A Dark Knight - Arrangement for String Ensemble and Percussion

Over the last month or so I've been arranging a portion of "A Dark Knight" from the soundtrack to The Dark Knight (originally written by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) for my high school's string ensemble (as well as a small group of percussionists). Because the real song is 16 minutes long, I had to cut it down a lot to keep it a reasonable length, so my arrangement is only about 6 minutes long, taking about 4 1/2 minutes from the beginning of the song, and about 1 1/2 from the end.

I arranged the song for Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Cello, and Bass, as well as timpani and mixed percussion (bass drum, toms, and a gong). What you see here in this video is a playback of the music I created on Finale Notepad, but the audio was made by me in GarageBand (because playback in notepad sounded terrible, especially the percussion).

You can download this mp3, as well as my sheet music for the full string ensemble score and individual parts as PDFs, here: http://floatzel.net/gronnoc/darkknight.html

Enjoy, and maybe try and get YOUR school to perform this song!

Category:

Music

Tags:

• dark
• knight
• batman
• arrangement
• finale
• notepad
• string
• ensemble
• orchestra
• percussion
• hans
• zimmer
• james
• newton
• howard
• garageband
• sheet
• music

[brokensilence51]

Hey, I love this arrangment, but I was wondering can you please clarify something for me? I'm new to music scoring and I know about programs such as sibelius and finale and that they can playback the audio, but the playback sounds too midi. What did you mean by you made the audio in garageband? Did you physically record each part?

[GRonnoc]

@brokensilence51 what I mean is that since the playback on finale isn't very good/expressive, I exported a midi, and opened it in garageband to use with software instruments in that program, and I created a separate recording to lay over this video of finale.

[TheStupidityBuster]

wats a good tip for playing the main viola part

ITS FRIGGIN DIFFICULT

[GRonnoc]

@TheStupidityBuster can't really give you a good tip honestly. For starters I don't play string instruments....I play tuba. and this was actually never performed anywhere, only my other arrangement was performed.

[GRonnoc]

@Brenden5826 Did you read the title of this video?

[apolllos7]

Once again incredible. I don't mean to be a noob but your movie soundtracks are way more impressive and cool than your pokemon and video game material, i know that'll probly offend you cause you love pokemon and I admit the pokemon music is talented but if you want "most" adults to take you seriously and be impressed by you this is the kinda stuff you should do, I mean you can do alot more cheerfull stuff than this but the pokemon stuffs only gonna get you credit with the Japs. No offence

[crazyrocket569]

whoa.



[osakaiba]

Great job! thanks a lot!! (for the scores)

[apolllos7]

@MrJohnnywonny I agree. It's easy to criticize but hard to do haha I just noticed that it would definitely sound better and smoother, I had thought that was just a flaw in the vst finale instruments but now that you mention it the abruptness seems to happen when the bars are switched. Forgive me if I'm not making sense, I stopped music completely for the past two years. I'm just getting back into the swing of things again.

[MegaBigz09]

@WanderingFilms I live in Nigeria is there any website

[GRonnoc]

@MegaBigz09 I'm sorry I don't just magically have trumpet music for stuff...they sell trumpet books with music from movies in them - you might be able to buy a batman book for trumpet somewhere.

[MegaBigz09]

@WanderingFilms Can u at least get me molususs which it the dark knight theme for trumpet

[JanooProductions]

Very good!! i like it!

[WanderingFilms]

@MegaBigz09 dude, really? it's an arrangment for string ensemble and percussion.......

[MegaBigz09]

Can you give the trumpet notes to this please. my email is zdhanju@hotmail.com

[brokensilence51]

Thanks alot... I'm working on getting a program called Notion 3, dunno if u ever heard of it but I downloaded the trial and it's reeli nice. It has VST support as well, if u want, check out the sound quality of the instrument playback on my channel (and that's just the midi instruments)