The Best Ways to Voice Strings? (and what IS string voicing?)

hi paul here from spitfire today i'm gonna show you a few ideas about string voicings so how do you arrange your chords and your parts for the string orchestra I'm gonna use the BBC Symphony Orchestra plug-in and I'm gonna write in a few different arrangements of a basic kind of four chord sequence and we're gonna see what different things sound like and you can make a judgment about whether you like certain sounds or not so first things first I've got the cellos up and I'm gonna look at the way that their cellos and basses interact I'm gonna put in the root note of the chord and we're gonna do a flat major going to G minor so a kind of movement in thirds then we're going to resolve to C minor and then up a tone to D major so a few different shifts there and it should give us a little bit of an interesting variety of options of what we can do with the higher parts but we're going to do the lower parts just the root notes so let me write in first of all the cello part okay super basic one cord per bar let's go to the bases there are different ways of doing this so you'll notice that the bases go down an octave lower than the cellos so quite a lot of orchestral literature is written with the basses and cellos playing in octaves but you can use them at unison at the same pitch the bass is read from the musical part with a little 8 underneath the bass clef which usually means that it's read and sounds an octave below the pitch that it's written out and so what that means is that you can you could share a part if the basses and cellos are playing the same thing if they literally play the same notes on the stave in a traditional way that the basses will sound an octave below so let's listen to what that sounds like first [Music] okay so that's quite a familiar sound what does it sound like if we if we play the basses at the same pictures that as the cellos the same actual pitch so the basses would need to be written an octave up [Music] okay so you can hear the difference there between the two sounds now that is useful in it in and of itself but what you've got happening here is that the instruments are playing a different tempura if you take the instruments within a certain group so I'm so obviously the basses sound kind of their strongest down at the bottom end because they are a base instrument if you were talking about for example the flute the flute doesn't sound very strong at the bottom of its range because it's kind of designed to play higher so with if you take that into account but then you look at the instruments within the kind of subgroup together so let's look at the cellos and basses where are they gonna match tymberlee well they're gonna match when they're playing in the same relative register so the basses sound great right down the bottom and as you go higher and higher up they become weaker so if you want them to match tymberlee then you need to use them down the octave from the cellos the cellos obviously have a really extended range and concerned they sound totally different of the top-end and concerned incredibly well matched to the violas and even the violence but we'll come to that in a little while so I'm going to go back and I'm going to stick the basses back down the octave now the first thing I'm going to try with the violas is I'm going to try using them right at the bottom of their range and just work out whatever the client of closest note is of the chord sequence that I'm doing I'm gonna allow them to stay right down in the bottom of their range so they go to the C below middle C as their lowest note so that as the cellos come up the bass it the cellos and the violas are actually quite close in pitch and let's see what that sounds like [Music] okay so that's kind of interesting it sounds that there's an alternative way I could do which is I could I could even do that that's let's try that [Music] let's carry on building on this for me that doesn't really sound totally satisfying but it's an effect it sounds kind of like condensed and quite dark and a little bit muddy now that's not necessarily a bad thing I'm gonna add the violin twos and I'm gonna try and stay right at the bottom of the range of the violence here as well just to kind of condense everything down into this bottom end so you can see what the effect of that is so I'm gonna pick I'm gonna pick the notes of the chord that I can get into right at the bottom of the range and the violins start at this G below middle C let's see what that sounds like [Music] okay so I cheated slightly I added a note I went to an a on the third chord so that turns that C minor chord from a C minor into a C minor add six I guess I just didn't suddenly in the moment want to go back down to the G they open G at the bottom of the violins you can you can kind of play vibrato the way that the string players play vibrato is they usually hold another note that's not sounding I'm guessing possibly the G above but you know so you get a slight harmonic in there but while there then while they're bowing the open G they kind of vibrato the ghost notes and that does give you a slight sense of movement but basically when you go back down to there it's a very still sound so that's fine now I'm going to again kind of you know go squeeze down to the bottom end so let's try B flat D C D and see what that sounds like [Music] so you'll notice that I didn't at any point attempt to put the bases and the cellos playing a different notes now there is a reason for that and I'm going to demonstrate it now so you've you can hear what that sounds like and that is our kind of basic dark voicing right at the bottom of the of the range there but if instead of the cellos playing if instead of the cellos just tracking the basses what happens if they attempt to do a harmony with the bases now I'm gonna do use the simplest harmony possible which is the perfect fifth arguable whether that's the simplest how many possible so the first notes obviously I can't do that because we the cellos don't go down low enough cuz that would be to b-flat below the bottom of their range but so let's start on the e-flat and then we'll go down to the D which is a fifth above the root note of G and then we'll do the G which is the fifth above the Reno C and then a so we're going to have the cellos and the bases are now going to be playing apart from the first note they're going to be playing 1/5 apart so see what that sounds like [Music] okay so again if we kind of strip off the the higher strings then