This String Arrangement Rule Will Change Your Music Forever

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]If your string arrangements sound muddy, flat, or lifeless, you're probably making the same mistake that most producers make. You're starting in [music] the middle. See, most producers open a string patch, stack a bunch of chord tones in the center of the piano roll, and then wonder why it sounds fake. But real string arrangements usually aren't built from the middle out. They're actually built from the outside in. It's an old arranging principle I learned over 15 years ago, and to this day, it's still one of the most useful string writing techniques I use in every single production. And whenever I teach this to our producer students, the reaction is always the same.

[00:00:32]And I think the best place to start is actually the whiteboard and then we'll come back and demonstrate in the dah. So we're going to start here on the whiteboard. I'm going to explain the actual concepts. Then we're going to take those concepts and then we're going to take them into the studio where I'm going to actually show them to you in action because you need to understand this stuff first. All right. So what I'm going to teach you is to use a very specific method in a very specific order of how you're actually going to be building out your string arrangements.

[00:00:52]This is called the bottom top middle method.

[00:00:58]So, the bottom, top, middle method. This is referring to the order that we're actually going to be building our string arrangements. Because most producers, most composers when they're trying to build their string arrangements, they just kind of start in the middle. They start to just build things out. They start with the chords. They're not actually thinking through an actual system of how they're going to do this in what particular order. This is going to massively simplify the process, but it's also going to make it sound a heck of a lot better. So, what we're going to do is we're going to start with the outer [music] parts. So, we're going to start with the outer parts and then we're going to fill in the say it with me, the inner parts. [music] Crazy. So, we're going to start with the out and then work our way in. What does that actually mean, Nathan? Well, I'm going to show you. We got to do this.

[00:01:40]So, in order for this to make sense, we need to actually know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about bottom, top, middle, like outside, inside. What the heck does all this mean? In order for any of this to make sense, you need to know the anatomy of a string orchestra. So, the anatomy of a string orchestra is going to be violin one at the top. Then you're going to have bass on the bottom. Okay, now hopefully this is starting to make sense. Hey, look.

[00:01:57]Bottom, top, and then the inside is your violin 2 and then your viola. Okay, so when I say that we're going to start with the bottom and then the top and in the middle, what we're doing is we're starting right here. This becomes our number one. Violin 2, this become or violin one becomes the second thing. And then this violin 2 and viola is the inner [music] parts. Why does this matter at all? How does this actually simplify things? And actually, it's it's pretty easy to articulate. And let me show you. Okay, so we have this violin one, violin two, viola, and then bass and cello. So, we're going to start here, right? So, we're going to start with the bass and cello. And then here is how this actually kind of works. If we have a chord like a C major chord, and then we go to like an A minor chord, and then we go to like an F major chord, which I'm going to be showing you here in just a little bit. Right here's all the bars of music that we have. The reason we start at the bottom is because the bottom is the most obvious thing that we're going to have going on. The bass or cello in this case, we're going to treat them the same. We're talking about what is called uh a more traditional fourpart harmony. We're going to have the bass doing the root all the way through. Pretty much that's the easiest thing the bass can do. Nice thing is the root is literally just whatever the chord is. If you have a C major chord, then this is going to be a C right here, an A minor right here, or just a not an A minor, an A, and then an F right here. So in a sense this becomes way simpler because we already know what the bass is going to do. The bass is going to do whatever the root is. Now if this was like a C over E, then yes, we would absolutely come in here and that would become an E in the bass. Now I don't want to over complicate this. Hang with me. Then what we're going to do is come to the top voice which is our violin one. From here this could be a melody or a chord tone. So, in some cases, if I have a very, very simple arrangement that I want to go with where I don't need the strings to be doing all this crazy stuff, I just want it to be helping fill up the arrangement. When I say arrangement, I'm talking about the big picture arrangement of the entire song. I might just be fine going with a chord tone. But there are certainly times in a string arrangement where I want to have the upper violin doing some sort of melody. And the problem is is if you try to go with your bass and then you try to fill out this stuff here and then figure out the melody, that's problematic because now you have to fit the melody to whatever you already did here. Or else it's going to start sounding funky. Whereas we already know we're going to do the bass here. If we do the melody next, then that becomes a for sure guaranteed thing that we're going to go with. And then all we have to do is fill in the middle with chord tones. Or we can do a counter melody, which [music] that gets into more of the advanced territory. So, let's say that we have a C major chord here. We've already we already know that the bass is going to be doing the root, which would be a C. And let's say we have a really cool melody going on. And the melody is hovering primarily on an E. Okay, that's the third of the chord. A C major chord is going to have a C, E, and G. So, if we have an E here, we have a C here, then we know, guess what? We're only missing one note, right? Crazy. It's this guy right here. It's a G. And guess what? We have two different voices right here. So, we just need to figure out, do we want the G to be in the viola or in the violin? And that's [music] where it's going to start making a little bit more sense when I actually open up the DAW and show you how this is going to work. But, let's just go ahead and say we go with the G right here. That means we have only one more note to use right here with the violin 2. We got to figure out what the heck is the violin 2 going to do right here. We already have a C, we already have an E, and we already have a G. Good four-part writing is going to say that the one thing you don't want to do is double the third.

