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Recording Strings on Hip Hop/Pop collaboration
The Pete Miser-produced track, “All I See”, off of Dido‘s latest release Girl Who Got Away features a hip hop string arrangement and performance by Christian Howes. The album was released on March 4th, and the track “All I See” is available only in the deluxe edition of the album available here.
Producer Pete Miser on recording strings with Christian Howes:
“The string parts that Christian performed for “All I See” were recorded within about twenty minutes of my meeting him. A mutual friend put us in touch. He came to visit me in the studio and, in the course of our conversation, asked if I had any tracks laying around that I was working on. I pulled up “All I See” which, at the time, was going to be a completely different song for me. He layered about 8 tracks of parts and harmonies and then we moved onto another track. Super simple. Super fast. We spent maybe 30 minutes on it. More than a year later I sent that track as well as a few others to Dido. She wrote “All I See” over it and asked me to write some verses to compliment her title/concept. It was about as easy, fun (and fortuitous) as a session gets!”
Says Christian, “Pete Miser is a rare musician with a combination of skills enabling him to go in between the film/tv production world while at the same time continuously turning out highly personal and artistic music with street cred in the hip hop world. My team is used to creating string arrangements on a lot of great music, but it is always nice when we end up on a track for an artist with recognition like Dido, because people like my mom are impressed”
“Before file sharing, this was how I used to do all my string recording work; overdubbing my violin, viola, and octave-violin. Nowadays, my team of players shares files virtually and we can make the string section arrangements sound bigger, fuller, and more human.”
