On Friday, five of us entered the studio to record real strings for the re-branding campaign of a large company. The music had been carefully scored for double basses, cellos, violas and violins and was already well notated, meaning that we could simply turn up and play without us doing any additional work on the parts or wasting any studio time. As such, the three hours of recording studio time were spent in an intensive fashion, with three tracks (ranging from 15 seconds to two minutes) being completed with several overlayers to thicken up the string sound. Although the composer and producer had envisaged our strings being added on top of some high quality sampled strings, it was a distinct possibility that if we managed to create a full enough sound using overdubbing in the studio, the live strings would suffice on their own. As live strings are always far more convincing and natural sounding than even the most expensive string samples, this was an option we were all aiming for.
The session went well and although there were a couple of tricky passages which were really challenging, by the time we were finished, the sound was really rich and full and the clients seemed to be very happy with the result. We look forward to working with them again on other projects in the future.