Notation and Engraving for Scoring Sessions - Part 1 - Introduction

Welcome to this brand new tutorial series! In this multi part tutorial, I will focus on the notation side of things and while this might not be of interest for a few of you (who see their work in virtual orchestration only), it might still be worth reading through them as there might be some information that might be useful for your own work in creating realistic mockups.

Having said that, there is no single right way or standard that is applicable in every situation. In fact, knowing what musicians you write for might have a strong influence on how you notate for them and I will try to mention these differences in cases where there are several different ways of handling it.

My own experience mainly comes from working with orchestras and musicians in Europe. The session landscape here is a bit more diverse than in the US which has led to several regional differences. While in London, you have pretty much the "industrialized" version of a session machinery that has musicians and staff who do nothing else but play sessions, in the rest of Europe you will encounter a more mixed variety of players. You will likely get anything from players who almost exclusively play sessions to players who mostly play concerts and rarely play sessions.

It is vital to understand that there are some striking differences between the session world and the concert world. Most prominently probably the "playing to click" which can cause considerable problems with players who are not accustomed to that way of working.

The main differences however result from the fact that in the session world, there is no rehearsal time as there is in the concert world. This fact alone is the source for most of the differences that we have on the notational side of things between these two worlds.

The result is that when notating for sessions, there is a constant weighing between providing all information that is necessary and keeping the pages clutter free. In a sense, writing for sessions requires a much deeper knowledge in what are the defaults of playing something on a certain instrument.

Which again leads to the differences between concert and session players as these defaults indeed do vary.

I'm working as an orchestrator for more than 15 years now and still, every time I write scores for an orchestra that I haven't worked with before, possibly in a country that I haven't recorded before, I get results that differ from what I was expecting. 

Just a few weeks ago, I orchestrated a feature film score that was recorded at Synchron Stage in Vienna, which was my first recording in Austria and there were some things that happened that I didn't expect to happen. It was all something that could be adjusted with a quick word to the musicians, so just tweaking a few details of interpretation, yet it differed considerably from what I would have gotten in another location.

These differences of course make it tricky to boil it down to a list of "do that and all will be good". So everything that I say here and in the following parts are the things that I usually do which however doesn't save you in all cases from misunderstandings.

In fact, I even remember a few instances of different orchestras with pretty much opposite requirements of certain notational conventions.

A good standard work to fall back to regarding notation is Behind Bars by Elaine Gould, which generally covers a lot of the important things. The major downside of the book is the entire exclusion of Jazz notation, maybe out of pure desparation about the sheer endless notation conventions that exist there.

However, even with a guide like this book, notation is nothing that could be considered "mechanical". In fact, notation is the art form of formulating something in a way that is understood by the musician that you're working with who in return will give you the interpretation that you are expecting. From my own experience, I can tell you that I spent countless hours of my life internally debating about what would be the best way to notate a certain passage in order to get closest result to what I imagine. There are situations where there simply is no "one way" to notate something and it needs to be looked at from different angles in what is the best way to notate something.

In the session world, there is one dominating concept in notation that overarches every decision you make:

Notate as easily readable as possible.

This of course comes from the fact that session recording means sight reading. Making the reading experience for the player as uncluttered and easy as possible will drastically improve the performance.

The overarching concept of subordinating every other decision to the ease of readability has some consequences that in a more puristic view of things might even be considered wrong.

For instance a single chord of Abm in the scoring session world will in some cases be notated with a B in some voices rather than the correct Cb to avoid the extra flat needed. However in a sequence that clearly implies a scale motion that includes that Cb, the easier readable version will probably have that Cb notated.

Notating in the most easy way also implies to include as much information as necessary but as little information as possible for the players. Even the best sight reading players on this planet can not process pitch, articulation, dynamics and several layers of (unncessary) playing technique indication without a certain amount of errors. So any redundant or unneccesary information should be avoided.

One of the biggest problems with learning orchestrators (and one that I made as well) is the tendency to overnotate things to prove "expertise" where the complete opposite would be more appropriate in the session world. There also is a very thin line between detailed playing indications and patronizing the musicians. In general the rule of thumb should be to leave the exact execution to the player and notate the result that you want. E.g. in most cases with strings it should be enough to notate staccato dots on the note and not indicating what exact bowing technique should be used for it.

In the session world, it is also common to use more English descriptions for explanations or directions in the score and parts than Italian. In fact, you might see quite a few rather unusual words written in score sheets and parts for sessions. It is for instance not uncommon to see horn notes labeled "bark" or low trombones labeled "stab". Short and unmistakable words can help to speed up the session and avoid needing to address the musicians directly to shape the interpretation in the way you want.

Excessive "flowery" Italian language is quite uncommon in the session world and particularly uncommon terms should not be used but rather be formulated in plain English language.

So the bottom line is to always notate that the intention is easiest and most directly communicated. However, as I said above, it might not always be entirely clear what might be the best way to communicate your intentions to the players depending on who they are. I will focus more on these things during the next few parts of this series.

In the next part of this series we will have a look at scoring session conventions regarding the layout and notation of score sheets.