Let’s take a song as an example. My worship leader and pastor, Trevor Walker, has kindly given me permission to use one of his songs so we will use his song “Set Me Free”. This particular song is a fast paced electric piano driven song in the key of E with bass, organ, and a touch of R&B style. For the purpose of this example, I’ll display everything in the concert key (E). In reality, I would still write the parts in the concert key of E and then transpose them for the appropriate key of the instrument (for example, trumpet). After listening to the song several times, I noticed that the song stands well on its own without horns, if necessary, but that adding some horns could also spice it up.
The first thing I noticed was that the intro (about 00:00-00:13) has some space where horns could not only fit in, but accentuate the drive of the song. What we don’t want to do is to blast everything else out of the mix, but there are some definite places we can add some accents. So, without over doing it, we’ll add a few horn runs with nice accented parts. In this case, I’ll add a horn run over held chords to a syncopated long note, then a long run at then end of the intro.
After writing the first part, I considered adding multiple horn parts in harmony, but the effect was overwhelming and too much so I went back to a single part of all the horns. Sometimes, that is the best solution! This intro carries us nicely to the verse.
At this point, we really want to back off and hear the words (the message). It’s perfectly fine for the horns to hang out a while and I personally enjoy singing with the worship songs between parts. So for the verse (about 00:13-00:39) and the Pre-Chorus (about 00:40-00:55), the horns will mostly stay out of the mix. We will add some coloring here and there and a few accent points but notice that the horns are not all over the song here.
(We’ll add just a little brush of color in the verse …)
(and some movement in the pre-chorus …)
(and then help announce the chorus with a little crescendo energy.)
The chorus (about 00:56-01:27) is a slightly different story though. There is a lot of excitement there that just begs for energy so the horns come back in and add movement, excitement, and texture within the chorus and we actually start the measure before the chorus (shown above). The part is very similar to the intro, which is fine, but it could also be an entirely different horn part too. Note there are lots of passing tones used here between chords but it works well.
For the middle bridge section (about 3:00-3:40) , you could even add an improvised trumpet or saxophone solo while the bridge moves and the word “Freedom” is being repeated, making sure the solo is complete when the chorus returns. I would even so far as to suggest that the horn solo starts quiet and builds up in volume and intensity as the bridge moves forward. It is even possible that an improvised flute solo might fit in around 4:40 to close the song out. Voila! We’re done.