Do orchestras tend to have too many instruments?

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I'm learning more about composing and working with a composer, for my video projects, since I want to like the music to be what I think is the best it can be as a director.

However, when choosing the instruments with a composer, does an orchestra really need as many as it has? I can't even hear a lot of them so if I can't hear them, are they all necessary? When I watch orchestras in concert videos, they often have a tuba, but I can almost never hear the tuba for example. So do you really need say 30 instruments playing, when maybe 10 would suffice, since the human ear cannot possibly hear all 30 I don't think?

Most bands that play, have four instrumentalists in the band, or at least pop and rock bands, so I wonder if that's enough instruments for a band, is 30 or more, too many sometimes?

What do you think?

Orchestras started off more around the size of a Big Band, but then gradually grew in size.
Most of the blocks of instruments are playing the same thing most of the time: it’s how you do high volume if you haven’t invented electricity or amplifiers.
As to the number of different instruments: that’s a tone colour thing: the same bass line played by a double bass and a tuba in unison sounds different to played on either one singly, so that’s your old-school way if doing effects.

Oh okay, well as long as they sound different unison, cause a lot of times, I can only hear maybe 5 instruments at a time, and so I wonder if the rest are necessary therefore. I thought I was counting in unison, but maybe I wasn't .

Yeah, if you pick the right combination two instruments in unison can sound like a single instrument of a blended character.

Yeah that's true cool. We can do that then, I just don't know if I see a reason for 30 instruments simultaneously per say. It's just when I see an orchestra, I try to hear the instruments but I end up seeing a lot more than I can hear.

With the massive, late-Romantic style orchestra, I don't think it's possible to hear all the instruments individually! You can in earlier music, like Haydn or Mozart, though even that takes a bit of work. One of the reasons conductors are so highly regarded is their ability to hear an impenetrably complex wall of sound and figure out how to make it sound better.

The tiny orchestras used in early Haydn symphonies sound just fine for that music, but can't get the richness and variety of sounds or the sheer volume of Wagner a century later. Some composers use their army of instruments quite sparingly, but still find it handy to have, say, a fourth clarinet ready when they need it. Sibelius is a bit like that. And because all those instruments are available, composers tend to use them! Still, you can do a lot with a smaller orcherstra. Opera and ballet companies often employ an arranger, whose job it is to re-arrange the music for a smaller orchestra for reasons of space or budget.

Yes....they started out with little chamber orchestras in Bach's day back in the early 1700s (comparable to jazz combos of today). And by the 1800s that had evolved into the full blown circa 100 strong philharmonic orchestras we know today.

There was one 19th Century composer (maybe Berlioz?) who felt that that was TOO FEW instruments, and said that an orchestra needed around 800 instruments(when you added up all of strings, woodwinds, brass, etc, that he thought that was needed).

The college textbook said that no one has ever put together a real orchestra that size. It got me wishing that someone like the Mythbusters ought to do that. Set up an 800 piece orchestra to play one of that composer's pieces just to see how it sounds. Or maybe do the experiment on the cheap by using a normal sized orchestra, and then using adobe premier, or something like that, to electronically multiply the number of each kind of instrument to make a passable simulation of this hypothetical 800 piece orchestra.

Bear in mind, part of the reason orchestras tend to have multiples of the same instrument, playing the same part is because they didn't have the option to mic-up and just turn the PA system up louder.

Beyond that, the whole array of instruments will be playing parts that compliment each other, if one section is playing a chord in an open voicing, other instruments might contribute single notes from that chord in different octaves (possibly with even more going on). Using an open voicing makes a chord sound less dense, filling in the 'gaps' with a different sounding instrument leads to a different feeling than if those notes were coming from the 'main' instrument.

I am used to listening to European classical music, so no, I don't think of orchestras as having too many instruments. They don't all play at the same time, so whole portions of songs would be silent if some instruments were removed.

