4 Ideas (Suggestions For Accompaniment)

Hey, I've been trying to orchestrate some melodies, but I'm struggling with the choice of instruments as well as how they should be used to compliment the main melody and not be overwhelming.

There's 4 small melodies in the MP3/MIDI separated by a few seconds of silence. All of the main melodies are for a solo violin, and so far I've tried orchestrating the second one with a Cello and Violin Section, but It's kind of grinding my ears, although it could be because of how many times I've listened to it over and over.

4 ideas.mid 4 ideas.mid

15 hours ago, CharlesVictor said:

Hey, I've been trying to orchestrate some melodies, but I'm struggling with the choice of instruments as well as how they should be used to compliment the main melody and not be overwhelming.

I think before setting out to orchestrate something you should make sure that you have enough raw data to warrant the orchestration.  Right now you just have some melodies without any accompaniment.  I'd say you should first try to write a piano partiture (I mean like where you put all your ideas into a piano staff even if it's not playable by one person), filling out the bass, harmonies and any contrapuntal voices you want to include and dropping those things when they're not necessary which will help you prevent the piece from sounding too overwhelming.  Variations technique can be really useful in finding a version of each idea that you like.  You can play with how high or how low you set the melodies, what kind of different possibilities you want for harmonies and bass.  And then as a last step assess whether you want to arrange the idea for a different ensemble.

Your ideas as they stand kind of seem like run-on phrases or sentences.  Your third and fourth ideas have more of a traditional structure.  Anyway - I hope some of that was helpful and I wish you luck in finding something to do with these ideas.

Peter

P.S.:  I think choosing the accompaniment will be a big deciding factor in influencing the rhythmic character of each idea so you should really decide for yourself what kind of accompaniment you prefer.  That's my 2¢.