String Samples

A string section is one instrument divided between thirty people. Violins take the top, violas fill the middle, and cellos work the register a male voice occupies, all of it moving as a single line with the parts stacked underneath each other.

Arrangers built entire careers on that stack. David Van De Pitte scored What's Going On so the strings answer Marvin between his lines. Charles Stepney wrote parts with the timing of a rhythm section. Philadelphia and Salsoul dates put a full orchestra over a disco kick and let it run for eight minutes, which is roughly the point string music stopped belonging to concert halls and started showing up on dancefloors.

Melody is only part of what those players hand you. Pizzicato plucks land like percussion, tremolo gives you movement with no notes changing, and harmonics produce string sounds with no tune attached at all. Sampling breaks the rest into usable pieces, so four bars of a swell becomes something a whole beat can lean on, and string loops taken from real dates keep the slight disagreement between twenty players that a single tracked line never gives you.

Soul dates with the section booked in after the rhythm tracks, Bollywood orchestras, library music written to be forgotten, film scores nobody has reissued. Plenty of it arrives with stems, so the strings land without the band around them. Our Sounds section’s royalty-free sample packs need no clearance at all. Our Songs section’s original recordings can be covered by your plan, and both leave you free to release whatever you build out of them.