Robin Hoffmann

Opening the Portal - Composition Screencast - Part 9

In this part, I start from the beginning of the piece to refine and work on the details.

By The Christmas Tree - New Orchestra Recording

In fall of 2019, I was switching to Dorico and in order to get to know the software, I spent some time writing three little Christmas tunes just for fun. I have made the mockup as well as the Dorico files available here.

Earlier this year, I was orchestrating the score for one episode of Star Wars Visions by co...

Write Music According to the State of Your Career (?)

I consciously and willingly decided to slow down or even sabotage my own career. At least according to a few composers and mentors that I was talking to during my early years of pursuing this career. And they might have been right. From my current point of view I would probably even tell my younger self the same thing.

But let's back up a bit here. One of the strikingly simple career advi...

Poll of the Week: What Role Does Music Play in Your Spare Time?

I would be interested in what role music plays in your life outside of musical work. Check all that apply.

Reharmonisation Part 11: Bass Notes II

With all the previous parts of this series it has become relatively obvious that successful (re)harmonisation strategies don't need to be complicated. In fact, strikingly simple strategies can have a huge impact. Additionally, complex sounding harmonisations don't need to actually be complex at all.

Today, I want to focus on a strategy that is incredibly versatile, sounds very sophisticat...

Lucy Kay - Enjoy the Silence - Score Sheet

Due to popular demand, here is the score sheet for my arrangement of ENJOY THE SILENCE that I wrote for Lucy Kay. Here it is important to say that this score is ONLY for study purposes.

A few additional elements like epic percussion and synths are not notated but they don't play a massively relevant role in this arrangement.

2021-11-19 08:48:20 +0000 UTC View Post

Poll of the Week: How Do You Deal With "Office Work"?

Being a self employed composer for media often means to spend a considerable amount of time in answering emails, phone calls or messages as well as book keeping and many other non-musical things. How do you fit those into your daily work routine? Check all that apply.

Listening Fatigue

When working on music for several hours without break it is a relatively common problem for many composers to start to suffer from ear fatigue. You start to hear things that are not there or start to not hear things that are obvious problems. Especially in work phases that are essential for the sound (like mixing, mastering) these things can become problematic.

Some of the mixing engineer...

Pirate Waters - Mockup Walkthrough - Part 2

Here is the second part of the walktrough of the mockup of my piece PIRATE WATERS that I recently posted. In this part, I talk about signal paths, effects and reverbs.

Poll of the Week: How Many Instruments Do You Play?

(at a level where you at least can play some easy etudes on it)

Film Orchestration - Part 3: Concert Halls, Studios & Seating 2

In the last part, we were having a look at the acoustic properties of concert halls and traditional seating charts of symphony orchestras. The reason why I focus that much on this topic is that film scoring has a fundamentally different target in its reproduction than "traditional" concert music. Film scores are usually not supposed to be played or listened to in a concert hall but they are goi...

The Overworking Attitude in the Industry

A few days ago, in a relatively large Facebook group about composing for media, a fellow composer posted the following provoking text:

The discussion became pretty heated pretty quickly and in spite of said composer clarifying that it was meant to be satirical and disabling further comments, it s...

Template Evolution - 2019 vs. 2021

One of my patrons was recently posting on social media that he was following some of the things that I have been talking about on here regarding mix/template etc. transfering that into his template and also mentioning that he took down some of his older music from streaming platforms because his mixes were so much better now, which is great to hear.

While I was just working on another upd...

Poll of the Week: How Does Your Musical Imagination Work?

This is something that I have been wondering about for a while. Tried to cover as many options as I think might exist but I'm pretty sure there are specifics for everybody so don't hesitate to use the comment section. Check all that apply.

Witches' Spell (for Woodwind Quintet)

Here's my second piece from our first ORCHESTRA DISCOVERY SESSION, which we recorded in early September in Prague. This one is a more "dissonant" piece with some frantic and virtuosic passages throughout. It was great fun recording that.

The score sheet is attached below.

