ORCHESTRAL COMPOSITION BOOTCAMP

The tutored 8-week online course with professional composers and orchestrators.

~~$899~~ $779

BECOME THE COMPOSER YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMT OF BEING

Orchestral Composition is an eight-week tutored course that will help you master the sections of the orchestra, refine your compositional ideas, realise your compositions in a DAW, and mix your work. There are live masterclasses and workshops with your peers and tutors and you'll receive written and live feedback on your work from professional composers and orchestrators.

BE NOtIFIED WHEN NEW DATES ARE ANNOUNCED

ORCHESTRAL COMPOSITION BOOTCAMP

The tutored 8-week online course with professional composers and orchestrators.

~~$899~~ $779

SOLD OUT – NEW DATES ANNOUNCED SOON

30-day money-back policy

BECOME THE COMPOSER YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMT OF BEING

Orchestral Composition is an eight-week tutored course that will help you master the sections of the orchestra, refine your compositional ideas, realise your compositions in a DAW, and mix your work. There are live masterclasses and workshops with your peers and tutors and you'll receive written and live feedback on your work from professional composers and orchestrators.

ORCHESTRAL COMPOSITION BOOTCAMP

The tutored 8-week online course taught by professional composers and orchestrators.

~~$899~~ $779

Pay in interest-free instalments. Choose PayPal then 'Pay Later' at checkout (not available in all countries)

BOOK NOW FOR JUnE 3rd START

Places are strickly limited

7-day money-back policy from start date

BECOME THE COMPOSER YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMT OF BEING

Orchestral Composition is an 8-week tutored course that will help you master the sections of the orchestra, refine your compositional ideas, realise your compositions in a DAW, and mix your work. There are live masterclasses and workshops with your peers and tutors and you'll receive written and live feedback on your work from professional composers and orchestrators.

NEW

ORCHESTRAL COMPOSITION BOOTCAMP

A ThinkSpace Bootcamp: 8-week online tutored course with live sessions, personal feedback and guidance from professionals orchestrators.

~~$899~~ $779

BOOK NOW FOR FEB 17 START

Hurry! Places are strictly limited. 30-day money-back policy

BECOME THE COMPOSER YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMT OF BEING

Orchestral Composition is an eight-week tutored program designed to help you master the sections of the orchestra, refine your compositional ideas, realise your compositions in a DAW, and mix your work. There are live masterclasses and workshops with your peers and tutors and you'll receive written and live feedback on your work from professional composers and orchestrators.

Live sessions and TUTORING from the pros

You'll receive personal feedback and guidance on your music from an esteemed team of working composers and orchestrators. Their credits include The Little Mermaid, Robot Chicken, countless projects for Disney, Dreamworks, BBC, and Netflix, plus two EMMY nominations.

YOUR HOST: GUY MICHELMORE

Guy Michelmore is a multi award-winning film, games and television composer whose clients include Marvel, Disney, Dreamworks, Lionsgate and dozens of major TV networks around the world. He is best known for his work with Marvel on eight animated feature films including Ultimate Avengers and Thor, as well as hundreds of episodes of television including Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Iron Man: Armoured Adventures, Hulk and many more. His unique and accessible style has made him a popular YouTuber with over 300,000 subscribers.

YOUR EXPERT TUTORS

Your tutors are the ones supporting you throughout the course with live webinars and written feedback. They're all professional composers and orchestrators in their own right and will be with you every step of the way.

CHARLES FERNANDEZ

Emmy-nominated Composer & Orchestrator
(The Little Mermaid, Robot Chicken)

EMILY HAWKINS

Composer for drama & documentary films, podcasts and libray music.

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ

Composer, Orchestrator & Educator
(EastWest, Spitfire Audio)

What you'll learn

Each week you will be studying a different topic. With over 20 hours of video content in the course, we will lead you through detailed tutorials one step at a time.

When the course starts, you will have access to all this content, however you should follow through in order as it will be supported by the live events and guest lectures throughout eight weeks.

