The Orchestral Template

Why a Template?

Think about what an orchestra looks like from the conductor’s podium. Strings to the left and right. Woodwinds in the center. Brass behind them. Percussion in the back. Every player has a seat, a part, a position on the stage. The conductor doesn’t spend the first twenty minutes of rehearsal deciding where everyone sits — that was figured out a long time ago.

Your template is the same idea. It’s the seating chart, the signal flow, the color scheme, and the reverb space, all pre-built so that when inspiration hits, you don’t lose it troubleshooting a routing problem.

BBC Symphony Orchestra

The library for this guide is BBC Symphony Orchestra from Spitfire Audio. There are several tiers:

• Discover — Free (after a short waiting period, or $49 to skip the wait). Covers all four orchestral families with a solid set of articulations. This is the recommended starting point.
• Core, Professional — Paid tiers with more microphone positions, more articulations, and finer dynamic control. If you have Pro, you’ll have more options, but everything in this guide applies to Discover.

To install: create a Spitfire Audio account, download the Spitfire Audio app, and install BBC Symphony Orchestra from your library. The plugin loads inside Logic as a software instrument.

Building the Track Structure

An orchestra has four sections: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. Inside each section are individual instruments, and in a real orchestra many of those instruments have multiple players. Here’s what we’re building:

Strings

• Violin I
• Violin II
• Viola
• Cello
• Bass

Woodwinds

• Piccolo / Flute
• Oboe / English Horn
• Clarinet / Bass Clarinet
• Bassoon / Contrabassoon

Brass

• Horn I–IV
• Trumpet
• Trombone
• Tuba

Percussion

• Timpani
• Additional percussion (snare, cymbals, bass drum, glockenspiel, etc.)

In Logic, create a software instrument track for each instrument and load the corresponding BBC Symphony Orchestra patch. For strings, that means five tracks. For woodwinds, you might start with four (one per instrument family — you can always duplicate later when you need, say, a separate English Horn line). Brass gets four. Percussion gets as many as you need — start with timpani and add from there.

Summing Stacks

Once you have your tracks laid out, you need to organize them. In Logic Pro, the tool for this is the summing stack.

Select all five string tracks. Right-click (or go to Track > Create Track Stack) and choose Summing Stack — not Folder Stack. The distinction matters. A folder stack just organizes visually. A summing stack creates an actual audio bus, which means you get a single fader for the entire string section, a single insert chain, and a single send point. That’s how you control the whole section as a unit.

Do the same for woodwinds, brass, and percussion. You’ll end up with four summing stacks, each containing its instruments, each with its own master fader.

You can nest these further if you want. Some composers create a master “Orchestra” summing stack that contains all four section stacks. That gives you one fader for the entire orchestra. Whether you need that depends on your workflow — start with the four section stacks and add complexity only when you need it.

Panning the Orchestra

An orchestra isn’t a wall of sound coming from center. It’s a wide, deep, spatially organized ensemble. Your panning should reflect that. Here’s the standard concert seating, viewed from the audience (which is also how your stereo field works — left is left, right is right):

• Violin I — Left
• Violin II — Center-left
• Viola — Center to center-right
• Cello — Center-right
• Bass — Right of center (some conductors place basses far right, others center-right behind the cellos)
• Flute / Piccolo — Center-left
• Oboe / English Horn — Center
• Clarinet — Center to center-right
• Bassoon — Center-right
• Horns — Left of center (horns traditionally sit to the left, bells pointing right)
• Trumpet — Center to center-right
• Trombone / Tuba — Center-right to right
• Timpani — Center-right to right
• Percussion — Across the back, generally center to right

Don’t pan anything hard left or hard right. A real orchestra doesn’t extend to the very edges of the stereo field — it occupies a wide but bounded space. Violin I might sit around 40–50% left. Bass might be 20–30% right. The exact numbers are less important than the relationships. Violins should clearly be to the left of violas. Cellos should be to the right of violas. Horns should be on the opposite side from trumpets.

Pan each instrument track in Logic’s mixer. Then close the summing stack and check the panning on the section level. The individual pans do the detailed positioning; the section pan can shift the entire group if needed.

Reverb Setup

In a concert hall, every instrument shares the same acoustic space. The hall’s reverb is what glues the orchestra together — it’s the room itself, surrounding every player equally. Your template needs to recreate that.

