Thank you, all. I expect Snaxie's coming out as a transwoman and medically remedying her condition is about as shocking as... Well, a really not-at-all shocking thing, even to people I know primarily over the Internet. It was a little obvious.
Though my singing voice has changed to the point of being unrecognizable. And I'd trained up that poor disused bottom octave so well, too. Twere I ever to get back on a stage, I suppose I could really confuse people with some nice octave jumps if I wanted to. On the plus side, voice training equals more range, and being a singer helps with this particular issue.
Current musical thoughts are how much I can abuse or am abusing drum kit parts, specifically metal-influenced stuff, double kick, blast beats, and the like, in orchestral works. I don't really know of other composers doing that, so there's really no established precedent, and since it's clearly not straight-up metal, they are an effect. All I have to go on here is, well, metal, and metal employs those all the time. There's a century of precedent for adding jazz-flavored percussion. Metal, not so much. Oddball reverse influence there; usually it's metal influenced by classical works. I don't want to overuse it.
That being said, having a kit player among the percussion section makes for some nice accents when you need things to hit really hard. Between timpani, concert bass drum, kick drum, and floor tom? That's a pretty big bang from just three players. (Add an extra if you'd like; timpani + 3 isn't at all uncommon. That gives you both hand cymbals and a crash on the kit to throw in there, too, for a six-piece bit of obnoxiousness. Or seven, if you want a chord on the timpani.) Clearly this is not a thing one should do frequently, as it will lose its impact.
Also, whether to leave all snare parts to the kit player, include two snares on the kit- one a more typical concert snare- or do interesting things with two snares. Or just have the the percussion section divide it up amongst themselves as is preferred practice. Just write the parts; timpani is always played by a specialist. Let them divide up as necessary. Though I think with drum kit involved, that's also a specialist thing, particularly if it's going throughout, or mostly, it will have the same player. Things to think about.
It's really not much different than producing rock records; the thought process is essentially the same in terms of combination of tones and timbres. Just different tools. I've been deliberately avoiding scoring for electric guitar, though, even if I often use one to write as it's convenient, particularly for string parts. It's essentially a fretted horizontal cello in terms of range, if not what's playable as double/triple/quadruple stops. It's become a matter of course for me to write string parts on things with strings rather than a keyboard instrument so I understand how they can, y'know, actually be played. Keys/piano is great for visualizing harmony, but not so much for what's practical. Thankfully I've played enough things and read enough scores over the years to have a good sense of what's workable, I think, though I still consult standard orchestration reference books (Piston and Adler in particular) when necessary.