[00:05:22]And the third in this case is the E because if you have C E G, this is the 1 35. That's the third. You don't want to double the third. So you can double the root or the fifth. Which means whichever one we didn't use, we already know.

[00:05:34]Guess what? We can either just do a C or we can do a G. And in this case, probably make sense to do a C.

[00:05:41]Otherwise, we've got two G's back to back. Let's actually go in the DAW because it'll make a heck of a lot more sense when we do that. Let's do it. All right, so we're in the DAW, and now we're going to get into the practical of how to do this. We have a chord progression here. It's incredibly simple. And what I want to show you is what this would sound like if we're just doing what most people do, which is just block out the chords and just call it a day.

[00:06:09]All right. So, that sounds about like what the average amateur string arrangement sounds like. But if we're using the technique that I've already talked about, this is going to make so much more sense. Now, one thing I need to make sure that we're all on the same page about is that we're going to be talking about chords. We're going to be talking about notes and chord tones and things like that. And I understand that some people get really confused when we start talking about music theory, and it can be scary and intimidating. And I want to try to make this as simple as humanly possible. So, what I'm going to do is over here, I'm going to put the chords that we're using, and then I'm also going to actually put all of the notes that exist in those chords. That way, we can have this done as simply as possible. So we have four chords that we're using. C, A minor, F, G, and C.

[00:06:50]Okay. So the very first thing you need to understand is that almost all chords in modern music are built up of what's called triads. Triads are just three notes. So if you think about every single chord, we could have like a C major chord. There's actually only three notes. But a keyboard has well has more than one octave. Let me describe what I mean or to demonstrate what I mean. If we look at a piano, you can see [music] right, we have so many notes. So if we have something like a C major chord, which would be this, it's [music] very easy to say, yes, those are the three notes C, E, and G that make up that chord. But that same pattern can just be repeated up, up, or down.

[00:07:37]Hopefully that makes sense. For those of you who already understand this, I'm so sorry if this seems so incredibly basic.

[00:07:41]I realize this might actually be kind of confusing for those of you who don't know music theory and understand how chords work. So, a few years back, I actually made an entire ebook that's over 80 pages that goes through literally everything here with diagrams, pictures. You can see it right here.

[00:07:54]Anyway, I'm going to give it to you completely for free if you click the link below. I'm not even going to ask for your email address or anything. You can just download it. Okay, you're welcome. Back to the video. So, while there are only three notes in a triad, we can take the octaves [music] And those three notes can become way more than three notes. It's just they're across different octaves. Okay, this is going to make sense here in just a moment. So, a C major chord is going to have a C, an E, and a G. An A minor chord is going to have an A, a C, and an E. An F major chord is going to have an F, an A, and a C. And a G major chord is going to have a G, a D, and a B. Okay.

[00:08:34]Now, I'll be showing you the MIDI role of this. Don't worry. Don't worry. I'm going to show you all that. But these are the notes that these chords actually use, and this is going to help us make some decisions. Okay? So, when I talk about starting with the root, starting at the bottom, we're going to start with the bass. And for the purposes of this video, we're going to be starting with the bass and doing cello and bass together as one voice. They're just going to be in octaves. When you get into more advanced string writing, you can absolutely treat the cello as a fifth voice, actually. And then the bass takes care of that. And then now you just have more options in the middle.

