On Dec 29, 2004, at 3:14 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I currently live in Los Angeles and make my living as a full time musician. Most of my income comes from being a proofreader, copyist, midi transcriptionist and music librarian for feature films and television. But I also compose, arrange, orchestrate and play from time to time as well.
This caught my eye. I often get calls from composers on deadlines who need me to transcribe and orchestrate from MIDI files. I've been arguing with my clients constantly about whether this constitutes "orchestration" or not; they claim that since THEY are making the decisions as to whether a given line is strings, woods, brass, etc., that THEY are the orchestrator and I am the copyist. I never charge copyists' rates for this kind of thing (I charge more, way more) but I still have a big argument every time, even with the same clients.
Even if we come to an agreement, the quality of the MIDI files I am given varies wildly, from beautifully set-up files laid out in score order with separated woodwind, brass, percussion and string sections, strictly quantised to import nicely into Finale; all the way to "noodling" on a couple of different patches that needs to be completely arranged pretty much from scratch, assuming that I can figure out what is going on, which is not easy in these cases.
I know that composers like Danny Elfman work like this, passing on MIDI files in various stages of completeness to an accomplished arranger/orchestrator, whereas some others like John Williams hand over highly detailed 6-staff sketches, leaving the orchestrator with little to do besides prepare the full score and decide section splits (and maybe add in some accents and crescendos that JW might have missed.) It seems to me that BOTH extremes get credited as "orchestrator", but the amount of work and the responsibility assumed by the orchestrator is wildly different in the two cases.
How do you charge for this kind of thing, and how do you draw the line between copying, orchestration, and arranging? Do you charge an hourly rate? How much responsibility do you assume for how the final work will sound, which seems to me to be the main point when deciding rates? How would the rate vary if suddenly you came across an incomplete passage that you had to fill in? I know the unions in LA and NYC have well-laid-out charts of rates for this kind of thing, but how do they decide WHICH rate (copying, orchestration, arranging) is actually applied?
The nature of the biz here in Montreal is such that I often have trouble getting myself ON the musicians' contract for my work, so the question of letting the union arbitrate is touchy, to say the least.
Can you comment?
Christopher
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