Orchestrating Purely Digital Elements: Needed in Score?

[Piano Pete]

Hi guys,

I recently got a snippet to orchestrate and it contains, I would say, 80% purely digital elements and 20% instrumental elements to be recorded. Now, from my personal experience, I typically like having all of the instrumental and artificial elements on the score to reference if ever needed; however, the digital percussion and synths are really abstract/modified so the midi notes do not reflect the pitches being performed. In this case, is it best to leave them out? The notes are cluttering the score pretty bad and the notes themselves are not even any help to reference in the middle of the recording session. I have spoken with the individuals I am working with and they do not seem to care one way or another if the purely digital elements are notated, even the whammied percussion. While I may be fine in this scenario to leave them out of the score, I was wondering: how should I approach this scenario in the future? It feels weird to me to be paid to orchestrate and print a score yet leave so much of it out. Should I just streamline the score with the pertinent information for the live musicians?


--- Accidentally put this in the wrong forum. Deleted previous post and put it here. ---

[Michel R E]

are these digital elements prerecorded? or performed "live" along with the orchestral players?

if it's a prerecorded element then I would simply treat it like any score with a taped element, and use a thick horizontal bar to indicate entrances and exits, along with timing, and any pertinent dynamic data.

[Piano Pete]

The elements are pre-recorded. There is no budget to record tailored percussion ensembles (Taiko and other bombastic things). For the tangible stuff, like the sampled percussion, there are rhythms etc. but they do not really impact the bits that are planned to record: Strings, brass, winds, and choir.

[N Grossingink]

I'd suggest you leave the digital stuff out and just make a score and parts for the live musicians, as long as your client seems to be OK with that. I'm assuming the live musicians are being recorded separately from the digital tracks. Are they listening to the digital tracks on headphones?

I do a bit of session copying myself and there are 3 different Finale files involved:

√ Piano/Vocal - used for the vocal session and rhythm session (guitar, piano, bass, drums, percussion)
√ Winds score and parts for winds session
√ Strings score and parts for strings session

None of these 3 Finale files reference any of the others.

N.

[Piano Pete]

They do/will get audio in their headphones; however, I have always noticed that the extra synths/sampled percussion ensembles get muted in favor of a standard click. The percussion bits that are being recorded live are notated, but the fun bleep-boop synth sequences and taiko/godzilla ensembles seem to be over kill for this project.

In my mind, if they were recording to the samples, the percussion rhythms and synths being the main focus of the score, I would be more inclined to have it notated; however, since the orchestral/choral bit is the important part, I am leaning to leave them out.