Labs & Notebooks

Working notes on film scoring, orchestration, and the craft of making music for picture.

• Music Grading, Part 1: Why Your Perfect Sample Library Sounds Wrong

  On the hidden three-variable problem inside every orchestral recording — and why a director's reference is never just about the music.

• Music Grading, Part 2: Relocating the Orchestra

  How treating an impulse response as a location rather than an effect changes every downstream decision in the signal chain.

• Music Grading, Part 3: The Temp Track Illusion

  Pulling apart a 1974 quadraphonic recording of Orff reveals that the director wasn't responding to the music — they were responding to a compound artifact.