Midi vs Orchestra

This is in no way an academic report but I thought that I would write my two sense in on the argument between using midi to score film music and using the conventional method live instruments/orchestra.

Conventionally the film composer would write the score to a film, usually by hand from use of piano to work out the main melody, from here this would be given to an orchestrator (or of course if the composer was skilled in orchestration, they could orchestrate the piece themselves) and would be performed by the orchestra and recorded sometimes in front of a large screen with the film being played, sometimes to a metronome or visual marker point to then be mixed, mastered and ready to be added to the film.

Nowadays any musician (or non musician for that matter) may purchase a macbook and logic pro and instantly begin working on a film score or piece of music. Does this stint creativity? Is this real composition?

I started my musical life as a guitarist, learning punk and rock songs for my own enjoyment before playing in numerous bands, creating our own musical pieces which you could call 'compositions'. Playing guitar was fun, as was rehearsing in bands, writing songs and playing them infront of people, it was never something that I considered doing academically until I was 19 and decided to enroll in a college course in musical performance, the first two years of which saw me learning music theory, sight reading for the first time and pushing myself as a musician as opposed to playing whatever I wanted. By my third year I had taken a keen interest in composition, finding enjoyment in the study of music from my favourite films and computer games and playing around in programmes such as logic and ableton, creating sounds and instruments that I could never dream of making out of my guitar. I took on basic keyboard lessons in college and pushed myself to write music using the keyboard for a range of instrument sounds made through samples found in logic/ableton. By my fourth year (second year of HND) I dropped my guitar as my first study instrument and instead took up composition full time, creating pieces of varying styles and genres both for my own enjoyment and for proposed briefs. I took classes in composition, composition for the screen, orchestration, theory, studio technique and so on. Now almost 6 years since I entered academic music studies i am in university, completing my honours year in sound production.

I have grown up on midi composition, in an era where music can be written at a click of the button. I believe there is an art to composition, it is a skill that requires knowledge of not just how an instrument works but how all instruments work together. Personally I believe that many people pick up a laptop and programme, a bunch of sample or loop packs and write music. This is fair enough, they are exploring their creativity which is great but it's not what I believe to be composition in its purest form. I may not sit with a pencil to work out my composition but there is something refreshing about picking a key, using the notes in that key, adding accidentals, changing into an alternative mode or scale, augmenting chords, transposing sections and so on, an art to music that is slowly getting lost in the laptop/sample/music of today.

I wish that I had the ability to compose a full score that could be properly orchestrated to the right standard before being played by an orchestra, but for now midi does the job, the instrument effects are getting more and more realistic with real sampled instruments being the norm for use.

So do i believe that midi is better than the conventional form of composition and orchestration?

No i don't, i don't believe it's worse though, I believe that all can produce with the tools that they are given, right now my tools are sampled instruments using a midi keyboard to project my musical ideas and if were given a major film project to score for, I'd use what I have to score for it!