EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

Speaking of film music: The thought of composing music for films and 
other projects has probably occurred to many of the non-professionals 
on this list - but how do you get started writing, say, orchestral 
music, when you have no formal education?

One place to start would be to look for a sample library with 
orchestral sounds and judging from various reviews it seems 
like "Advanced Orchestra" is a good choice. But since these CDs will 
cost you 5 * $250, most people will not buy them unless they're sure 
they'll be able to use them properly (you can start by investing in 
the very cheap Protools versions for a start though). Will you have 
to do a lot of tweaking in EXS in order to use the samples? How 
difficult is it to learn how to write orchestral music if you have no 
formal training?

According to amazon.com, there are some books about music theory that 
might be relevant, i.e.:

* Samuel Adler, "The study of orchestration"
* Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, "Principles of orchestration"
* Kent Kennan, Donald Grantham, "The technique of orchestration"
* Kent Kennan, "Counterpoint"
* Cecil Forsyth, William Bolcom, "Orchestration"

Which book(s) are recommendable to someone without formal musical 
training?

While you're saving up (!) for the full version of "Advanced 
Orchestra", you could rent some good movies and analyze how music is 
used in them. One could look for the list of previous Oscar winning 
film scores and make sure to look into different genres too. Also, 
both older and newer movies are relevant, i.e. the old Hitchcock-
movies are said to use music very well (never payed any conscious 
attention to it myself; will have to rent some of them and listen.)

You could also look into the works of some of the famous composers 
out there, i.e. Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer, John Barry etc., and 
maybe pick up one of the books with interviews with these people as 
it would give you an idea of how things work when you're writing 
music professionally.

Finally: Is it possible (and legal) to rent a DVD movie and 
then "save" all or some of it in a format that can be loaded into 
Logic? If so, it would give you a chance to pretend you're writing 
the soundtrack for a movie which would be a very interesting exercise.

Anyway, this is hopefully a subject of interest to people on this 
list.

Merry christmas,
Henrik Jensen

PS. Just replaced MicroLogic with the Gold-EXS bundle and am thus new 
to these programs as well as to this list. It seems like an 
interesting forum though