Spider!

A Composition for String Quartet

by Jon Fairhurst

The Composition

Spider! was inspired by the music of Dmitri Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet. I originally "heard" my opening melody as the combination of the 1st and 2nd violin parts, and later separated it into the two voices. And what should emerge? Why, the main theme from Shostakovich's 8th Quartet, of course! The 2nd violin plays it twice, a full step down. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I'm glad to give the nod to the great 20th century composer. I also reference Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score.

The Tools

I used Sibelius to write the piece, and GigaStudio 96 to play it. Only one sample library is used: Kirk Hunter's Solo Strings. They're perfect for this style. After the composition was completed, I moved the MIDI file over to Cakewalk, polished some of the phrases and added expression control (MIDI CC-11) to control the intra-note dynamics. After rendering the tracks I moved it into Sonic Foundry's Vegas for mixing.

My final mix applies only the Acoustic Mirror plugin to the individual tracks. This allows me to put the strings into the same virtual space, to pan them and add resonance. I mixed to an aux bus and added a touch of reverb to help blend things, and applied an overall EQ to add air. After mixing I went to Sound Forge to normallize, compress and convert to 16-bits and MP3.

The Results

The Score

I made great efforts for this piece to be playable by humans. In fact, during the first version I had a section with the two violins playing the same 8th note pizzicato line - only the 2nd violin was offset by a 16th note. It made for an interesting echo effect, but was pretty stiff and virtually unplayable. This version has a new line that solves it.

To see the score in PDF form, click on the following links. I have the overall score, as well as the separated parts.

Enjoy!

-Jon Fairhurst