The Writing Process

Earlier this year, I embarked on the journey of writing a string quartet part for Ryan Tree's song, "What I'm Living For." I was first introduced to this song when preparing for a gig with Ryan at Crabby Don's a few months earlier.

Like most songwriters, Ryan always has interesting songs floating around in his back pocket. He pulls these songs out and lays them in front of his musical collaborators when preparing for the right show or writing the right album. When he first laid this song in front of me, I felt an immediate emotional connection to it as a cellist. It's the kind of song that the cello just yearns to play and I immediately wanted to fill it with long, lush notes.

Interestingly, I also felt a connection to this song from my experiences as a violinist. I learned to play the violin when I taught orchestra. It really added more depth to my understanding of how playing a particular instrument can shape the kind of music that a person will gravitate towards playing. When hearing this song, I wanted to play beautiful high notes that hung and the air and danced like the sun in the trees on a cold winter afternoon.

When thinking of a string part to write for what I'm living for, a simple cello part never seemed like enough. This song deserved a lush chamber piece that could speak to all of its emotions. In chamber music, each part is meant to be important and rich. It is like a 3, 4, 5, or 6-part conversation or debate where each voice must be heard and has something important to bring to the table.

Since I play a six-string cello, it was quite easy to write and play violin, viola, and cello parts on my instrument. This made composing a fun process where I could easily hear exactly how each part would already sound.

The most challenging part of the song-writing process was actually recording. I really wanted to try and make each part sound like it had been recorded on the specific instrument it was written for and not just played on a higher or lower range on my cello.

I decided the best method to achieve this was to use my violin bow in the recording of the violin parts and to use a lighter touch with my cello bow when recording viola parts.

During this process, I became intimately acquainted with the reasons that the violin bow and cello bow are built the way they are. While using a violin bow certainly helped my violin parts sound more like they were played on a violin, I ran into quite a bit of difficulty making the bow behave on a cello string. I had to adjust the way I bowed to create a nice tone and ran into constant issues with squeaking and scratching when playing the high parts. It was definitely a lesson in physics that gave me a greater appreciation for modern bow and string designs.

Music Video

Several months later, I was invited to be a part of the music video shoot. We had a fun time getting the band shots!

Ryan launched the video earlier this month to coincide with the release of his debute album, Illusions. For every music video view, 5¢ will be donated to the HALO Animal Rescue. Watch and enjoy!

This weekend we released a song called Transcendence. This song is a particular favorite of mine as a cellist. Because of the quiet nature of the first half of the song, I was able to pull in a lot of fun techniques, such as ponticello (playing close to the bridge) and some orchestral style atmospheric parts. These techniques, which are staples of classical playing, are normally difficult to impossible to use in rock songs because they get lost in the mix. They rely on small details to give their full effect, which generally isn't the focus of rock music. I took my opportunity in this particular song to explore how these techniques could add to the genre of music we are creating in Don't Panic.