Originally Posted by: shapertakh

what confuses me is that many pop/rock songs do have string sections playing but not a single band memeber happens to be a violin or a cello player...take for instance INCOMPLETE by the BACKSTREET Boys....its got all kinds of orchestral sounds playing in the background but neither of the memebers of the band plays orchestral instruments.....

That's becasue the backstreet boys don't ( or didn't, do they still exist?) write any of their music. In fact it is surprising but a lot of bands write very little of their music really. Their producers write most of it and they have a team of people helping them. The band might write some rather simple and crappy song and the producer takes it rewrites it, has them re-record it a bunch of times mixes it all up adds instruments and effects with a computer and thats what you hear on their album.

Thats why a lot of rock bands sound completely different when they go on tour, why they turn their gain and distortion way up (it makes it harder to **** up and harder to hear when they do) and why people get pissed off because they thought they were gonna hear what they heard on the album when in fact that would be impossible (short of playing over a backing track, which they probably couldn't do anyway).

I'm not ragging on anyone, thats just the way it is. Most music that sounds good is because of a really talented producer and not because of a talented band. Thats what a producers job is though to take a band and get them to turn out music he can use to make a great album.

I'm not sure to the extent of this in general and I know there are lots of bands that are very (at least one or two of their members anyway) in post production. But I also know there are bands who can barely play their instruments much less mix an album. Most bands probably fall somewhere in between.

I mean I know from interviews and stuff that even really talented bands like The Mars Volta's producers play a important role in writing (well Cedric gets help with vocals, Omar pretty exclusively writes all the music) but they (Omar) still play a big role in post production.

On the other hand Porcupine Tree doesn't even have a "producer" I don't think, Steve Wilson does everything with some help obviously.

Any way, as far as strings go I don't know much about orchestral relative tunings and such, but if your just using vst instruments then it shouldn't matter that much. When I write strings I generally write just one instrument and then like Zak said just add thirds and such on other instruments or sections or whatever. Just stack them. It's simple but it is probably what you are thinking, rock songs don't get real complex with that stuff.

There are programs and plug-ins out there that can get some pretty kickass sounding symphonic stuff going but unless your really gonna get into it I wouldn't bother. Good luck.