REQ: Berklee Online - Arranging: Small Ensemble and Horns

Whether you are writing for jingles, soundtracks, or pop songs, knowing how to write/arrange for smaller bands and larger ensembles is crucial to your success. Arranging: Small Ensemble and Horns explores the properties of the trumpet, trombone, and alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones and approaches the techniques and melodic embellishments that will give you a basic understanding of writing/arranging for these horns as a section. In this music arrangement course, you will focus on applying writing processes for two-, three-, four-, and five-part horn combinations; skills that can be applied to both live instrumentation and sampled or synthesized sounds. You really can't write effective sequenced parts without knowing what real players would characteristically play on these instruments. This music arrangement course will provide you with a greater understanding of the possibilities and sounds that the horns as a section can add to your arrangement.

By the end of this course, you will:

Learn to identify chord symbols
Understand trumpet and trombone instrumentation
Understand the instrumentation breakdown of saxophones
Write within a given key and transpose to fit a specific instrument (unison writing)
Understand and complete an arranging process
Understand melodic development
Write two-part and three-part soli sections