Tips for Scoring Competitions – What the Judges are looking for

Congratulations on your first attempt at Scoring Competitions! It can be an intimidating task, but I am glad you take your chance. Sadly there is no right or wrong way – but there certainly are many things to consider for your first attempt.

The competition is hard, really hard. But don’t let this make you fear. There are actually some points where you can set yourself above the masses.

The jury has a clear focus on creativity and how well the soundtrack fits the picture. Around 50% of the points you can get in total are made by these categories. The other half contains orchestration, production quality, and overall theming. Depending on the competition, the criteria and their influence change.

Each Scoring Competition has its own criteria that heavily influence the judging process. There is a clear focus on how well you orchestrate and write the track itself, but there are a lot of points to consider in terms of writing to picture. Scoring Competitions are not called so because you can enter any track you want – the goal is to write specifically to the picture they gave you. So focus on the mood, the atmosphere, and the story the scenes are trying to tell.

Table of content

What are the judges looking for?

Now, this is a topic that depends on the competition. Some even put on display how the points are going to be given. The upcoming Marvin Hamlish Scoring Competition for example shows you five main criteria to be judged. When comparing them to other competitions, they are a good reference point and sum it up. My advice is to take a careful look at your submission and try to improve on these points.

But in the end, music is an extremely diverse and personal topic. So the categories tend to be a bit general to fit the masses of entries. If details for the judging are given, focus on those but don’t underestimate the following criteria.

► Musical Literacy and proficiency (20% of score)

“This score is effectively orchestrated and realized in a manner that displays musical proficiency.”

► Creativity (25% of score)

“This score is distinctive and demonstrates imagination.”

► Technological proficiency (10% overall score)

“Understanding the limited resources available, this score is of a high sonic quality and displays proficient use of technology.”

►Dramatic connection to Film (25% overall score)

“This score elevates the film, responds to the visuals, and enhances the emotional elements of the story.”

► Overall Excellence (20% of overall score)

“This score displays musicality and makes a strong, memorable impression.”

As you can see, the criteria have an equal or at least comparable influence on the judging. The technical part is a bit shorten, so the focus lies on the creative part.

Musical Literacy and proficiency (20%)

Judging Criteria

Literacy 20%

Now that seems to be a bit intimidating and terrifying at first glance. If you are a complete beginner, it might be hard just to understand what these terms mean. In short: Your score should not only consist of basic and slow-moving patterns. Try to implement a few advanced patterns and movements.

Even though they sound great, scores in the style of Trailers are actually very basic and don’t show your skills in terms of melody development or a unique and interesting distribution of the instruments throughout the orchestra. The focus of epic Trailer music lies way more in the build-up and sound design elements.

To give you a more visual understanding, try to compare a general Theme by Hans Zimmer with one of John Williams. Don't get me wrong, I am totally in love with the music on both - but the strength of Hans Zimmer clearly lies in sound design and big emotions. He creates tension, drama, and action with an elementary form of music, where long sustain notes and a clear and simple melody are in the foreground. The notes for each instrument often tend to be a bar long throughout the entire orchestra with movements in the background.

If we compare this sort of music to a general theme by John Williams, we see a clear difference in orchestration. He uses zero to none SFX and brings out the strength of every instrument in the orchestra. It would help if you were a top-level musician to play these scores right from the paper because of the fast, fluent melodies.

This is just a visual comparison to understand the term “Literacy and proficiency” a bit better. John Williams glances with musical literacy, Hans Zimmer works with atmosphere and dramatic connection.

For you, this means, that you can try to improve on your track by adding a few advanced sections. It’s an easy “trap” to find a fitting chord progression and follow it straight throughout the entire score. Try to spice it up, make the melody a bit complex and implement a fitting and strong countermelody. You can try to make the ostinatos and rhythmical signals not only by cellos and french horns. A good point, to begin with, would be, to implement an interesting and distinctive rhythmic pattern in your melody. Judges tend to hear a lot of long sustain melodies (like “Inception” or “Batman”), so try to give your music a strong rhythmic point (like “Indiana Jones” or “Star Wars”).

Creativity (25%)

Judging Criteria

Creativity +25% 45%

There is a considerable debate about whether “quality” or “originality” should play a more significant role in judging. This is not only limited to scoring competitions; you can see this debate at nearly every creative competition out there.

Let's look at a short example: The task is to write a short story about a vampire. Now 90% of the people are writing in the style of Bram Strokers "Dracula." They establish a creepy mood, gave the vampire character and a good story. Then there is this one writer that writes about a politician with the nickname "The Vampire" because he is constantly draining out money from the citizens.

Originality definitely is worth a try. You don’t need to write an action queue when the task is to write an emotional piano part. But you can try to give the story a spin in another direction by a subtitled ethnic instrument or an interesting drone in the background.