In the first week you’ll be getting your technical resources ready for scoring and getting a rundown of the tools you’ll need to do the job. You'll learn ways to maximize the performance of your composing setup, exploring the strengths of certain sample libraries, building your own DAW template, and ending with a scoring demonstration from Guy.

Guy introduces you to the most diverse section of the orchestra. The woodwind and brass families of instruments vary more than any other group in the way they create their sounds, so Guy explores what instruments are available to you and how writing for them works in a practical session.

Much like strings, we’ll cover scoring for both woodwind and brass, the libraries involved, and any specific techniques you need to know to write for these instruments accurately.

WATCH A FREE SAMPLE

String Writing In Practice

In this two-part tutorial taken from our Orchestral Composition Bootcamp course, we discuss techniques for rapidly improving your string parts and taking your arrangement from block piano chords to rich string arrangements.

DIARY OF A BOOTCAMPER: Jenny'S Story

We followed the journey of one of our Bootcamp students, Jenny, to give you a 'boots on the ground' look at how the course works.

DIARY OF A BOOTCAMPER: Kenneth's Story

We followed one of our Bootcamp students Kenneth, an aspiring composer, on his journey through the course – here's what he had to say.

What Bootcamp students Say

"It has been absolutely fantastic. One of the tasks was to write to picture and send it to Chuck – who's EMMY-nominated and writes for Disney – and he gave me really detailed feedback. It was astonishing. You WILL grow and develop in your ability to write for an orchestra – there's no question about it."

Nick Wheeler

“I’ve improved so much already – it’s crazy. The feedback I've received on my own compositions has been fantastic. And so has listening to feedback on all the other student's compositions in the webinars."

JENNY MECHAM

"Bootcamp has really made a big impact on me. I can now look at my projects in a way that I hadn't been able to do before. The sections on strings and brass made such a big difference – they are so practical."

Kenneth Gonzalez

“The live sessions have been absolutely amazing – just utilising the skills for not just my work for bootcamp, but for my own pieces too. The Discord group is absolutely phenomenal too. The community is fantastic."

ALEX SNARSKI

"It really nails the space between a beginners course and a graduate course, so it's perfect for those looking for something in between. I have learned so much, particularly about templates, instruments, keyswitching, and hybrid composing."

BRIAN YORK

"I've really enjoyed it. It's given me a structure around which to write music – and a bit of a push so I can make composing a bigger part of my life."

Everett Miller

WHAT BOOTCAMP STUDENTS SAY

"It has been absolutely fantastic. One of the tasks was to write to picture and send it to Chuck – who's EMMY-nominated and writes for Disney – and he gave me really detailed feedback. It was astonishing. You WILL grow and develop in your ability to write for an orchestra – there's no question about it."

Nick Wheeler

“I’ve improved so much already – it’s crazy. The feedback I've received on my own compositions has been fantastic. And so has listening to feedback on all the other student's compositions in the webinars."

JENNY MECHAM

"Bootcamp has really made a big impact on me. I can now look at my projects in a way that I hadn't been able to do before. The sections on strings and brass made such a big difference – they are so practical."

Kenneth Gonzalez

“The live sessions have been absolutely amazing – just utilising the skills for not just my work for bootcamp, but for my own pieces too. The Discord group is absolutely phenomenal too. The community is fantastic."

ALEX SNARSKI

"It really nails the space between a beginners course and a graduate course, so it's perfect for those looking for something in between. I have learned so much, particularly about templates, instruments, keyswitching, and hybrid composing."

BRIAN YORK

"I've really enjoyed it. It's given me a structure around which to write music – and a bit of a push so I can make composing a bigger part of my life."

Everett Miller

How You'll Learn

This course gives you the flexibility of our on-demand, training courses but with personalised written feedback and live online events. You will attend a variety of live masterclasses with working professionals that focus on specific skills you need to know, as well as group feedback sessions with the common goal of increasing the quality of your work alongside your fellow students.

