Back to the Future: Alan Silvestri and the Octatonic Scale

The Octatonic scale—Alan Silvestri's secret technique!

To celebrate Back to the Future Day, let's roll back time and see how Alan Silvestri uses every part of the Octatonic and Symmetrical Diminished scales, with 8 notes forming a repeating pattern just full of strange properties, to create a Hollywood film score.

'3m2 Disintegrated Einstein' can be heard as Marty and Doc test out the DeLorean's time travel capabilities for the first time in Twin Pines Mall. Alan uses the chord families of the Diminished Scale to perfectly illustrate the drama of the scene. Practice your ear training and music theory with an assignment at the end.

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Video edited by Dallas Crane

You can find the full score book for this film, and others, on the Omni Music Publishing website.

[jonaskern]

Great analysis! Playing back the score in the background, great visualisation of the score, the way you unfolded the melodic elements - so intuitive for my brain! Thank you so much for your video, this is exactly the kind of content I'm looking for :D You even have a relaxed voice and melody of speech! I'm so happy to have come across you. Would be amazing to get more analyses like this in the future, bell is turned on! :)

[AxKlein]

This is the sort of analysis most film scoring students would've only dreamed of years ago. Thanks a lot for posting! And please, oh please, give us some Herrmann, Rósza, Barry and Morricone.

[michaelneedham]

Looking at these videos I feel like a kid on Christmas.

[ConnorHelms]

Crazy how fast paced and dense this can get, and its amazing just how concordant he manages to make the octatonic scale sound too! nice job

[arvindbaradwaj]

The great Alan Silvestri would be very Happy to see your analysis.

[ilkayboraoder]

Another great example for Dimished scale usage in almost all movie is "Predator" which was also musiced by Silvestri. (E. g. Billy's Confrontation) I brought exactly this concept to my movie music analysis lesson during my master's degree of film music composition course. Thanks to Omni's engraved score, my teacher was very impressed by examples. It is amazing to see how economical Alan Silvestri and he knows exactly what he wants! As it's said in the video, It is very useful to exercise this "Technique" since it fits perfectly for lots of different types of music pieces, such as ironic, funny, action, tension etc. and it can be easily used also for "Art Composer" works beside of movie music. Thank you for this beatiful video and best regards,

[mastermhr]

Speaking from Korea, i wonder one day Omni figures out license problem for worldwide shipping for this amazing score so various composer can finally analyze this score.Btw this kind of video is soooo good.Thank you Omni for publishing and video👍

[tomdavis]

Wonderful analysis Tim! And the "assignment" at the end is excellent!

[prestonmelton]

Very good analysis of one of my favorite scores. Thank you!

[edelcorrallira]

No wonder I fell in love with the Octatonic scale, I mean I saw its potential... Repeats every two strings and every four frets, it has major & minor & half diminished & diminished chords with a minor 7 ... Its a Swiss army knife, it does anything with mikimal finger dexterity or head space but that is merely scratching the surface.
The variety is mind boggling.
Also what a fantastic video... Sounds like it deserves a good composition at exactly 88bpm :P

[AlexSonicsMusic]

Thanks so much for this high quality content. Gonna try it myself at once🌞🎶

[GuyVignati]

This video is so precious!! Please share more videos like this one, they're invaluable! :D

[vincentzaalberg]

LIKE, great analyses condensed in a bite sized video. 10/10

[kilroy]

mm hmm yes nods.
I learned the main theme sheet music on keyboard. I really enjoyed learning it, and really started to get a feel for Silvestri's patterns, continuing with experimentation with the BTFF 2 and 3 music. But this is way above my head.
I'm not a musician, I just replicated the black dots on the paper and learned a bit more by ear.

[AntonioOrtizMusic]

This is incredible! Lots of information to unpack, definitely going to rewatch a few times to fully soak it in. A huge shoutout to the editor because this was very well edited.

[Novadag]

Fantastic analysis! More of this please.

[norvintu-wang]

Amazing stuff Tim!!! thank you for putting this together!!!! would love to see some analysis of Mr.Jerry Goldsmith score in the future

[robertplasschaert]

This is fantastic! Thank you for this!

[argentosthemepark]

One can just marvel at this briiliant score. Great insights in this video. Much appreciated. :)

[DavidSoundWizard]

This is amazing. please do more of these please