Hey, Adam. What's up? Do you have cats?

I have a cat.

Does it like to play with strings?

It loves to play with strings, as do I.

I'm Adam Anus, and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Oh, I'm in a good mood today. Yeah, you are. I'm exhausted, but I'm not in good mood. All of a sudden, you perked up when the red light of the microphone came on. It's because I'm a pro. That's right. And you're cradling your, your coffee mug there, your Hans Solo. Hans or Hans Solo? I never knew. Hans Solo? Is it Hans Solo? Buddy, we are going to get more emails from that one comment than anything else we've ever done. More than the Corey Henry episode. We've done some crappy stuff. Okay, cool. Yeah. Well, so we today are going to talk about string writing. That's why we had a little back and forth about strings because we were involved in a really fun project a couple days ago.

That was great.

Yeah, and I thought it'd be fun to just sort of do a Q&A if you're up for it.

Sure.

And, you know, this is obviously daily jazz advice, but I think, you know, for piano players, jazz players, really any musicians, it's nothing that you have to get into, but a lot of us do get into writing for strings, writing arrangements for larger orchestras. I think today we're going to really just concentrate on the strings. But maybe out there and you'll hear it land you've been thinking about it you've done a little bit you don't know where to start or whatever so I thought it would be fun to kind of demystify it first of all and talk about some techniques and some ways to do it because we did it wasn't necessarily a jazz session although there was a little jazziness here and there was there was a lot of jazziness oh there was a lot that's true i think for a pop session it was it was leaning heavily on the jazz i mean you were playing on

it john coward was playing on it i mean the there were cats playing on it yeah right right and i mean

it was the fun thing about this session was uh we already had the rhythm section and the vocals

brian owens wonderful young vocals from st louis laid out and even a certain amount of kind of mixing, rough mixing, percussion added, great rhythm section and everything. Yeah, that's a luxury when you're writing strings to have it almost finished. Right. And so you know where everything is going to be, especially when there was, you know, from what I understand from when you recorded the session down in Memphis with the rhythm section, it was a very loose session where, you know, you guys were kind of jamming and these songs came out of the jams. Yep. And so there's so much improvisation going on in the comping and in little solo things that are just beautiful that it's nice when you're writing the strings that you can hear all that and write around that or with that, you know, and that was something that we got to do.

Well, and I was thinking about that might even be, you know, kind of a technique that folks could use to start to learn how to do this.

You could take something, you know, really, and it could be any style that was with vocals without instrumental, jazz, whatever, and just write some things and layer it on top of. I mean, it's really easy to do. Even like in garage band or something, you could write some string parts and then see how they fit over that. And it would sort of be similar to what we did on these arrangements anyway. That's right. You could start small with just one violin part and try to write one line that would work. You know, that would be somewhere to start at the very, very basic level. Yeah. And what you really want to be able to get to is the string quartet. You know, the string quartet is, I was just talking about this with our friend Chris Stark, who's a great composer,

classical, like new music composer.

Yeah.

And he.

Award winning.

Award winning, very, very much so.

And he talks about the string quartet in such fond terms because it just saves you.

Like you could do anything with it.

Those instruments are so expressive and everything sounds good almost.

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