[00:09:06]The more options you have, the more complicated it gets. So in this particular case, we have C, A, F, G, and C or A minor. So we already know, like I described at the whiteboard, we're going to use the root notes on the bass. And so the beautiful thing is I can just go ahead and record that in. And the one thing I'm going to do is use this guy right here. And that is going to allow me to get a little bit more dynamics.

[00:09:28]So if you have a mod wheel, make sure you use it. Okay, let's just go ahead and record these. C, A, F, G, and C.

[00:09:33]Really, really easy. [music] [music] Now, the cool part about this is it sounds really lame when you get started, but then as you build it, you get to start hearing it come together. Okay, so that's our base part. We're not going to do any editing here. I have a whole video on how to actually make your strings sound more professional. I'm not worried about that right now. All I'm trying to do is teach you how to arrange strings. Okay. So, we're gonna do the exact same thing in the cello, just up the octave.

[00:10:14]Definitely want to use the mod wheel.

[00:10:15]Gives that nice realism. Here we go.

[00:10:19][music] >> [music] >> Now, you're probably thinking, Nathan, this sounds so incredibly boring. Where are we even going? Don't worry, it's going to sound really cool here in a second. Okay, now what we do is we have the bottom. Now, where do we go next? We go to the top. So, from here, we need to figure out what kind of string arrangement are we trying to do. Are we trying to do a string arrangement that is supporting something or are we trying to do a string arrangement that has some sort of melodic idea? Okay. Now, I think that we should go ahead and do something melodic for now. That way, I can show you how to actually build a string arrangement around a melody, and then you can actually simplify it from there.

[00:11:02]So, the melody I'm going to use is something like this. [music] Okay, it's going to sound really beautiful this with the piano and chords. Here we go. Now, if you're wondering, Nathan, where'd that melody come from? I'm just I had already made the melody before this. You make your own melody. That's not the point. Okay, the point is we have a melody. Here we go.

[00:11:30][music] All righty. There's our melody. I'm not going to re-record or anything like that. We're just going to keep it how it is. Like I said, I have a whole video talking about how to make stuff like this sound a lot better. We're not worried about that right now. Okay. So, we have this melody. And this melody is primarily actually built around using chord tones. This is just outlining a C major chord. And what we're going to do is look at the contour of the particular melody that we've got in front of us.

[00:11:56]The contour is doing this. It's kind of going up and then comes back down and then goes up and then it comes back down. It falls. It kind of has this up down motion. Every melody is going to have some sort of motion that happens in time. It might go up. It might start down. It might kind of hang around and then go up and then down. You want to look at the overall contour of the melody because this is going to help us make some decisions around what kind of string arrangement we want. Now, if we wanted to go something really boring, we could literally just say, "Hey, let's just have the chords happening underneath of this." Eh, we we could do that. Like, I don't know why not, but sure. But we want to make something a little bit more interesting, right? So, let's do this. Here is what this looks like so far with the cello or bass. The bass is actually be down here in the octave below. And we have our melody right here. And look at all this space we have in the middle. This is where the violin 2 and viola are going to exist.

[00:12:46]So, Nathan, do you start with viola or do you start with violin 2? How the heck do you know where to start? Usually, where I like to start is I like to start with violin 2. So, we've done the bottom, we've done the top, and then we just work down from there. And the reason we do that is because if I look at this note right here in the violin one, this is an E. Okay, now look at this. Remember, look at these. Look at these. Okay, if I hover over the note, it'll show you the pitch E3, right? If I come over hover over this note right here, this is a C2. Don't worry about the number. Just E and C. Okay. So, we have E and C. So, all we have to do from here is to say, "Hey, what notes are we missing?" Crazy. It's a G. We're missing a G. Okay. So, from there, what I want to do is try to figure out if I know that I have a C, E, and G. Do I want the G to be played by the violin 2 or do I want the G to be played by the viola?

