:
- Being familiar with the notation conventions of the industry and knowing how to use templates to speed up the process and ensure consistency.
- Understanding voicings and how to best distribute them; for example, if all the strings are composed as one stem, they must be split out into individual parts for the orchestra.
- Understanding the instruments you are creating parts for, and ensuring the music is idiomatic, legible, and ideally sight-readable.
- Adding dynamics based on the MIDI velocity or the surrounding context of the piece.
- Balancing quality engraving work with a speedy turnaround time.
Ultimately, the orchestrator’s job is not creative collaborator, but translator; the final product is 100% composed by you, and we’ve handled the logistics of getting it from your computer onto the performer’s stand.
We can work directly with Cubase, MOTU Digital Performer, Ableton, and Reaper sessions. If you use any other DAW (including Apple Logic, Avid Pro Tools, and many others), we cannot open the session directly, so you would need to send us the project MIDI as well as audio for all individual stems.
Please feel free to contact us to get a quote for your project for if you need further clarification. Generally, a DAW to Sheet Music orchestration project will cost $7 per staff per minute of music. At the end of the process, you receive PDFs of the score and parts ready for the recording studio. We can also provide notation files (Sibelius, Dorico, or even Finale) and/or MIDI realisation upon request.