CONDUCT AN ORCHESTRA 1/4

Orchestra Conductor

Tutorial one, the gesture

My purpose here is not to make an exhaustive review of the thousands of aspects of how to conduct an orchestra.

The idea is that if you understand a few principles and use a few tips, you can tremendously improve the result of your experience with any orchestra. You can make things easier, sound better and save expensive studio time.

My expertise is conducting my own music, which is bound to be synchronised with a motion picture.
This is why I will talk more about the specificities of recording in sync with a film, which is a bit different from the classical techniques.

The first task of a conductor is to synchronise dozens of musicians together. This is what your right hand does. It is recommended that your gesture should hit an imaginary point, to improve precision. This is kind of simple, you think a machine could do it. But no, because there's a glitch. The bigger the orchestra, the farther away musicians are. Percussions could be 30 yards from you. It takes some time for the sound to reach you. It means your gesture is always a bit ahead of what you hear. This can be greatly improved by the use of headphones, but still you will feel the delay.

Your left hand, in classical music, is used to give infos like volume, start, stop, legato, vibrato etc. Some call it the "hand of the heart".
I'm not recommending using this technique when working with a synchronised movie. You really need such a tempo precision that both hands should be working together. If tempo permits to have a vertical movement, it gives you an extreme precision in the way the orchestra will react to you.
If you'd like to use this gesture, the volume will be given by the amplitude of your movement, and all other infos like start, crescendo, will have to be given by your eyes and head movement.

This is the end of tutorial one about the basics. You can comment and ask questions by using my stephanemeer youtube channel