Reddit mentions of The Study of Orchestration (Fourth Edition)

If you want to save your money and learn a ton, wikipedia is actually an excellent resource for basic orchestration. IMSLP has loads of free scores... youtube and spotify loads of videos and recordings of performances. Listen to/watch a piece along with its score. If you're still looking for a book, Samuel Adler's The Study of Orchestration is a great (but expensive) place to start. Cheers.

If you're not familiar with chromatic harmony up through augmented sixth chords and enharmonic modulations, I recommend getting a good modern textbook like those listed in the sidebar.

Counterpoint is indispensable for composers, but the internet is in the habit of perpetually recommending Fux, whose style I regard as outdated. Plus, his examples have contrapuntal and stylistic errors. Brian Hyer's counterpoint manual is fine for species writing. Also look at Seth Monahan's videos on harmonic species counterpoint. Ernst Krenek's manual is decent as a start to tonal counterpoint. Kent Kennan's Counterpoint is a very good book too.

Beyond that, Schoenberg's Fundamentals of Musical Composition and Reginald Smith-Brindle's Musical Composition offer some nice insights to composition.

For orchestration, you can go with Sam Adler's Orchestration, but honestly I usually don't use these books for much more than ranges and this tiny, cheap book is more convenient. Sometimes I'll look up how to notate a certain technique, but even the big orchestration books can be spotty on those and I find myself hunting them down in specialist books. Jazz arranging is a little different. For that, refer to Rayburn Wright's Inside The Score and Bill Russo's Composing for the Jazz Orchestra, but understand that these are built around a certain tradition of jazz arranging.

If you really just mean epic/trailer/blockbuster type music then there are tons of tutorials. This guy has some good tips. If you mean orchestral music in all its potential forms then a lot of listening to, and studying, scores is important. Books such as Walter Piston's (as Schoekah mentioned) but also Samuel Adler's The Study of Orchestration are also very useful. Another good resourse is Orchestration Online Its run by a very good composer, orchestrator, and educator (I might be biased because I know him) and has some very good information.

Composing the writing new lines or melodies. Think of it as writing something from scratch. Just like drawing
Orchestration is a form of arranging: for example you take a piano piece and arrange it for orchestra that's basically orchestration.


This video explains it (good channel for Orchestration):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=119&v=3BfD50eERmo&feature=emb_title


Also, get the bible of orchestration (it is expensive so I advise you to get the 3rd edition instead as it's way cheaper):
https://www.amazon.com/Study-Orchestration-Fourth-Samuel-Adler/dp/0393600521


Piston is also a good book for orchestration