A theme I'd like to develop

• Aug 11, 2011 - 00:00

Hi there.
I have an idea for a TV show and I had this theme in my head. I used Muse Score to get it on paper.
I'd love some comments and some help. :)
I'd like to create a full theme track out of this. I'd start with a slower version of the lone flute and then 4 beats of a military snare and into a brass rendition at a faster speed. Something military in flavor, but sounding something like the Star Trek TNG theme as well. Unfortunately, I don't have a clue on which instruments to give which parts to give it that feel. I'm not even sure what instruments to use. I've got some research done on it today, but any hints or guidance would be appreciated.

The second file, the Theme one, is my first (failed) attempts at orchestrating it.

Thanks!

Rod

Attachment Size
Rod's Theme.mscz 1.87 KB
TV Show Theme.mscz 3.48 KB

Comments

• Aug 15, 2011 - 14:15

I can't truthfully say that I know too terribly much about this myself, being just a hobbyist in these matters, but I have found that what works for me more-or-less is to set up a large MuseScore document purely as a scratchpad, with a large number of empty measures and several instruments that I am considering, and then to simply doodle around in it ... making a mental covenant with myself never to use the "Delete" key.

As various ideas seem to work out better than others, you open other documents and copy-and-paste from one into the other ... once again, never throwing those documents away and never using "Delete."

These various documents are your rough-drafts. They're the fitting-room where you, so to speak, try various things on for size. Having worked the various ideas out once, you don't consign them to the digital paper-shredder even if they don't "make the cut" and move forward.

I find that it is very hard not to look at some finished piece and to suppose that, somehow, thanks to the miraculous talent of someone who's infinitely better than you, what you're seeing "just popped out fully-formed like Venus from that clam shell." What actually works is a strategy of successive refinement.

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• Aug 15, 2011 - 22:47

I simply point the cursor at whatever phrase I want to listen to next (in whatever open document I want to listen to next), and play the phrase. If I like it, I make a note of it and copy it into whatever document is closest to "the song in progress."

I make notes in the document, as well as on a separate notepad that I'm keeping on the table beside me, about exactly what I have copied ... from where, to where.

The process of "coming up with the possibilities" and that of "stitching them together" ... these two are kept as far away from one another as it is possible to do. (I do that, no matter what it is that I'm writing.)

The creative process, for me anyway, is pure chaos ... or that's the way it seems until it starts to "come together" after Lord-knows how-many drafts. I make it a point to keep every single one of those drafts. (I might "lightly strike through" a scrapped idea or version, but I never obliterate it, and I never discard my records of how exactly it got there. Disk space, after all, is very cheap indeed.)

I also keep a "running log" of every project. It's like the Captain's Log on Star Trek, without the stardates. Music projects; creative writing projects; even computer programs. (I actually use a version-control system. But, hey, I'm a professional nerd...)

It is impossible to look at any "finished work" and to gauge just how many scribbled and torn-up pieces of paper might be in the author's wastebasket. It just looks, well, "finished." Like there was absolutely nothing to it. Like the author just woke up from some magic dream and, "there it was."

But I can look at the song and say that it is, so to speak, "version 14.2.1 of" whatever I started with. Even though it might well be the first version to ever see the light of day.

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