getting those playing in fifth kind of things down there I guess it's an effect that you could use for certain things but it's really starting to sound quite muddy now what happens if we do let's do the first two notes as I did then so octave then the fifth then I'm gonna go to third so they're going to be a minor third apart for the C minor chord which is the third third chord and then a major third apart for the fourth chord the D major chord let's see what that sounds like [Music] okay so the more now as we're introducing these new chords these new intervals where things are getting closer together it's just becoming more and more indistinct unsatisfying sounding and kind of muddy so let's take that out let's go back to our original going in octaves I'll pop that back in now and then we'll look at the higher strings [Music] what do we need to kind of define Accord in its most basic form we need the third and that is the thing that gives us the most basic flavor of the chord is it major or minor if we start with the idea that we're gonna we're going to do a wide voicing with the upper strings the widest voicing we can do is to have each of those upper three parts playing exactly the same thing but an octave apart and in order to add a little bit of interest I'll try and move in a different kind of direction each time so we're getting a little bit of contrary motion it's always a bit more interesting if the parts aren't all moving in the same direction at the same time so let's start with the violas [Music] okay that sounds okay we've got a little bit of contrary motion just for one of the chords let's match that on the violins up the octave volunteers [Music] and then again on the violin ones up another octave [Music] okay so let's just isolate those top three parts and hear them on their own okay so that's an interesting quite a strong sound and that can be very very useful for really punching out a melody getting that really wide you could even do four octaves and have the cellos at the bottom but let's leave them on the bass at the moment let's look at a different way of voicing this we're going to keep them quite wide apart we're gonna leave violin ones playing that part we just did at the top for that for the next notes what would be the next most important note we've got the root of everything we've got the third of everything now now I'm gonna put in the fifth I don't have to put in the fifth in some ways the fifth is kind of a given but for the purposes of this I want to do this because I want to show you what it sounds like when you have the violin ones and the violin twos in that kind of third relationship or sixth relationship so whereas the violin ones are up here for that first a flat major chord I'm gonna put violin twos starting from this b-flat here I'm doing that because I'm going to keep them quite quite widely spaced so you can hear the effect of having these higher strings very widely spaced and then we'll bring them together and put them into a closed voicing so first up was reading the 5th of every chord and I'm gonna similarly to that downward and then to upward movements are I'm gonna do exactly the same on violin twos so it's interesting you can hear obviously they're playing a part and they're doing something but they sound really disconnected from violin ones now don't they let's put in the violas for the sake of completeness for the violas because we've now got our kind of three components of the triad of each chord in place I'm going to pick a few interesting extra notes but I'm gonna keep it down here I'm gonna use the bottom octave or so of the violas just so that everything still stays fairly widely spaced apart so I'm using suspensions and things which you kind of think well they kind of should sound nice like ninths and fourths to give you a kind of feeling of suspension but somehow it's not really gelling together so let's have a look at doing something slightly different you know leave the cellos and basses where they are we're going to shift all these all these middle string parts up and we're going to bring them to each one to within an octave of the higher part so first up we'll do violent twos if you remember violent ones are doing this [Music] so I want to try and keep within an octave of that for violent twos so first up the first chord is that a flat chord I'm going to again do the fifths with violin too so I'm putting some quite rigid restrictions on to myself but I'm gonna try and keep it up so it's right underneath what's going on up here [Music] okay see that's starting now to sound a little bit more cohesive we've got some interesting elements going on there but we're keeping everything within an octave for those two top parts I'm gonna do exactly the same with the violas I'm going to again add in some of these crunchy suspensions and things but I'm gonna do it and try and keep that within an octave of violent twos so just having just flicking over to the score quickly you can see violent twos are doing this B flat D G a so let's mess around somewhere up nice and close to those [Music] [Applause] okay that's sounding quite nice quite nice that's a little bit too close in some places so for my for my crunchy note here I'm gonna use a D on the first chord so that's the major seventh of the E flat major chord then I'm going to go down to the C which is a so forth for suspended fourth in the G minor chord then I'm gonna drop down to an a which is a sixth in the C minor chord and then I'm gonna go up to the C again which is this major seventh in the in the D major chord so let's see what that sounds like [Music] [Applause] okay so these are as you can hear when you get the comedies closer together in the higher strings you get a more of a kind of cohesive sound you can you can even get them tighter than this so let's let's remove that idea for the violas so what we're gonna try next is we're gonna move the part that I wrote on violin twos which as you recall is a sixth down from violin ones and I'm gonna insert the parts in between so for example here we have the G up an octave that's where you get our little eight symbol above the treble clef means that this for legibility they've logic has written the part but with a transpose up an octave attached to the clef so that's a G up the octave and here's the b-flat below that a sixth below that so I'm gonna fill in the middle of that and I'm actually gonna go back and we're gonna forget the crunchy chord thing for now we're just gonna do our vanilla chords and I'm just gonna insert the