Bollywood Strings Vst
Asdrubal Dagreat
Bollywood Strings provides bespoke live music acts. From violin & harp duets, string quartets, strings & tabla, cello & piano and more. All musicians perform various genres of music, giving our clients the best musical experience for any occasion.
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For this arrangement, I used string samples from Spitfire Audio's Albion, but had I scored it for live players, I'd have given the upper part to violas and the lower part to the cellos. Why not use violins for the upper part? Well, although the notes technically fall within the violin's range, I felt the violas would sound tonally stronger playing the low As and Gs, since the latter pitch (marked in red) is the lowest note on the violin, which can only be played on its open bottom string. And, of course, the lower part could only be played by cellos, as its lowest pitch (the B flat in bar four, marked in blue) lies a tone below the playable range of the viola.
To ratchet up the angst in this music, I wrote a bass line that fluctuates unpredictably between F# and G. This undermines the tonality further: on hearing the first four notes of the top line played over an F#, the ear assumes a major key, but that's subverted as soon as the bass note moves up to G, at which point the same four notes take on a diminished feel. Establishing the 'tonal centre' (ie. key) of a piece of music is all a question of context and expectation, and, as you can probably tell by now, my personal preference is to avoid the expected and try not to make the context too obvious!Some string libraries contain rhythm tools for the automatic creation of ostinatos. The two shown here are from Spitfire Audio Albion and Audiobro LA Scoring Strings.
Diagram 3 shows the first four bars of this tune, featuring the characteristic 'Indian strings' pitch slides (in other words, 'portamento') between most notes. In order to further accentuate the Bollywood flavour, I used the notes of Bb and D# (respectively, the flattened second and sharp fourth) over the A chord, as, to my (admittedly uneducated) ears, that particular combination of scale intervals has a distinctly Indian ring to it!
In the end, such notational issues proved largely academic, because as soon as they read the words 'Bollywood Chorus' on their parts, the players instinctively knew what to do. From the moment their bows hit the strings, we were transported from cold, drizzly Islington to the humid, sultry climes of Mumbai, the temperature in the control room rising by a few degrees as a little bit of India was grafted onto the music of an English rock band.
Whereas successful acts can command a budget to hire live string players for their albums, most musicians aren't in that privileged position. However, with the creative and intelligent use of samples, it's possible to bridge the gap between real and sampled strings. When working with orchestral samples, one of the keys to creating a successful MIDI arrangement is instant switching between performance styles (aka 'articulations') in real time, emulating the sudden changes in tone colour and dynamics one associates with a real orchestral performance. To make this possible, most sample libraries now utilise a technique called 'keyswitching'.
One of the most flexible articulation switching systems was designed for the Vienna Symphonic Library's Vienna Instruments sample player by Christian Teuscher. Software for this proprietary player is provided free with every VSL library. A 'matrix' (roughly equivalent to a Kontakt 'multi') holds up to 144 'cells' containing single or layered articulations, and you can switch between the cells via keyswitches, MIDI control change (CC) commands, pitch wheel, velocity or even playing speed (ie. the elapsed time interval between notes, as opposed to the speed/velocity of a key press).
The moral, as ever, is to keep focused on the music and try to be imaginative and exploratory in your musical ideas, at the same time as keeping a firm hand on the technical chaos that can ensue when working with MIDI and samples. I hope some of what I've written will be of help for both of those endeavours. In Part 3, I'll be joined by the gifted composer and arranger David William Hearn, who'll serve up some useful masterclass tips, while I continue to give you my personal take on the big subject of arranging for strings.
7. Ask the band's producer to send you stems (submixes of drums, bass, guitars, vocals...) of the song, so you can hear exactly what's being played on the track. The same stems can be used as a backing track for the strings session.
16. Make sure the stems and copyist's parts arrive at the studio in good time for the session. Even if everything is technically perfect, it can take almost an hour to put out parts, check backing track balance, sort out click track, etc.
Although a little daunting on the face of it, most of these are merely logistical tasks which can be solved by sensible forward planning. The most important thing is to create a string arrangement that works well for the track. Once you've nailed that, you can proceed with confidence!
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