Composing / Arranging / Songwriting

Writing music for picture seems like the ideal career. You get to work in your studio for a living, you can earn good money, and there's so much potential work: action films, travel and nature documentaries, romantic comedies, cartoons, low-budget sci-fi, even breakfast cereal ads. But how do you break into this lucrative world?

Is writing TV show theme music as easy as it might seem? To find out, we follow the progress of David Lowe and Paul White's music for a recent BBC series on gardeners.

Jack Wall is a leading light in the video game soundtrack industry, where his credits include the latest chapter in the best-selling Myst series of computer games.

Not content with reviving and staging a 1920s avant-garde work for the first time, Paul D. Lehrman also worked out a way to reunite the piece with its contemporary film, which was never used due to technical problems. This is how...

Do hit songs have a hidden ingredient that makes them successful by appealing directly to our emotions? It's a question that musicians and scientists have sought the answer to for many decades. Acoustic researcher Ernest Cholakis has a new take on the theory...

Abbey Road's famous Studio One has played host to innumerable big-budget orchestral recordings for film, but the final session before its refurbishment in 2001 saw it being used for a new purpose: to record the soundtrack for a video game.

Sam Inglis demostrates how you might furhter enrich your lyric writing with the use of comparisons.

This month, Sam Inglis shows you how to improve your lyric writing by using fewer words to say more.

In this month's installment, Sam Inglis looks at how you can use the sounds and rhythms of words to make your song lyrics more memorable.

Whenever we hear or read song lyrics, we are hearing the voice of a person, whether that voice be the songwriter's own, exploring his or her own emotions and feelings, or someone else's. The second part of Sam Inglis' series explains how you can write for different voices to put across different messages.

Writing the words to songs is often thought of as a process of pure intuition, but there's a lot more to it than that. In the first part of a new series, Sam Inglis suggests an alternative way of going about it.

If something's letting down your pop tracks, it could be the arrangement rather than the song itself at fault. Derek Johnson & Debbie Poyser offer some advice on how to make sure your music gets the star treatment it deserves.

Use of a full symphony orchestra remains a luxury afforded only to the world's top-selling artists or film composers. But with a little help from technology, the sound of convincing strings and blaring brass is achievable on a budget. John Rowcroft reports, and offers advice to anyone seeking to follow his example...

These days, any decent synth or sampler offers plausable orchestral sounds — but there's much more to creating believable arrangements for orchestra than realistic samples. Keyboardist/composer Dave Stewart offers some guidance, passes on some advice from pros, and explains how orchestral samples were used to create an arrangement for the latest Geri Halliwell single.

When it comes to emulating acoustic instruments, the modern orchestra probably represents the ultimate challenge. Philip Meehan shows you how to take it on and win.

This month, Big George persuades more famous musicians and arrangers to give you the benefit of their hard-won wisdom.

This month, some of the people who actually get their hands dirty with arranging — often for the household names in popular music — pass on their thoughts, hints and tips.

Big George looks at arranging for strings, brass and horns.

Great songs are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Big George mops his brow and takes it to the bridge...