String articulations

This month’s Easy Guide has strings attached – and using articulations can make them sound more authentic than ever

If you’re new to string or brass arranging, the term ‘articulation’ may be unfamiliar. It describes the use of a different technique to play the instrument, achieving a particular sound or effect in the process.

With a violin, for example, there are many ways to play it – you can pick the strings with your fingers, play smoothly with the bow, bounce the back of the bow off the strings, and so on. Each of these techniques or articulations has a name, and can be indicated with symbols on a musical score to give the orchestra an idea of how to play the part.

When composing realistic orchestral sounds in software, most samplers or ROMplers allow you to switch between different playing styles on the fly via MIDI, to quickly change the way the instrument is virtually ‘played’.

If you’re thinking of using one of the many commercially-available orchestral string libraries to create convincing-sounding string arrangements, it helps enormously if you’re aware of what all the different articulations actually mean. Both brass and string instruments have their own articulation sets, but this time I’ll focus solely on string articulations.

So, using the new Studio Strings instrument in Logic Pro X 10.4 and the ace Spitfire Audio Albion ONE string library, let’s delve into the mysterious world of string articulations.