This week I wrote a string arrangement. Let me tell you how that goes down. And let me preface this by saying that I’m writing as though you were my sister-in-law (who you would really like), not somebody who reads Electronic Musician. So don’t think I’m talking down to you.

I got a call a week or so ago from an old Belmont friend, Josh Deane. He’s formed some kind of working relationship with an artist named Jeff Deyo. Jeff is giving Josh a shot at producing a couple of songs as a sort of audition to produce his next record.

Josh sat in on a band rehearsal to hear the two songs. One of the songs is called “Glory” (starring Denzel Washington) and is a pretty straightforward song—no weird chords, no crazy turns in the road, with the exception of a key-change near the end of the song. But as Josh listened to the band play it, he got inspired to take a more daring approach. He was hearing a hybrid of Eastern music and hard-rock sounds. A good example of this hybrid, the same example he gave me, is Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited,” from the City of Angels soundtrack. Another example that some of my friends might know is Andrew Peterson’s “So Long Moses.” Also, Fleming and John, as well as any arranging that John Mark Painter has done, use this sound like money in the bank. The hard-rock sound comes from the bass and drums. The Eastern sound comes from the kinds of parts the rest of the band plays. For example, the guitar tones will probably still rock, but the guitarist will look for melodies that sound like Indian music. Think of it like doing an impression of an accent. You’re still speaking your language from your vocal chords, but you’re putting on the inflections and quirks associated with another dialect. If I may vulgarly simplify all the centuries of tradition and nuance that have shaped eastern music, the sound we’re going for is kind of “creepy” and “slidy.” There, now I can never run for president. Strings are really handy for this kind of thing because, if they’re written right, they can sound very ethnic.

So Josh called and told me his idea. We met and listened to some songs that he thought were significant: the Alanis Morissette song I mentioned, a P Diddy song that had drums like he thought they’d shoot for, a couple of demos of “Glory” with guitar parts and piano parts I could think about, and a Robbie Williams song with slidy strings. We also discussed the major events of the song: it starts with just strings and keyboard; the first chorus is just classical guitar; the drums come in very heavy at the second verse, etc.

The band is tracking the song on the 4th of July. Already, this is different from previous arrangements I’ve done for records. Typically, I write to a track that’s mostly finished. That way, I’m able to interact with (and stay out of the way of) what’s already there. So I knew I’d have to do what I could to build my own track to write this arrangement over. Josh wanted to have the arrangement recorded in a rough version for the tracking day so the band can play along. He needed me to record this rough version with samples or synth-strings. Samples are recordings of real instruments that are edited and loaded into a program so that you can play them with your keyboard. Synth sounds are mathematic impersonations of real sound, no samples involved. When we record with real strings later, we’ll keep the synthesized and/or sampled version in the mix, a little quieter than the real strings, to reinforce the sound.

So at this point I retreated to my lair and made my game plan. I only do a couple of string arrangements a year so I don’t have a method. I loved what I did this time, however, and I feel fairly stupid for ever having done it any other way. First let me tell you how I built my scratch track. A scratch track, by the way, is a rough recording of a song used as a tool when making the real recording. I was working in Pro Tools, which is sort of the standard music production software. I created my session and imported a demo of “Glory” that was pretty lame but was at least at the right tempo. I then imported that P Diddy song and isolated a bar of the drum-beat. I then time-stretched it so that it was in the right tempo and looped it over the whole song, muting it in places where the drums drop out. I needed just vocals with no instruments up until the first chorus, so I recorded myself singing the first verse. So it’s me singing the first verse and the demo comes in at the chorus. Kind of like the geeky kid handing the mic to Clay Aiken on the American Idol finale. Finally, I recorded a piano part that’s fairly important to the whole arrangement and doubled it with Rhodes to make it sound dreamy. Now I had a scratch that was roughly indicative of the final recording.

I wrote for two violins and two cellos. At the recording session, we’ll have just one cellist and one violinist. They’ll play a few passes of each part and we’ll stack these passes on top of each other to get the sound of a larger section playing together. So in Pro Tools I created four MIDI tracks, one for each part.

