Alpha0ne"

- There's an old, old classic book on music theory that discusses intervals, harmony, counterpoint and much more - by a guy named Walter Piston. You can probably find his textbook dirt cheap, but really, there's none that's more accurate or authoritative, that I know of.

Good luck; composition is a difficult thing, especially when you have to bait your Muse

 

Thnx again guys. I think I will familiarize myself with the idea fo musicnut2000. Just to analyse some songs and other musics harmonies. I was just afraid of the huge amount of different chords. So many diminished, augmented, 7th 6th 9th chords etc. I am just confused. I am intrested in orchestration. But i think its a long way to compose like hans zimmer. Pirates of the caribbean soundtrack or John Williams' Star Wars, Back to the futures from Alan Silvestri or Dany Elfman with Alice.
Fantastic tunes. How do they do that? How to know which instrument for which part? They all sound so perfect arranged.

 

Well, they all started learning from old masters, they started with playing few/lot of different instruments, listening lot of, of course again, classical music and analyzing it, coping hot stuffs, variations... as I posted videos about pipe organs, you can see same tehnique that could be applied on orchestra.It's artistic sound desing.
Lot of these movie pieces are inspired by , even very similiar/ identical in texture with classical music pieces, music idea or phrases or motives could be borrowed...
CHECK image: WAVEFORM

 

hi, first of all should watch all the videos from here http://play.macprovideo.com/library/app/musictheory to get the big picture

second, read the book Harmony for Computer Musicians http://www.amazon.com/Harmony-Computer-Musicians-Michael-Hewitt/dp/1435456726/ it has a brilliant CD accessory with full of exercises, all about in this topic