Devin Townsend on learning how to work with an orchestra: “I was so frustrated”

Canadian mad scientist of metal music Devin Townsend is preparing to release his massive work “The Moth” in May. The orchestral album was a huge undertaking that took almost a decade to complete from an idea to full record.

We asked Townsend in our recent interview how he approached learning the musical language that is needed when working with a classically trained orchestra. Townsend responded:

“Like a child. I mean, it’s funny, I of course had high school band and choir and things like that. And I’ve, again, of course, put out 30 records or something, so I’m no stranger to music, obviously. But the ways in which I learned how to do my craft – if you want to look at it that way – job, whatever you want to call it, was… I don’t know what I’m doing, I just do it. And then eventually I integrate patterns into the process”, Townsend says and continues:

“I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I know that if I do this, it achieves that, right? So, yeah. So somewhere along the line I feel like I kind of developed a language for myself that I can understand, that really it’s like only me that understands. And then when I started having to incorporate all these other people, whether or not it was orchestras or other musicians and scoring and orchestrators and choral directors and all this stuff, they all had a language that they knew together. So when they were communicating about a part, they could understand even though they’re coming at it from different perspectives or different instruments or different tasks, whatever, there was a commonality to the language that made it such that it was an efficient workflow. Not knowing that language, not knowing how to speak that language, when I first started working with choirs and orchestras years and years ago, I just wasted so much time and money because I just couldn’t… when there was a problem or when I had an idea, I could only really express it in the ways that I knew.”

“A good example of that was when we were doing ‘Empath’ I remember the beginning of the song, ‘Why?‘. What I was trying to explain to the choral director was that the effect that we were trying to achieve with the first 3 bars was like a butterfly landing on progressively smaller flowers. And, and he was like, what do you mean? I was like, oh, you know what it looks like? Like a butterfly lands on it and then lands on it, then lands on it. That’s what it needs to sound like. So it needs to sound pink and delicate and all this shit. And he’s just looking at me like I have two heads, right? So eventually I was like, okay, so I’m just wasting my time and everybody else’s. So I have to go back to the drawing board and just learn from a very fundamental level.”

Townsend then says he hired teachers to learn more about music theory, composition, arranging and orchestrating:

“So I hired teachers who would just be treating me like I was literally an infant. They’d be like, okay, Devin, write a melody. And I’d be like, oh, ‘Mary had a little lamb’, or whatever. And they’re like, okay, where’s the viola? Where is the scale? Where’s the range in which the viola… so if we’re going to split up those intervals, which part does the viola play versus the cello? And I’m just like, ‘uh, this one?’ ‘No, no, it’s another, you know what I mean?’ And you know, I don’t want to say this in a way that comes off as arrogant. It’s not meant to at all, but just for the sake of referencing an experience, it’s like, say you’re a really good runner and you’ve spent your life learning how to run and you’re really fast, and then all of a sudden someone’s like, ‘hey, you know, the way that you’re running is like… No one else here runs that way, so you can’t really do that if you want to run with the team. So you got to learn the way that we run.’ And so then you have to learn to crawl first. “

Townsend recalls being frustrated over having to learn the fundamentals:

“So fucking frustrating, dude. Like, so fucking frustrating. I remember years ago when I first started learning about orchestration, I remember just going outside the studio and just like screaming into a bush. I was so frustrated, right? Because I have all these ideas. I’m like, oh, and then the orchestra goes like this, and there’s these, you know, these cascading harmonic, arpeggios that go… And, and they’re like, no, no, no, where do the violas go? And I’m like, fuck, man.”

“The Moth” will be out 29th of May.

You can watch the interview below.