missing note in the middle of each chord which in this case is the e-flat for the first chord and as you probably worked out by now it's basically tracking the root notes is tracking the root notes they're being played by the Chilean bases but it's actually in a slightly different you know motion because we go down before we go back up [Applause] okay so now we've got a really close fighting there at the top and that's sounding great it's all of the instruments we've got a very big gap in the middle now so that's creating it's a little bit of a problem and I think we'd probably benefit from pulling those instruments that are all in the gods they're they're up on the thinnest string let's pull them back down a bit so we're going to transpose them all down an octave and see what that sounds like [Music] okay so it's sounding quite nice but it's still sounding kind of boring and the reason for that is that we've just got too much stuff just going in the same direction we haven't got any interest in the middle part any interesting crunchy notes let's get rid of that that one that the middle part that was tracking the baseline and instead of that let's put in a few of those interesting notes and see what that sounds like [Music] okay so it's starting to come to life a little bit now it's starting to sound more interesting I'm gonna leave that I'm gonna take the top part and I'm gonna do something here with the top part and the violin tubes and make them exactly the same but I'm gonna put that back up the octave so now what we've got is we've got our cellos and basses playing the octave at the bottom we've got our violas carving out a few of these kind of additional notes in the chords just to give it a little bit of interest we've got our violin two parts which is simply playing the root notes and then we've got the octave above that violin one simply playing the root note that octave up so we've got a wide spread of octaves in the outer parts and just one note in the middle oh we are we going to lose the feeling of what chord is what though it's going to be interesting to see whether our additional notes that we put in or are enough to kind of infer what's going on in the in the chord itself [Music] it's interesting because I don't know whether it's the ghost of the memory of what we've been listening to but there is there is a kind of inference there which helps you to imagine the missing notes of the chord I'm gonna play something slightly different but just using a few passing notes and just see if I can get a descending line working with the rest of these strings [Music] so one of the things that's happening now is because we've got more parts moving in different directions it's starting to sound more interesting I think we're getting to the point where it exhausted this this kind of simplistic thing things that are things that would make it sound more interesting if we go back to the violin twos and we start moving parts so that they're not always moving at the same time [Music] so you can hear that all of these things are starting to add more color into the arrangement and giving us more interesting stuff for our ears to lock onto let's go back let's strip it back and let's look at the middle middle part of the strings and what they sound like when we use those in octaves so I'm talking about violin two's violas cellos let's put them with the violin twos and violas at pitch and then the cellos an octave below and we'll see what that sounds like so I'll come we'll put a new melody in here so let's see what that sounds like with the violas playing an octave up [Music] okay so that's a nice color it's not super strong and I think that what's going to happen when we add violin twos to it is that we will get a much stronger sound so let's see what happens so you can hear what the violent oohs are bringing to the party now and the reason for that is that you're getting because the violins are effectively playing lower in their range you're getting a much stronger temporal character from them and we could put violin ones on to really kind of we really kind of nail that in so let's just hear what that sounds like now funnily enough that's not really adding much change to the sound it's not adding much change the character it's saying because the volunteers are already doing the thing and all we're doing is just adding a kind of density to that to that part but what would be interesting would be to then try adding the violin ones an octave up now they should then sound temporally a little bit more like the violas [Music] now we're getting a difference and the reason for that is that you've got the violins playing in octaves up there are doing their own kind of character sound but you've got the violas kind of temporally matching those violin ones and the cellos really are a little bit of an outlier because they they kind of sound strong at the bottom and at the top it's just that the character of the sound changes slightly they've become they can easily operate as part of the high strings and in fact we can demonstrate that by going back to the cellos now originally they started here on that G which is an octave and a half up from the bottom of the range but they can play super high let's take them up an octave so they're going even higher so they're playing at pitch with the violas and violent twos and let's see what that sounds like [Music] now what's really great about those having those cellos right up there is that we can write some closed voicings for that I'm going to show you how what that sounds like now so we'll just use those last two chords and I'm going to just simply arrange them so that they so that they're in a kind of sixth thing there so it's half the cellos right at the top of their range we're going that we're going to do this I'm gonna put the third at the bottom of the chord so for the C minor going to D major [Music] really simple let's build on that we'll take the violas we won't have them doubling we'll have them playing the next part up but I'm not going to space this super super close so it just sounds like a piano chord I'm gonna space it with a sixth which seems to be a really lovely kind of distance that works really nicely in these high strings [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then taking violin twos so we've done we've actually got the third then we've got the roots notes I'm gonna go up and play the the other kind of missing core missing note from the chord which is the fifth okay now this is really sounding intense and fantastic