You can, of course, do the extreme and cross-genres. We have seen this work at the Westworld Scoring Competition by Spitfire. The winner of the competition, David Kudell, won the competition by writing an 8bit-Theme for an action chasing scene.

Taking less risk is not always the best solution. I encourage you to write a bit riskier and try to give it your personal fingerprint.

Here you can take a closer look at David Kudells Cue for the “Westworld Scoring Competition”. After listening to ten thousand cues written in the style of “The Dark Knight” by Hans Zimmer, it must have been a relief for the judges to find a track that does things diffrent.

There is a thin line between overdoing it and doing it just right. It is a bit risky, but I think at least one element that makes your score stand out is recommended. This doesn’t need to be so extreme as in the Westworld-Competition.

Try to record your own sounds and make a unique sound out of them by playing around with all the plugins and effects. You can also bring your standard instruments to the extreme by doing unusual things or using a unique articulation.

The end of possibilities is only constricted by your imagination.

Technological Proficiency

Judging Criteria

Technological Proficiency +10% 55%

This is an art in itself. When I wrote my first tracks I struggled a lot with this aspect, and I still do. What this means, is how well your track is produced in terms of clear sound, volume, panning, and sound quality.

Fortunately, this aspect doesn’t count as much as the creative and musical proficiency – side. So it’s more forgiving for beginners. But try to deliver the best score possible.

Two common terms occure at this point: Mixing and Mastering

A) What the heck is Mixing?

Mixing is the first post-production process your track goes through. In this stage, we try to give all of our instruments the best sound possible and mix them to balance them. We only enhance what’s there; no mixing can make it good if the track is not well-orchestrated. Good orchestration is essential. If you struggle with that and have a muddy and unclear track, I highly recommend you to look at the following post:

Tip: To start your mixing process, export your Project as STEM-File. Each voice in your DAW gets rendered as an audio file and gets loaded into a new project. This prevents disturbing cricks and cracks, reduces the memory and gives you a coparable track as your endresult. We are no longer composing, make sure your track is ready to polish. Major problems need to be solved in your orchestration, not in the mixing and mastering.

Now, what exactly are we going to do?

The goal is to bring out the best sound possible. There are engineers out there that do only this for their living, but I give you a short run down so you can get a solid 90% of the work done.

Step 1 – Leveling:

After you imported all your voices as single audio files, the leveling process can begin. This means, that we bring each voice to the necessary volume level. You might have already have added piano and forte parts, but this step is crucial nonetheless.

After the import, reduce the volume of each instrument to zero. We start to rise the first voice to a good and comfortable volume level. The voice is yours to pick: Usually mixing engineers start ether with the most present or important voice, or start with the percussion and later on a bass section to build up the framework. I personally start with the baselines, because they are later on harder to hear.

Now we go through the entire score and raise each voice to a level where it fits the other instruments. Usually going forth and back is necessary.

Important: Trust your ears. This is an intimidating process at first, but learn to trust in your ears if something sounds better after the change than before. If not, change it till it does. Don't overthink it, and trust in what you hear. You can do this; you already wrote an entire track! The hard part is done.

Step 2 – Panning:

This is my most favorite process. You can change the panning usually by a small slider inside your mixer. We try to give our instruments room by putting them more on the left, or more on the right side. We already have done a separation in depth by volume, now it comes to panning.

As a reference, I implemented this simple pattern, where you can see where each instrument typically is located in the orchestra. Go through each voice and add the recommended values. It’s unbelievable what this simple process changes, and it is so simple.

Step 3 – EQ

EQ is the short form for the usage of equalizers to boost our track. The goal of an equalizer is to boost or reduce certain frequencies within an audio signal. We can for example boost the midrange or cut off the lower frequencies completely.

I recommend two techniques to improve your sound. These are very easy and lead you to huge success. It’s enough to use the build-in equalizer of your DAW. You will improve on the usage of EQ’s in the future, but to get started try these simple workarounds:

1. Cut off the bass Go through every track and add an equalizer with a highpass filter. This means that only higher frequencies are played, lower frequencies are left out. Every recorded instrument, be it a high-pitched violin or flute, has a lot of low frequencies in it. Deleting these doesn't change the timbre of an instrument, but by doing this with all instruments, your score is way less muddy. It makes a huge difference when added to every track. Set the cut at around 150 Hz as a rule of thumb. I encourage you to play around a bit with the value, depending on the instrument.

2. Remove unwanted frequencies Use a narrow and loud peak to detect unwanted frequencies. Often individual instruments tend to have an unpleasant ringing or noise in the background at a particular frequency. When detected, decrease the volume at this point, tho reduce the unwanted background noise.

Compare your equalized track with the track before. Just make sure to compare them at the same general volume. Your ears are easy to fool; a louder track always sounds better.

