ORCHESTRA CONDUCTOR part three
This is the third of four tutorials about conducting an orchestra for the purpose of recording a music soundtrack.
Tutorial three
How to be prepared?
The state of mind is essential and a full tutorial number four will be dedicated to this most important topic.
They are a few conductors around the world capable of mesmerizing every detail of a full score and have a clear vision of how it should sound. If you were one of them you wouldn’t be wasting your time reading me. So this concerns most of us, composers, and advanced level musicians that want to make the best of a recording session as a conductor.
The first obvious step is to know the music as a listener. If you are in the movie business, you had to produce a piano of a sampler version for validation. This can help.
You have to be able to hear right away if there is a mistake in the score or in the musician’s reading. Wrong notes are not the only possible mistakes; it can also be somebody starting too soon or too late.
Memorize the tempo changes, the starts to give, fragment the score into a list of instructions, like dynamics, expected difficulties etc. Why not using colours, your own symbols and anything that could help. If you don’t use a click you also have to point out which cues are mandatory and which one can float a bit.
If you are the composer, you probably finished your score at the very latest minute and the night preceding the recording session will be a very busy one.
