My last CD, Reflections on a Journey, was a wonderful experience for several reasons.  Playing with an orchestra was a dream come true.  But playing your own music with an orchestra is as close as you can get to heaven on earth.

I would love for every pianist to have an idea of how playing with an orchestra feels.  In fact, I had an original goal of releasing all the arrangements from my last CD along with the orchestration tracks.  Sadly, that never happened.  I contracted with someone to write out my piano part in a clean format for publishing, but that person never finished.  I do not really have the time to do it myself either.

I do have several of the songs done however, and after a little more editing, I am going to publish them here over the next month or so.  I have decided to go ahead and make the orchestrations available too.  Whether I am going to charge to download the orchestration tracks is still up in the air, but I am going to offer at least the first one for free!

So, here is the arrangement and orchestration track for "Jesus Is All the World To Me."  Download them both and you can go to town!

Arrangement
Orchestration track

A few things to know before you get started.  These orchestration tracks are the same ones I use in concerts.  If you know much about audio, you know that for stereo sound, there is a left and right channel.  On these tracks, the right channel has the orchestration.  The left channel has a vocal count that I feed to an earpiece in my ear to keep me in sync with the orchestration. 

If you are going to play these songs publicly, you are going to have to find a way to do something similar.  Most churches can handle this easily.  Just plug a headphone into your piano monitor jack and ask the sound person to run the left channel to your monitor and the right channel to the "house."

In the left channel, you will hear conductor Steve Mauldin counting 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and....  There is one pickup measure. The good news is that if you play the arrangement while following his counting, everything will sound great.  The bad news is that following his counting is not as easy as it sounds.

This by the way is not his fault.  To say that my music has a lot of tempo changes and rubato would be an understatement.  Creating a vocal count track was necessary to keep everyone together and also allow me to play along with the tracks later.  Here is how we did it.  Inside the studio, I played in one room and the orchestra played in a different room with Steve conducting them.  He was listening to me through headphones and spoke the vocal count which each musician heard in their headphones.

That meant Steve had to anticipate my tempo variations or his count would get off.  The fact that Steve was able to anticipate what I would do as I played was a small miracle even though he listened to a scratch recording of me playing the songs many times ahead of time.

Sometimes, you will hear Steve leave out a number.  For example, he might say 1 and <pause> 3 and...  You will get used to that.  In some sections, he will leave out the "ands" and just say "1, 2, 3..."

If you listen to the left channel carefully, you can faintly hear the piano.  Of course, you can also buy the CD if you need to hear the song before you play it.

If you have ever purchased arrangements and orchestration tracks before, you know that they are expensive.  That is because orchestrations are extremely expensive to do.  In fact, the orchestra I used cost me about $3000/hour at some points.   So don't think I am getting greedy if I start charging for orchestration tracks in the future!

I hope you enjoy playing with this one.  Let me know your feedback.

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If you have a question about this lesson or something you would like me to cover, please email me at greg@greghowlett.com.