Step4 – Compression

Compressing your track is the process where we try to reduce the dynamic volume. The goal is to have a narrower spectrum between loud and quiet parts. This might sound strange at first glance because the dynamic range is a significant musical effect we want to keep. But don’t worry, compressors are generating just a more consistent dynamic range, so the instruments fit together.

Compressors can also give instruments like cymbals and drums a more sustainable tail because they otherwise tend to decay quickly. By doing that, drums, for example, get a fuller and more prominent sound and are no longer just a loud and short hit.

Before Mixing:

Leveling, Panning, EQ, and Compressor:

The difference is easy to spot at around 0:14 till the end of the phrase

Step 5 -Reverb

Reverb gives your score the final touch. It’s best to put the reverb on as the last step because changes by compressors and equalizers are not as easy to hear effectively, while the reverb is on.

The previous processes usually are done for each voice separately. The reverb can be put on your section bus or even master bus. A section bus would set the reverb the same for all instruments in this section, while the master bus changes it on all voices in your Mix. I prefer to use a section bus, so I am more versatile. Percussion may need a diffrent reverb than strings for example.

Congratulations – you just mixed your first track. This was a bit much for this part, I know. But this step hugely improves the first impression your track makes. Scores in competitions are usually mixed and mastered, so a softer track that doesn’t has the punch or full sound stands out as a weaker competitor.

B) What the heck is mastering?

Mastering is the final process a track runs through right before publishing. The goal of good mastering is that the sound has high quality on a wide range of systems. The sound quality should be qual on diffrent types of speakers, laptops, headphones, smartphones, etc.

The second, and more important goal in our case, is to give the track a consistent “loudness”. It’s a misconception that mastering is simply “making the track louder” – it’s more like giving your quiet parts more strength by adding volume and reducing your big heavy parts to not be too much.

After you finished mixing, render your score as a single audio waveform and load it into a new project. We no longer change single instruments, but the track in its entirety. There should be no major issues at this point. If there are, fix them in the mixing stage or, even better, in the orchestration itself.

The difference between adding compressors in the mixing and mastering stage is that we no longer focus on how the instruments sound together but how the track itself gets displayed.

Maybe you came across a song in the past where you turned up the volume at the beginning because you couldn’t hear anything. At the climax, your ears were bleeding because it was way too loud, and you need to change the volume throughout the track. That’s something we want to avoid.

Here you can see the difference between a non mastered and a mastered track to better understand the mission of this process.

Dramatic connection to film

Judging Criteria

connection to film +25% 80%

The whole point in participating in a competition is to write the score to a specific picture. This criterion describes precisely that: How well does your music go with the picture?

Film music establishes an atmosphere, helps to establish tone, and can change audience perceptions. While music is the main event when recorded for an album or a release, its role in a movie is to support the visuals and help to tell a story.

As an example: The scene shows a girl running out of the house at dawn and looking towards some hills in the distance. We can tell a story, that the visuals don't show. If we write a sad romantic theme, it might seem she is waiting for someone. If we write an adventurous uplifting theme, it can give a hint that she es waiting for someone to take her on an adventure. If we write a scary theme, it tells the audience that something unpleasant is coming towards her.

Music doesn’t only change the atmosphere by diffrent genres. It is also important how we arrange the theme to this specific theme. Even if we tell a scary story, it isn’t necessary to go full in every time we have the possibility. It is often better to simply outline the idea and leave the big orchestration for the actual climax.

I can’t give you specific tips for each of these points, it’s the composer’s decision for what he wants to go for.

Does the Soundlibrary matters?

Some competitions specifically are judged without any points for the sample quality of the instruments. These competitions are designed especially for beginner composers.

The Indie Film music contest for example specifically does not include the quality of the library in their judging.

For the other competitions, I would recommend using a decent library. You can get “BBC Orchestra” and “Spitfire Labs” for free – they have an incredible sound and even though I have a few full orchestra libraries now, I am still using them.

So the sound quality shouldn’t be that big of an issue. If you create a track that shows your musical knowledge, fits the movie, and tells a story, the quality of the library has a small influence compared. A bigger issue of using basic libraries might be the lack of articulations. Even though BBC Orchestra has an unbelievable sound, it only gives you legato or staccato notes. For more in-depth articulations you might need to look at a more advanced library.

I also highly recommend the “East-West Composer Cloud,” where you get access to a vast variety of libraries, including the famous Hollywood Series (Hollywood Brass, Hollywood Strings, …) And a ton of good design supports and even ethnic instruments and choirs. It costs only a few bucks a month and is totally worth it, even just to try out a few things.

Sound quality should not be that big of an issue with the sources I gave you. Don’t let this be a reason to lose confidence in your skills.