The composition of the orchestra is somewhat determined by standards in orchestral composition, anyhow—if the music is written for x amount of instruments with y different parts, you need enough instruments to realize the composer's vision.


I have trouble separating out sounds as well, but I assumed it was part of having auditory processing issues. I was told these issues are common for autistic people, so you might have the same issue if you are autistic.

Oh okay. I could ask other people how many instruments they can hear then, out of curiosity.

But if the instruments are not all playing at the same time, then why have that many then?

In reverse order:

Just because you don't need all the instruments playing simultaneously, doesn't mean you don't need them all at some point in the performance. Unless you're going to have members of your orchestra swapping instruments depending on where in the performance you're at. My understanding is that swapping instruments is more common outside of the world of classical music.

There's going to be a lot of factors in play for determining how many instruments/how clearly can individual instruments be heard. Every instrument has a different signature and fills different parts of the audio spectrum because they don't just produce a pure tone, there's harmonics and other content. Depending on how one is experiencing the performance, they might hear more or less. If you're listening to a decent quality recording, produced with the different instrumental parts recorded in isolation and with an effort to mix and EQ the tracks with a focus on clarity you'll hear the individual instruments and sections much more clearly than if you're listening to it live. Listening to it live, there will be parts of the room where things are muddier or less distinct than other parts. Listening to a roughly made live recording (like just a quick stereo mic setup) would likely be even more difficult to hear the individual parts compared to being there for the live performance.

Oh okay. I could ask other people how many instruments they can hear then, out of curiosity.

But if the instruments are not all playing at the same time, then why have that many then?

For different tonality. The composer wants some parts of the song to have the sound of a flute, some parts to have the sound of a trumpet, and some parts to have the sound of violas. Etc.

Sometimes you want only a few instruments playing for a quiet and delicate sound. Sometimes you want everyone playing for a strong, full sound. If all the instruments all played all the time, the whole song would sound mostly the same.

Well, the really short answer is: flexibility.

Sometimes the texture that best communicates the feeling the composer wishes to convey in a movement doesn't require a certain instrument, but that instrument is required for other movements so it can't be omitted, those players just get a moment to rest.

When you listen to music, regardless of genre, parts of the pieces shift dynamically. They get louder and fuller or softer and more sparse. Even when a band is limited in terms of instruments (like a 3 or 4 piece rock band) they'll try to get more sounds out of the instruments they have to convey whatever it is they wish to convey. Sometimes that rock band might have a part of a song with just guitar, or bass, or vocals, or whatever, and other times they might be much busier sounding.

If you're writing for an orchestra you're familiar with what tools you'll likely be able to use when your piece is performed, so you would write based on that. I feel like you're almost approaching the question backwards. Why wouldn't you use all the colours you have available for your paintings? I mean, certainly limiting one's pallet has it's uses too, but no one would ever ask 'why use all those colours?'.

Also; what starkid said.

Berlioz was a bit ahead of his time when it came to orchestration. If you look at his music, Especially the Requiem, the Symphonie Fantastique, and Les Troyens, You’ll hear traces of both Wagner, as well as Mahler.

How else can you get the effect that Mahler was after in his 8th symphony, Der Symphonie Auf der Tausend. (Excuse my German, especially at 4:30 in the morning.)

You don't have every actor in the cast of a play, or a movie, doing a monologue at the same time.

They don't all play "at the same time" because it's ...a musical composition. The different families of instruments (woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings) do different things at a different points in a musical piece- sometimes overlapping with other instruments, and sometimes not.

But having said that that IS a thing: sometimes say the whole violin section gets "masked" (you cant hear any of them) at climactic loud moments (when everyone of the 100 players join in) in some symphonies when they are performed the way a composer of another century specified his work be played.

My guess is that you need the variety of instruments. But you may not actually need the quantity of each kind of instrument that a full on philharmonic orchestra has. That's because today you could probably multiply the effect of any instrument electronically in the studio if need be.