Great Books for Composers

Composition & Production
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Hello Composers! =)
These are my personal top tips on great books for composers, to help you evolve your music knowledge, practical skills and professional career in music! :smiley:

Great Books for Composers

PS. Please share your own tips on great books for composers in a reply below! :slight_smile:

Sincerely,
Mike

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you can add :

  • the study of orchestration from Adler
    there is also his workbook
  • the guide of midi orchestration
  • the orchestration guide from charles koechlin in 4 volume but not sure if there is an english version
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For complete beginners to composition, the ā€œIdiotā€™s Guide to Music Compositionā€ is great:

And then for those interested in film scoring specifically, the ā€œgo-toā€ guide is Fred Karlin and Rayburn Wrightā€™s ā€œOn The Trackā€ :

There are too many other good ones to list, but if I had to recommend just ONE book for film scoring, itā€™d be that one!

Incidentally, I just interviewed the author (Michael Kruk) of ā€œAn Introduction to Writing Music For Televisionā€ that you mentioned above - thatā€™ll be released this week. Iā€™ll update this post with the link when itā€™s live :slight_smile:

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Haha how cool, because I also just interviewed Michael for my website/blog, Iā€™ve done another interview with him before. And I also read his new book which is truly amazing in my opinon! :smiley:

My interview with him will be published this week too :wink:

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For real stoics of music theory I learnt from these two books:-

Kitson - Elementary Harmony
Lovelock - Free counterpoint

They both set me up for writing in four part harmony for choirs.

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