just to show you I would actually just double the violin ones and twos playing the same thing in this particular case because I like three-part voicing up high and we've got the cellos in there otherwise if the cellos weren't doing this then I would use volume ones twos and violas to do the same kind of space now you know know kind of thirds in there so you've got the sixth at the bottom and then the fifth at the top so just to show you what it would sound like if we added the fourth of voice in kind of in between those if you recall the cellos here are playing the third of each chord so C minor to D major we've got the violas here playing C to D so that's the root of the chord we've got violent twos playing the G and a so I'm going to break with convention and stick the violin ones below the violent is just for the purposes of illustration here and we're going to get them to play those flats those thirds the e flats and then the F sharp in between violent twos and the violas [Music] so that's an interesting choice as well you can do that for parts cord up there what happens if we're doing this kind of closed harmony up the top here let's delete those those violin ones and we try and put a crunchy notes in the chord kind of right in the midst of it so I'm going to just put in the 9th for the first chord so we're gonna use a D over that C minor chord and then I'm gonna put in the 7th for the D major chord so they just dropped to the C so now we're getting something really interesting and getting these kind of extended chords playing in a group up high gives us a really intense sound and it's kind of it kind of assaults your ears and and it's because of the the beating of all those harmonics up really really high just gives you just that if feeling of you know passion and kind of excitement it's it's a really intense sound now the final thing that I want to look at and I know we're not there's so much there's so much that we could cover in this but I think just to kind of keep it bite-sized the final thing that I want to look at is what happens when you have everybody playing the same thing in octaves and it is a really great sound it's a sound that Christian used on his - tanker moon I think is the correct pronunciation for ITV where the the kind of absolute climax of you know an incredibly exciting cue he's got the whole orchestra playing in octaves I think he actually did something a little bit crazy with auto-tune as well I remember if that's exactly on the same thing but it's a great sound so let's try it out and we'll have cellos first first up [Music] so we're going to use the bases down the octave as as traditional as we discussed at the beginning then we'll pop the violas again we're kind of looking at these at the lower end of the orchestra we're looking at using the same kind of temporal thing we've got the cellos and basses both playing starting in their lower octave so we'll do the same for the violas [Music] the violas obviously starts in a sea and the the violins start on the G so the lowest octave available to violence is to song the D above middle C so we'll do that [Music] and then finally we'll put the violin ones just an octave up from there [Applause] just gonna twig so these all end in the same place and then just hide that for a second don't to make it too exact the basses come off last and let's have a quick listen back to that [Music] so again a lovely super powerful sound having everybody playing the same thing so I've only really touched on just the very beginning of investigating different voicings but hopefully there's been something interesting and something that might be useful to you writing your own string arrangements and please leave comments below and if you're interested in specific pieces of music we can look at how the strings have been arranged and why we think there might have been arranged for that and I'm really keen to kind of start a dialogue about orchestration because there are so many people who are incredibly talented musicians that I've met in my years of being you know lucky enough to be a professional composer and professional musician and loads of incredibly talented musicians who because they weren't brought up you know trained in the Conservatoire trained at university as I wasn't you know I don't have formal orchestration training I'm a autodidact I think is the word just self-taught they view it as a kind of barrier and kind of think that they are going to make a fool of themselves if they try and go in and experiment with things and try and use orchestral instruments in their work and nothing is further from the truth especially now you know the current players that we we've been working with you know session players in London the BBC Symphony Orchestra the incredible orchestras around the country and and smaller chamber groups around the country are all incredibly excited about working in new music it's one of the things the BBC Symphony Orchestra say we do new music we love new music they're commissioned new music and they are very excited to play new music so we want to get as many people writing for Orchestra as possible it's something that you can learn you don't need to go to college to learn this stuff it's obviously fantastic if you are lucky enough you know to have had three years studying all of this stuff in depth with incredibly talented teachers but we're not all lucky enough to be in that position and so you know let's learn this stuff there's plenty of resources out there there are many study scores of all kinds of incredible pieces of music you know there are amazing treatises on orchestration written over there you know the last kind of hundred hundred and fifty years lots of stuff I mean a link a few interesting books below things that I've found very interesting so dive in ask questions below I'm gonna try and you know I don't profess to be a amazing Orchestrator but what I can do is I can take the stuff that I've been able to learn over the last twenty-five years and and try and pass it on it at least that that's that is going to be helpful hopefully to some people so thank you very much for watching I hope this was of interest and I look forward to seeing you on the next one bye

Channel: Paul Thomson

Views: 117,482

Rating: 4.9410028 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire, orchestra, composing, music, how to compose, orchestration, midi, daw, voicing, string voicing, #oneorchestra

Id: LpTlegLGW9g

Length: 38min 13sec (2293 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2019