[00:13:34]The way we can figure this out is actually pretty simple. The highest note here is an E. Okay. So then a G is all the way right here, which means we would actually be skipping a whole other chord tone to get there. We have E, C, and G. And in most cases, unless you want to go with a very open voicing, you usually don't want to skip those notes, unless you're really spreading things out. If this melody was an octave higher, we'd have a lot more room to wiggle with. But in this case, the the melody is not a very high melody. It's happening pretty low in the register of the violin. So, what we're going to do instead is just say the violin 2 is just going to start, hear me, start on the very next chord tone below where it is. So, if I know I'm on an E here, then I'm just going to go one note below, which would be a C. So, I know that C is going to be the starting point of my violin 2. And what I want to do is just mark this out for now, and then we'll perform it a little bit later. So, I've got our C here, and then now we know we're just missing the G.

[00:14:31]And then that G could be right here in the viola. Hey, look at this. All of a sudden, we have now we have a chord, a C major chord.

[00:14:40]But you'll notice here that there's this melodic contour that's happening. So, what do we do with that? How do we actually make this sound really interesting when we have melodic contour like this? Well, the good news is is this is a pretty easy melody where we're going from a E to a G up to a C and then A. This right here, all of this is a C major chord contained in this bar of music. And this is just outlining a C major chord in the melody. Now, what's cool about that is I could actually take my violin 2 and then say, "Hey, what if we just follow along, but then just one step below on the chord tones." Well, then we could do something like this.

[00:15:17]Hey, look at that. Now, we're just following it up. Just following it up and harmonizing the whole way. This is a really good way of doing it. If we wanted to, we could just say, "Hey, let's just hang out here the whole way and let the melody float on top." That's also a way of doing it. It's going to sound a little more boring, a little less interesting. Or what we could do, option three, is we could come up with a counter melody to go along with this.

[00:15:37]Now, we're not going to do counter melody for the purposes of this video.

[00:15:40]That's where we start getting into more advanced stuff. We're going to keep it really simple here, but that's obviously an option. And once you have the top and the bottom voices written, doing counter melody becomes 10 times easier. Okay.

[00:15:49]So, what I want to do here is actually follow the contour of this melody. But we're just going to stick with these chord tones. I'm only going to use quarter tones. That's it. We're going to restrict ourselves here. We can use non-cor tones in real life. In this video, we're just using chord tones. So, in this case, I know that the violin 2 is going to start on a C right there. Get the keyboard again.

[00:16:12]So, if the melody is doing this, the violin 2 could do the exact same melody or contour. We're just going to start one step below using chord tones.

[00:16:24][music] Something like that.

[00:16:35][music] [music] Now, obviously, I'm kind of doing the mental math in my mind while I'm doing this. I'm not expecting you to be able to do that right now. So, if we were to look at the notes that we've got going, I just want to show you how this actually works on a practical level. You can obviously draw all of this in. If you don't actually play the keyboard, that's totally acceptable. But let's do this. Okay. So, we can see this is going to be a little bit of a problem because the E right here that I do on the violin 2 is actually rubbing against. You can see there's an E right here where the violin one comes down.

[00:17:13]So the violin one actually skips down here in the middle of this bar of music where the violin 2 is still hovering around there like this. Well, that's kind of a problem because now all of a sudden they're literally playing the same note. Not very good writing right there. Don't do that. So instead, what we're going to do is have it stop right there. And then we need to figure out what note to actually put right here.

[00:17:32]And what I would probably do is just take whatever the note is here. So we're on an A. Are we on an A minor chord?

[00:17:36]Yeah. So we're on an A minor chord right here. And we have an E. And so I just go down one chord tone, which would be C right here. I'm just going to drag this up. So like it goes like that.

[00:17:48][music] Might actually go a little sooner that way it doesn't feel weird.

[00:17:53]Here we go.

[00:17:58][music] Cool. Now we kind of have this sustain happening this whole way through here.

[00:18:07]That's a little bit boring. And this is the nice part about it. You can actually play something in and then look at it and say, "Hey, there's motion happening here." And this is kind of just staying on the same note, which is kind of boring. So, what if we did something more interesting? Well, let's shorten this here.

[00:18:31]>> [music] >> Let's go right here.

