String Arrangement Help · Audio Artist Academy

Dec '24 (edited) • General 🤩

String Arrangement Help

I am revisiting an old project I did a while ago and I think I did a lot of things wrong in the arrangement. I wrote down notes to try to figure out what I was doing with each instrument, and asking myself questions to decide how to proceed next.

Could someone help point out what I'm doing wrong or suggestions on what to try for the arrangement? Someone told me the chord progression isn't strong enough and that good be why I'm having trouble hearing certain instruments in the mix. The stuff in the background gets lost amongst each other, and sometimes it's hard to hear the melody in the flutes. I'm still a newbie at these sorts of things, so I'm not sure exactly what to do.

My main roadblock is that I don't know what violas generally do in a string section. I think I was supposed to write the violas as the top (5th) voice of the chord progression, but I ended up doing something else, some kind of counter melody line to the counter melody line in the 18V patch lol. I'm not also not seeing any of the instruments written as the top voice of the triad chord progression, I really just have a dyad going on as the chord progression. Could this be the main problem?

These are the notes I have written down.

Arrangement:

Bass flute - C2 to C3 range. Melody in A section
Flute - C3 to C4 range. Melody in B section
18V - C4 range. Counter-melody
Violas - C3 range. What the heck are they doing? Looks like a counter-melody to the melody? Ostinato? I'm not sure what to do here to fix this mess. Should I change them to chord progression and top 5th voice and move whatever the original viola line was to 2nd Violins (and change the 18V counter melody to 1st Violins?)
Celli - C3 range for chord progression, middle voice of dyad. Too tight/close voicing to viola? should I switch to open fifths? Why are the celli also doing doubling of the 18V's counter melody in C4 range? lol.
Double basses - C2 range. Chord progression, root voice of dyad, bassline

Sorry for the wall of text. Thanks if you made it this far lol. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKIYZePv9Ms

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