MIDI is a digital music language that I would compare to musical typing. When I record audio, I’m converting sound waves into zeros and ones, to be played back as audio at a later time. What I see on my screen looks like a sound wave. When I record MIDI, however, I am recording something like very precise digital sheet-music. I play a MIDI keyboard, which is hooked into my computer. As I play, information about the notes I play, how hard I play them, when I release them, when I hit the sustain pedal, when I let it go, etc. is recorded. What I see on my screen is something analogous to sheet music, though it bears little resemblance. Since MIDI isn’t audio, I always need a program to interpret the information as audio, like someone reading a book aloud. Here’s what’s handy about MIDI: I can edit it much more easily than I can edit audio, changing durations of notes, changing velocities of notes, transposing; I can quantize MIDI, that is, I can lock it into tempo so that each note is attacked and released with perfect timing; MIDI can be read by many different applications, so I’ll feed these tracks to my sampler to record my sampled strings, to my synthesizer to record my synth strings, and to my notation program to make music for the puny human beings to read later. As I wrote, I was feeding the MIDI to a sampler in a program called Reason, so that I could hear the strings as I arranged (remember, MIDI isn’t audio). The sample I was using was “Chamberlin Strings,” an old string sample from the 60s or 70s. I thought this would be a good choice because, believe it or not, we don’t want fake strings to sound too good. We want them to be good at being fake (like most of us spend our whole lives trying to do), so that when we layer the real strings on top of them, the timbres will, being more different, blend better. Go figure.

It took me about twelve hours worth of work to arrive at the arrangement I have now. The big hurdle was the first part of the song, where strings are at the fore. The Alanis song starts the exact same way, with just strings, piano, and voice. But there are a few differences between “Uninvited” and “Glory” that made my work a challenge. On “Uninvited,” the voice and piano together are enough to imply the key and chords of the song. The song is in a minor key and there are very few chord changes, only this winding, eerie melody over a drone. So there you have your Eastern vibe. The song can’t help but sound Indian. So the strings have no responsibilities. They’re at liberty to be weird. They’re basically sound effects. “Glory,” on the other hand, sounds like a worship song. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s not an Indian thing. The melody is kind of sweet and the chords move like pop music. The piano part helps; it repeats itself over and over, like the piano part on “Uninvited.” But the piano part doesn’t amply imply the chord changes and I didn’t have permission to change the chords. So the strings had to carry the burden of spelling out this Western chord progression while still sounding kind of weird.

Inevitably, I compromised. You can’t make the song something it isn’t. Melodically, I was sort of boxed in. I couldn’t use chromaticism, strange scales, or extensions over these middle-class chords. In other words, no weird notes. So the best I had to work with was rhythm, expression, and strange intervals. I used a lot of quarter-note triplets and hemiola (look it up) to make melodies defy the tempo a little. I wrote finger-slides all over the place. This song’s got more slides than “76 Trombones.” I wrote melodies that jumped around in ways that pop music doesn’t usually move. But again, I did this within certain confines. As I’ve said, the beginning of the song was the most difficult to arrange, because the strings had more weight to bear. Once the drums and bass came in, I was able to write only those idiomatic lines, since the bass will be holding down the chords from then on, and, for that matter, there’ll be tons of other stuff to hold people’s interest.

Once I had “written” the arrangement as MIDI, I ran it through the sampler and made an audio recording of the Chamberlin strings. Then I ran it through a synth in Pro Tools to get a more lush sounding version. These two tracks sound good together, and I imagine that Josh may be able to use both of them. I then opened up the MIDI file in Finale, a sheet-music program, and started editing the notation to be read by the players.

All in all, I’m pleased with what I’ve done. Now I enter that all-too-familiar stage in the game where I hope that I haven’t gone off the deep end and that the producer will like my work. I’ll let you know how it goes.

One last note, oh you of bleeding eyes. I’d like to thank my friend Drew Raines who set up this blog for me and is still helping me learn the game. He’s a genius and a kind soul. And I’d like to thank you for reading. I’d like to hear from you and hear if this kind of writing interests you. I want to know who my audience is and what I can change to keep this accessible to you. You can email me at ben@benshive.com. Or you can egg my house.