[00:18:43]Let's try this.

[00:18:47][music] Becomes a little bit more interesting.

[00:18:53]All of a sudden, now we got this [music] >> [music] >> I said I was going to stick with chord tones. I lied. There's a suspension in there. I'm so sorry. I had couldn't help myself. All right. Now, we've got all of this going on so far. Let's take a look at everything we have so far. And look at this. We have a nice little gap in here where our viola can exist. And so, this is why it's so helpful to start at the bottom, then do the top. And we just literally fill in the inner voices based on what we've already got. And then it becomes a game of just what have I already used? And then what can I still use? Okay, so at this point, let's take a look at it. We've got a C in the bass.

[00:19:35]We've got a C in the violin 2. We've got an E in the violin one. Huh, interesting. What are we missing? What are we missing? Look at the chords right there. We're missing a G. And so then we can use that to say, hey, I already know we don't have a G playing yet. And so then it becomes such an easy decision to know the viola. We just need to start on the G to fill that in. And then from there we can decide how do we want it this [music] something like that. Okay. This is where it kind of becomes a little bit like a puzzle. It's a very fun puzzle though because we make stuff that sounds cool.

[00:20:09]All right. So I know we're going to start on the G. [music] >> [music] >> Now, here's the problem. Okay, I can tell you a little bit of a problem. I can tell you that's already going to happen is this second bar here. We have this whole thing that happens.

[00:20:35]So, that we're going to have to kind of keep in consideration here. This note coming down here, the viola is going to have to make sure that it comes down as well, or else they're going to start playing the same notes as well, and we're going to run the exact same problem we ran into before. All right, so let's just go and at least give it a shot. See what I can come up with. And again, I'm primarily trying to just use chord tones. Chord tones. Only using these notes. Here we go.

[00:20:58][music] [music] I can already tell you a problem here that we've got, but that's okay. We'll open it up and take a gander at what we have. Okay. Hey, look. This is really cool. All of a sudden, we have these chords that are moving in motion together. Let's just solo this out and take a listen to how this actually sounds with all these parts.

[00:21:26][music] Aha. So, there's a little bit of a problem here. Maybe your ears noticed it. And if not, that's okay. I know.

[00:21:38]Which is Hey, look.

[00:21:42]Uhoh. These notes are the same and those are notes are the same, but they're just an octave apart. There's nothing necessarily wrong with having the same note an octave apart unless it's just doubling the melody.

[00:21:54]In this particular case, we don't want to do that. So, we need to figure out what are we going to do from here.

[00:22:01][music] You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take this and go down to a B because this is a G major chord that we're we're in right now. This whole thing is a G major chord. So, if this is a G major chord, we've got a D, we've got a G.

[00:22:14]Hey, look. Go up to the G major chord. G and D. What are we missing? We're missing a B. And so, that actually becomes a really easy decision. We need to go to B.

[00:22:23]And that becomes a C in this. So, we have a C, a G, and a C. And then, guess what? The problem here is that the bass is also gonna have a C. So, what are we missing here? Look at that. It just becomes a game of saying, what are we missing? So, we know we're missing the E. Okay, we're missing an E. The nice thing is we can just bump that up like that. And then now all a sudden we have an actual E major, a C major chord.

[00:22:48][music] Heyo. And now just by making those little tweaks, let's take a listen to how the string arrangement sounds.

[00:22:59][music] [music] Now, I can understand that many of you might be thinking, "Nathan, that seems really complicated." I'm telling you, this is the easiest way of making great sounding string arrangements that sound so much better than what we started with. I mean, seriously, just go back to the beginning of the video and listen what we started with. It was not very good. This sounds so much better, yet it's still actually pretty simple. Now, this is going to take time for you to put into practice. I'm not expecting, nor should you expect that you can just be like, "Boom, tomorrow I'm going to start doing this and make incredible string arrangements." What you need to do is practice. Start small and then start working on adding counterpoint, adding some motion, adding some movement. But if you start with the bass, then you do the top and you fill in the iners, I'm promising you it'll make your string arrangements so much better. If you want to see how I actually go ahead and produce strings to sound significantly more realistic than I actually did here, you can check out this video next. See there.