8 weeks of guided orchestral composition tutorials, with a mix a pre-recorded videos and live sessions.

Regular, tutor-led feedback sessions, alongside your peers, to get the group's insight on your work.

2 rounds of written feedback on your work.

Live masterclasses from guest lecturers, focusing on specific topics in great detail.

MinusONE ASSIGNMENTS

Learning how to write your own music can be overwhelming when starting from scratch. We now provide you with stems that build most of a track, but "minus one" important element. This allows you to focus on the one instrument group that module is focussing on, without thinking too much about the composition or its structure.

GROW YOUR NETWORK ON THE THINKSPACE DISCORD

We want to bring our students closer together, as we understand online learning can be isolating at times. With this course you will also get access to our exclusive ThinkSpace Community Discord channel. Anyone on this course, and other courses that use ThinkSpace Interactive, can join.

We hope you use this community as a relaxed environment to share your work with each other and ask questions amongst other people in similar situations as you. We've had plenty of experience running a Discord server for our Postgraduate Degree students, and we're very excited to bring this to our other courses too.

BOOK YOUR PLACE TODAY

8-weeks of tuition, live webinars and personal feedback with pro composers

Over 20 hours of orchestration and composition video tutorials

Lifetime access to all course materials – revisit anytime

Lifelong access to our worldwide Discord network of composers

SOLD OUT – NEW DATES ANNOUNCED SOON

Places are limited
30-day money-back policy

BOOK YOUR PLACE TODAY

8-weeks of tuition, live webinars and personal feedback with pro composers

Over 20 hours of orchestration and composition video tutorials

Lifetime access to all course materials – revisit anytime

Lifelong access to our worldwide Discord network of composers

BOOK NOW FOR JUNE 3rd START — ~~$899~~ $779

Pay in interest-free installments with PayPal. Choose 'Pay Later' (available in US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, AU).

Places are strictly limited
7-day money-back policy from start date

Frequently Asked Questions

If you are thinking about taking the course, there are some requirements you may want to consider. Here are the most frequently asked student questions to help you to assess whether the courses is right for you.

We expect students to have a working understanding of their DAW and the workflow involved. You should be able to input and manipulate MIDI, load software instruments into your projects, apply/edit effects and automation.

You do not have to be very skilled at this, or even how to do it in the context of orchestral composition, but we will assume you have used your DAW before and aren't starting from square one!

The course is structured as an eight week program, however, you have opportunities to submit your work outside this eight week structure if needed.

If you do, on average, a small amount of work each day (under an hour), attend the live sessions, and make sure to check out the course videos and materials, you should have plenty of time to complete it in the eight weeks. But if you fall behind, it's not a problem.

There's a few types of software you'll need to take part, but as a musician these should be things you have already.

You will need:
- A Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)
- A set of orchestral sample libraries
- An internet browser.

For your DAW, we can provide extension support for Logic Pro X and Cubase. Other DAWs should be absolutely fine, but we cannot guarantee we will be able to offer you technical support if you have issues.

If you have doubts about your setup, just drop us an email at contact@thinkspace.ac.uk

You will need a computer capable of running a DAW with orchestral sample libraries. Orchestral samples can be quite taxing on your machine - especially RAM. As a general rule, we would advise a minimum of 16gb of RAM, but 32GB would make your composing workflow a bit smoother.

There are techniques you can use to maximise the efficiency of your computer's resources, and we'll discuss that further on the course.

We also advise a decent set of monitoring headphones. Speakers are fine, but in a room that doesn't have acoustic treatment your ability to judge your mixes objectively will be more difficult.

A MIDI keyboard is also useful when inputting notes into your DAW, but plenty of composers make do with just keyboard and mouse so if that's your style don't let us disuade you from using that method!

have a question? contact us

Need some advice? Or just want to talk music? We’re always here to lend a professional ear.

contact@thinkspace.ac.uk

+44 (0)1243 256049

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