What does an orchestrator do?

Edited by Dallas Crane

Troy:

Me!

[AynenMakino]

Oh, making shorts of exactly this kind of thing is a GREAT idea!

[BadNessie]

"Austin Wintory's Definitive Videopedia of Composition and All Things Music"

Keep them coming - this is awesome as a separate bonus!

[IamMiaga]

I watched to whole podcast episode already but it's still great to watch a highlight clip like this.

[Arylith]

You are an absolute wealth of knowledge! Shoutout Troy for being curious and asking these questions

[debayanbmusic]

This is amazing! Had no idea what orchestrators do! Shorts like these could change my life!

[wcjerky]

To my understanding, thanks to Wintory, an ochrestrator to an orchestra is what an engineer is to a manufacturing process.

[lizkatrin]

Thanks for this video.
To me an orchestrator has always been a kind of a translator for the orchestra... 😀

[venusadonis]

Could absolutely listen to you talk music/orchestration all day, and this coming from someone who can barely read guitar tabs. Gonna check out the full episode!

[sachac.]

You really are a mine of gold Austin, thanks for everything. And please keep up!

[catastrophicjones]

Oh wow, I've always been curious what the difference was. That was so well explained, thank you!

[diogo]

Two things: now I know what an orchestrator is and don't forget to shave guys. :)

[Quotenwagnerianer]

It might be worth noting that the necessity to have an orchestrator is only due to the limited time budget of a film production. If a film composer had an indefinate amount of time to finish their music, they would all do it themselves.
In the history of 19th century orchestral music I can only think of one example where a composer supposedly worked with an orchestrator at first, because he was insecure about his own skills coming from the piano and not having scored for orchestra before: Franz Liszt.
He was supposedly helped with the scoring of his first few orchestral works by Joachim Raff, composer in his own right.
I say supposedly because I know both composer's styles, and the orchestral scoring, even in the early works of Liszt, sounds nothing like what Raff is doing in his own works.
So either Raff was very good at masking his own style in orchestration, or Liszt revised the orchestration before publishing the scores and eradicated all traces of Raff's hand.

[kujasan]

well obviously they strate orches.
terrible jokes aside, there is some etymologic showerthought in this.
as in, the orchestra is the semicircular square, and the orchestrator attempts to accomplish the euclidean task of squaring the circle.
not through math, but art.

[stephengoodman]

Great stuff guys. I thought I knew what an orchestrator was, but had no idea they could have so much creative input. The question you've raised for me now is what's the difference between an orchestrator and an arranger?

[iceomistar]

Do you have an orchestrator you collaborate with regularly? hiring one is expensive, I know many composers who prefer to orchestrate their own work to save money.

[someoneelse]

That outro song sounds familiar. What is it called?