October 2021 - Wrap Up

Even though it has only been a few weeks since I came back from vacation, it seems like ages ago. The downside of being self employed is that whenever you go on vacation, on your return all the things you ignored for that time will pile up. So I was quite busy with catching up on all the things that were asking for my attention while I was gone.

However, I had a spectacular highlight shor...

Opening the Portal - Composition Screencast - Part 8

It has been a while since we were looking at this piece but here finally is the eighth part of the series where I finish sketching the piece and move back to the beginning to start the detail work.

Poll of the Week: What is Your Primary DAW for Composing/Producing?

Deceiving Dissonances

Pianos are dissonance amplifiers. Period. This is something that took me years to actually fully realize as I thought that simply a dissonance is a dissonance is a dissonance. But they are not as everybody who compares for instance dissonant sounds in a choir with the same dissonant sounds on a piano will quickly realize.

The piano is an instrument which generates a lot of higher harmonic...

Device Lexicon: Part 2 - Low Trumpet Fanfares (feat. The Patriot)

Everybody has been saying that James Horner reused his "Danger Motif" over and over again in many scores (which by the way he defended in one interview as one of his artist's signatures) but also John Williams uses a recurring signature sound in action and particularly danger sequences.

You can find it in ...

Poll of the Week: How often do you listen to your own music after you finished working on it?

Brother Commercial - Composition Screencast - Part 1

I'm back from a wonderful vacation and well rested as well as still under the impression of having seen John Williams conduct the Berlin Philharmonic a few days ago so there definitely is enough enthusiasm to pick it up again here.

And with my return, I'm trying something new. This is the first part of the actual real life project that I have been working on where I scored a relatively lo...

Enjoy the Silence - Release

I am still on vacation but wanted to interrupt my silence to let you know about this release.

When Lucy Kay asked me to arrange and produce her new album and told me she wanted it to be called DARK ANGEL, I was very excited. We wanted to go against the "usual" classical crossover releases and came up with the concept of transforming iconic songs into powerful versions with a strong influ...

September 2021 - Wrap Up

I know I'm a bit early for a wrap-up this month but there's a reason for this and it's something that hasn't happened since I started this Patreon: I'm going on vacation. So for the next 2 weeks, there's probably going to be a bit of radio silence on here. 

However, looking at the access statistics, I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of you who still might want to do some catching ...

A Simple Act of Kindness (for Woodwind Quintet) - Recording & Score

Here's the first recording from our Orchestra Discovery Session from a few weeks ago. I wrote two pieces for this session. For this one, I wanted to write a quite emotional piece that captures the beautiful tones of the woodwind quintet. We recorded all pieces without any click in order to give them the maximum musical expressiveness and natural phrasing which of course is particularly benefici...

Film Orchestration - Part 2: Concert Halls, Studios & Seating 1

When we talk about film orchestration, we also need to take things into consideration that are different compared to traditional orchestration.

Probably the biggest difference lies in the fact that traditional orchestration usually targets a concert performance in a concert hall while with film scores we obviously have a recording of the music as the final product. This seems like a small...

Poll of the Week: Did/Do You Have a Plan B For Your Career?

Recording Imperfections

One thing that you do a lot when you record real ensembles is to dig in Protools sessions through individual mic signals. Even if you outsource the editing/mixing to someone else, you will most likely still listen through individual takes and even individual microphone signals to assemble at least a rough version to edit.

If you are coming from a sampling/DAW background and do this for th...

A Few More Impressions from the First Orchestra Discovery Session

It has been a week since we returned from Prague from our first Orchestra Discovery Session. By now, most composers have edited and mixed their tracks already and we have been discussing and critiqueing mixes and edits in the group channel on Discord. I think the results turned out really well and I'm looking forward to sharing the tracks and their path from idea to finished recording with you....

Device Lexicon: Part 1 - Sustaining Violin Chords (feat. Jurassic Park)

This is the start of a new series where I want to dive into musical devices that we keep seeing (and hearing) in film scores and that define a certain sound or a certain genre. This can be little orchestration decisions or composition approaches that I picked up over the years and should be seen as a little set of vocabularies that you can apply in certain conditions.

Today, I want to sta...