Create a bus send (Bus > Aux) and load a convolution or algorithmic reverb on it. Logic’s Space Designer works well — load a concert hall impulse response. Any quality convolution reverb with a good hall IR will do the job. The specific reverb matters less than the approach: one shared space for the entire orchestra.

Now send every instrument track to that bus. This is where the distinction between pre-fader and post-fader sends becomes relevant.

Use pre-fader sends for your orchestral reverb. Here’s why: in a real concert hall, a violin doesn’t stop reverberating just because the player is playing softly. The room responds to the sound regardless of the instrument’s dynamic. Pre-fader sends mimic this. When you automate a track’s volume — pulling the strings down during a quiet woodwind passage, for example — the reverb tail stays consistent. The instrument moves back in the mix without disappearing from the acoustic space.

Set the send level for each instrument to taste. Instruments that sit further back on the stage (percussion, brass) might get slightly more send. Instruments up front (first violins, solo winds) might get slightly less. But start with everything equal and adjust from there.

Level Balancing

With everything routed and panned, the next step is getting your static levels right. This is the fader balance before you’ve written a note of music — the default state of the orchestra at rest.

Start with strings. They’re the foundation. Set the string summing stack fader to a moderate level — not hot, plenty of headroom. Then balance the individual string instruments against each other. Violin I and cello tend to carry melodic weight, so they may sit slightly forward. Violas and basses provide body and foundation.

Bring in woodwinds next. They should sit naturally behind the strings in level — not buried, but blending. Woodwinds cut through strings because of their timbral character, not because they’re louder.

Brass comes next. Brass can easily overpower everything, especially in the low register. Start conservative. Horns blend well with strings and woodwinds; trumpets and trombones project more aggressively.

Percussion last. Timpani should feel like the bass voice of the orchestra, not a drum solo. Other percussion is contextual — you’ll adjust these levels per piece.

These are starting points. Every piece you write will require its own balance. But the template gives you a sane default so you’re not starting from zero.

Color-Coding

This sounds cosmetic, but it’s a workflow accelerator. When your session has forty tracks, being able to see at a glance which section you’re looking at saves real time.

In Logic Pro, assign a color to each track. Use the track color picker (Option-C) or the Color Palette. The convention that works well:

• Strings — Green
• Woodwinds — Blue
• Brass — Gold / Yellow
• Percussion — Red or Orange

Then use Assign Region Color by Track Color (in the Edit menu or via key command) to make the MIDI regions match. When you look at the arrange window, every region tells you which section it belongs to without reading the track name. This takes thirty seconds to set up and pays off every time you open the project.

Your summing stack headers should reflect the section color too. When you collapse the stacks, you see four colored rows: strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion. That’s your orchestra at a glance.

The BBC Template

A pre-built template — BBC_Template.logicx — is available that includes all of this: instrument tracks, summing stacks, panning, sends, levels, and color-coding. Download it from the Beat Kitchen Discord.

You are welcome to use it as-is, and for your first few projects that is probably the right call. But the goal of this chapter is for you to understand every decision in that template well enough to rebuild it yourself. When you know why the horns are panned where they are, why the sends are pre-fader, why the strings are in a summing stack instead of a folder — then you own the template. You can modify it, extend it for new libraries, or build one from scratch for a different DAW.

What to Practice

• Build the template from scratch yourself. Don’t open the included template file — start with an empty Logic project, create each instrument track, load BBC Symphony Orchestra patches, and organize them into summing stacks. Compare your result to the provided template afterward.
• Pan the orchestra. Set up the stereo field according to standard concert seating. Play a chord across all five string instruments and listen to how the panning creates width. Then bring in a woodwind — does it sit in its own space, or does it pile up on top of the strings?
• Set up a reverb send. Load Space Designer (or another hall reverb) on an aux, send every instrument to it pre-fader, and listen to the result. Try toggling between pre-fader and post-fader sends — automate one track’s volume and notice how the reverb behavior changes.
• Color-code everything. Assign section colors, apply region colors, collapse your summing stacks. Does the session read clearly at a glance? If not, adjust until it does.
• Save your template. File > Save as Template. Name it something you’ll recognize. This is the file you’ll open for every orchestral project going forward.