First Try At A String Quartet.

László

László

Too Many Notes
Joined
Apr 26, 2012
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Location
Michigan
I've been writing a lot of orchestral stuff. So when Spitfire Audio came out with Abbey Road Two, a string quartet/quintet library, I thought wow, the demos sound great, I'm gettin' it.

Uhm. Well...

It didn't take me long to realize that I know nothing of writing for string quartet. Speaking only for myself, the more spare the arrangement, the more difficult it is to write.

Umpteenth Edit: I completely reinstrumented and rewrote this darn thing.

https://soundcloud.com/lschefman
 
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Not bad. I'm hesitant to say this, but maybe thinking of it as a vocal quartet will help. I had to do this once in college. That is they way I approached it and it worked.

If you think of the four vocal parts in a quartet, then assign a part of the quartet of instruments to each. But if you've heard much quartet music (I grew up listening to male, mixed, and female quartets) then you also know what to do when a different instrument takes the lead. So if violin has lead in most of the song but in one part cello takes lead, you know where violin should go for that part. May be foolishness to you, but that was my background and I made it work when I had to compose for instrumental quartets.

This of course was before I was told "you can't take any of the more advanced music classes because you don't play a "band or classical" instrument." :)

But we won't get into all that. LOL
 
Really nice work Les. In places, there’s a Baroque-esque feel about the composition.

“Baroque-esque! Did you just make that word up?!”

“Yep”

“What does it even mean?”

“Well, like, in the Baroque style”

“What do you know about Baroque music”

“Well nothing really, other than it’s all crumhorns and recorders”

“There’s only strings in this piece. How do you explain that?!”

“Well I can’t really”
 
It needs a guitar.
There ya go.
I fixed it for you.

:p

50.jpg
 
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Alnus Rubra said:
Really nice work Les. In places, there’s a Baroque-esque feel about the composition.

“Baroque-esque! Did you just make that word up?!”

“Yep”

“What does it even mean?”

“Well, like, in the Baroque style”

“What do you know about Baroque music”

“Well nothing really, other than it’s all crumhorns and recorders”

“There’s only strings in this piece. How do you explain that?!”

“Well I can’t really”
Click to expand...

Everyone knows that Baroque music is the worst and constantly has to be modified to remove its Baroque-ness and make it acceptable, whereas other types of music do not have this issue.

Thus the old saying, "If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it".
 
alantig said:
Everyone knows that Baroque music is the worst and constantly has to be modified to remove its Baroque-ness and make it acceptable, whereas other types of music do not have this issue.

Thus the old saying, "If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it".
Click to expand...

I quite like a bit of Baroque n Roll.
 
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