How to Create Your Own String Arrangements

"Strings can give you a range of textures and colors, everything from harsh and nasty and raucous to a very beautiful washy kind of pad," says the British producer Rob Ellis. "You can fake strings with technology, of course, or you can do it for real. I prefer real strings wherever the inclination and the budget allows—there’s always a choice, but to me there’s nothing else that really does that job and provides those sounds and those colors."

For Rob, the potential for orchestral string instruments first arrived in the shape of a solo cello part he wrote for "Plants And Rags" on PJ Harvey’s first album, Dry, back in 1992, when he was the drummer in Polly’s band. Today, while he says he’s a musician first—and he still occasionally gets to play drums—his main day job is as a producer.

Rob’s collaborated regularly with PJ Harvey since that ’90s album, and he’s worked with Bat For Lashes, Anna Calvi, Marianne Faithfull, Charlotte Hatherley, Robyn Hitchcock, Placebo, Torres, and many others. His most recent solo album is The Nostalgia Machine (2022) for KPM.

Experience is a wonderful thing, but what if you’re making your first records and want to create some string arrangements? It’s all very well having the idea, but where to begin? "The first thing to do is to listen to pieces of music that have string arrangements, to get a feel for what’s possible," Rob reckons. He tends to produce artists with a penchant for what he calls melancholy, left-field, independent music, and the obvious string-part reference in that field is Nick Drake. "He’s a constant reference in my world anyway," Rob says, "let alone the string arrangement on ‘River Man.’ And Scott Walker, he would be another reference that often comes up."

The next move, he suggests, assuming you’re familiar with the basics of bass, middle, and treble, is to think about the ranges of the instruments involved. "You need to understand that each of the traditional orchestral string instruments—from smallest to largest, violin, viola, cello, and double bass—is designed to cope with a certain area of the pitch range," he explains. Imagine you’re playing a three-note chord on a keyboard. At it simplest, a string arrangement of that would have the big double bass playing the low note, the violin and viola playing the high note, and the cello playing the middle note. Add rhythm, expand a little, and there you are.

You can easily check the ranges of the string instruments with a quick Google, though Rob prefers an old book that’s been a faithful companion for years. When he began writing music, and more specifically writing for stringed instruments, Rob would visit his local library and borrow CDs and related scores of famous works by Ravel, Vaughan Williams, Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky. Ravel’s stuff, he says, is particularly worth a listen if you’re considering strings. "When you think about rich string sonority, Ravel is your man par excellence. No Hollywood orchestral score would sound quite the same without his influence."

Rob's "Walter Piston bible."

Home from the library, CDs and scores to hand, Rob would follow along—and learn a lot in the process. "I didn’t really read music, but I could count bars, so I could figure things out," he recalls. "Also, I had a very useful book, Orchestration by Walter Piston, which included details of every instrument in the orchestra and its range, quite simply done. And today I’ll still get out the Walter Piston bible," he adds with a laugh, "to check the details whenever I need to do a string arrangement. But obviously you don’t need that now with so much information online."

You can throw strings into a song wherever you fancy and in whatever form you have available or have the means to make happen. "You can MIDI up a plugin and play it into a recording to emulate string sounds," Rob says, "and in those circumstances you don’t need to know anything about how strings are written or played, necessarily."

If you manage to get in some string players to actually record real instruments for you, they are generally pretty flexible. "They can take your MIDI printout and correct any mistakes—they might say well, actually, what about if it went like this? Back in George Martin’s day, when he wrote the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ arrangement, for example, that was played by professional classical string players, and you really had to know what you were writing for them. These days, though, it’s so much easier. The thing is not to be scared. Just dive in!"

That’s exactly what Rob did back when he wrote the part that ex-Van der Graaf Generator cellist Chas Dickie played on "Plants And Rags." And that led to him writing for a bigger string ensemble on the next PJ Harvey album, Rid Of Me. "I was learning as I went along, and it helped that I didn’t know what I was doing, because my attitude was that I’d try anything, that I had no idea how or if this was going to work."

He was listening to a lot of early 20th century string quartet music by the likes of Bartók and Schoenberg in what he admits became something of an obsession. The band had a rock song, "Man-Size," which was considered as a potential single. "And I thought hey, wouldn’t it be great—or at least great for me—if we did the rock version on the A side, and then an early-20th-century classical strings interpretation on the B side."

He reckons he "sort of imposed this" on poor Polly. "In the end, the single idea didn’t happen. But then Steve Albini, who was recording the album, heard it and said "Man-Size Sextet" should also be on the album—and it was. Looking back, I think what a ridiculous thing to do! But also, I have quite a fondness for the over-enthusiasm of my relative youth, and I’m actually quite proud of it."

Another instructive string arrangement of Rob’s was the one he did for "Falling Back" on Marianne Faithfull’s 2014 album Give My Love To London. The idea for the string part came from the song’s distinctive three-note guitar riff, and exemplifies how to make strings strengthen and bolster an existing feature. "It’s almost a fanfare," Rob recalls, "but brass would be too over the top, so we used strings. I was thinking Bruce Springsteen, in a way, that bravura kind of sound: strings played very enthusiastically mimicking the riff, which was my starting point. It’s an example of how you can be quite rollicking with strings, and that’s a rarity for me."

It’s also an example of how less can be made into more. "With budgets being the way they are," he says, "it’s often impossible to employ a big orchestra. But you can fake it by using reasonable string and orchestral samples as the basic thickener, and then adding just a solo violinist, say, or maybe two or three players, multitracking their texture and tone and presence a little on top—and Bob’s your Mantovani." He pauses, then adds with a laugh: "It’s cheating, basically, but it’s a common technique, and it’ll give the impression of what you’re after."

Brian Eno had a good idea about this. Rob was working on an Anna Calvi album, and Brian came to the studio one day to advise. "He sat on the sofa at the back, singing backing vocals occasionally and getting very enthusiastic, which was very sweet of him and very welcome."

Brian generously gave Rob a favored synthesizer patch from a Logic plugin. "If you added it to real strings, it gave the impression that the strings themselves were thicker. Not a fake string sound, more like a sine tone that with added strings would make the whole thing sound thicker, without being an obvious addition. I thought it was classic him, finding that particular sonic bit of alchemy. It was his method of thickening string sounds in the studio—so we’re all doing it, even Mr. Eno."

A step down from rollicking strings and more in Rob’s regular line of work is the arrangement he made for "Midday Moon" on Off To Dance, Fredrika Stahl’s 2014 album. Here, the context was sparse and delicate, little more than voice and acoustic guitar. In this sonic environment, it had to be real strings.

"You can’t really fake a string sextet," Rob says, "because every instrument is too revealed. You can do it, of course, but it would just sound like a MIDI instrument. When you’ve got a thick pad in a big arrangement, you can get away with fake sounds. Even people of discerning ear would struggle to hear a difference. But if you’ve got a song like Fredrika’s, stripped back and minimal, you will hear if something’s not real. And if you want something to sound real, the only thing you can do is use a real band."