Creating Movement in Strings with Active-Bow Sustains

By Jasper Blunk (Performance Samples)

It’s been a long-term goal of mine to capture more movement in sampling, and particular in string sampling. I’m drawn to the sound of perceived adjustments in playing, bloom in the vibrato expression, and so forth. I’ve found that a good portion of this comes from bow movement, specifically fast bow movement.

When I started exploring this many years back, I experimented with just asking the musicians to bow more frequently. It wasn’t what I was looking for though. Next I tried having them bow at a moderate-tempo to the beat, but offsetting their bowings in divisi, so that there were always players sustaining (smoothing things over) while the other players were changing their bow direction.

However, the best results came from aligning the players bowing, and then relying on the post-production process to make it work. In essence, this is the active-bow sustain approach. The players bow back and forth (to score) at a moderate speed, keeping the volume consistent and the bowings connected. Then in edits, I separate each bowing, truncate the beginnings and ends (to get rid of the rhythmic bow-change sound), and then graft/x-fade the bowings together.

The result is a continuous, cohesive “fast bowing” that breathes, creating a feeling of constant “re-phrasing,” musical restlessness, and emotive adjustment.

Here are a handful of examples on different sections and at different dynamics. For each pitch, you will first hear the original version, and then the grafted version. You can hear the significance that consistent volume, timbre, and bowing connection has on the grafts. Some examples need a lot of graft and balance work, whereas others (like the very first example) could arguably get away with not having any grafts at all (or minimal grafts).

If you’d like to hear active-bow sustains in a musical context, listen to any of the demos for the Con Moto series or Solos of the Sea – Violin A. Active-bow sustains are a mainstay of my string sampling approach.

I do this on solo strings as well, though it’s more of a challenge there because of phasing, so grafts have to often be a lot more fine-tuned. Even then, some phasing and quirkiness can be unavoidable, but it’s generally an acceptable compromise for me.

What dictates the ideal speed to record these at? I’ve experimented with how tempo can affect them, by choosing a pitch (or multiple pitches), starting at a slower BPM and bumping it up x BPM each time, ending up with a large collection of different speeds and then comparing how they sound post-graft. Generally there is a Goldilocks zone with active-bow sustains. Too slow and you can lose movement, too fast and grafts can become more challenging and sometimes unmusical. As a tangent, it’s very interesting to try this approach when testing performance techniques: having the musicians perform the material at an original tempo, and then bumping up the BPM in small amounts until it’s really fast, to see how things evolve.

You may notice on the ensemble pre-graft sustains, there’s a whole-tone phrase at the beginning. I’ve found that this (or a variation on it) helps string players with intonation using their muscle-memory of finger positioning. It also adds a touch of expression right after the pitch change, and for that reason I often like fading from legatos to this point, as long as they match timbrally.

Originally posted 10-Feb-20 / Edited 3-May-20