Behind the sound · · Tomek Piskor-Ślesicki
Recording Blisko: strings under a microscope
For years, I tried to make string samples work for me. Pianos could make it to the final cut; my string parts always stayed placeholders, waiting for a live player to replace them.
It was as much about the sound as the writing. I'd program simple notes that looked uninspiring on the piano roll and sat lifeless under samples, but came alive the moment we played them in the room. There are a million ways to perform a single note, and I could never find a tool that did it the way I'd enjoy.
The libraries I tried all sat still. I kept wishing a held note would do something. So when Marta and I finally recorded our own, the idea wasn't to fix the industry. It was much smaller: to capture the way we already play strings on film scores, quietly and up close, as texture rather than melody. We recorded it in a week. The editing took me three months, but that's a later chapter.
A droning note, waiting to come to life
Marta Zalewska and I were introduced by a mutual friend, and our first job together was a short film score. We got on well from the first session, and she's played on nearly everything I've made since.
She's an in-demand virtuoso and composer, and I suspect my scores are some of the least inspiring, on paper, she's ever been handed. When I write for strings, I program drones and harmonic clusters, sketched with flageolets and other articulations on the fragile side. Strings take to that beautifully: parts with little harmonic movement that bloom in texture instead. The trouble is that the part I care about most, how dense, how restless the texture gets, never makes it onto paper, and until Blisko there was no library that let me sketch it either.
We needed a way to shape all that during the take, without stopping to talk. What we landed on must look ridiculous from the side: I conduct with one hand, shaping the density in the air, and Marta turns it into the bow, both of us following what we hear. I couldn't tell you which of us started it. It appeared, the way things do when you've recorded together long enough.
For years we kept circling back to a sound that's probably the opposite of what string players are taught at university: audible bow noise, uneven dynamics, the bow working right at the edge of making no sound at all.
Did the world need another string library?
There are hundreds of string libraries already, plenty of them excellent, and I had no appetite for redoing something someone else had done well. If we were going to add one, it had to hold something only the two of us did.
What we did was quiet, and close. Play that softly with the microphone right up against the instrument, and the texture comes forward on its own. Marta said it felt like playing under a microscope. At that distance nothing hides, not the instrument and not the player.
Górecki's Third Symphony was the closest match to how we wanted to record. The opening blows me away every time: so much power, all of it held at an intimate dynamic. We weren't copying his articulations, just borrowing the logic of a small sound that grows. John Luther Adams's Become Ocean was the other touchstone, for the way everything drifts and overlaps and never quite settles.
By the time the microphones went up, the decisions were made. We weren't there to discover the library on the day. We were there to capture it. We didn't record a single standard articulation.
A week in a quiet room
We recorded over a handful of long days in early 2020, around ten hours each. Sampling every articulation across the full range of three instruments takes time, and we played them all the way through.
Recording this quietly means you hear everything else too. The studio shared its building with other tenants, and one of them had a heavy door. Every time he left for coffee, or the toilet, or wherever he was going, we caught the thud of it closing somewhere inside a long, fragile take. It drove us both a little mad. When the sound you're chasing sits this close to silence, the whole world leans in.
Days that long wear you down. There were stretches where I was half asleep at the desk and Marta kept us moving, and others where I talked us through the wall. That back-and-forth is what the music needed: two people paying close attention to each other.
Miking for purpose
The fashion in sampling is to throw as many microphones at the source as possible and hand them all to the user. I went the other way: a few deliberate choices, a sound I love, and a commitment to it.
Can you find fifty worthwhile positions around a single violin? Past a point you're offering filler, and every extra microphone in the blend is another chance for phase to smear the sound. Fewer, better choices are faster to work with and cleaner to listen to.
Choices like that take nerve. There's no undo; you live with the sound you committed to. That's exactly why it has character.
So Blisko has two close signals and two for the room, grouped in pairs you blend between. Up close, hand-made Extinct Audio ribbons through 1970s Neumann preamps, with a valve 251-style mic set further back for a brighter, open option. For the room, a Soyuz pair in ORTF through Telefunken preamps. State-of-the-art 1970s kit with smooth modern microphones, so the strings sound neither vintage nor modern.
The decisions you can hear
A few choices made Blisko what it is, and most were about refusing to tidy it up.
Nothing was played to a click. Every note in every layer lands a fraction early or late, so a held chord arrives as a wave instead of a block. Even the patches that look like ordinary swells, the Arks and Rises, were performed with loose timing on purpose. None of it locks to the grid, by design. Play a block of notes where each player makes a similar movement at a different moment and you stop hearing chords and start hearing the irregular waves streaming out of your fingers.
The players sit in an unusual arrangement too. Instead of violins left, cellos right, each section was arranged in a semicircle at the centre, so you can change the number of players, from one to three, while the notes play. The sound doesn't only thicken, it widens. Each player has their own volume and pan.
We recorded wider ranges than you'd normally bother with: the viola up in violin territory, the violin reaching down low, each instrument pushed past its comfortable register. Strings sound wonderful out there, a colour you rarely hear, and that unfamiliarity is what I was after.
And we kept the noise. The breath, the bow, the room: we barely touched any of it. Those small sounds are the reason the thing feels alive.
What Blisko became
I didn't build Blisko to replace a live string section. I built it to do something neither live players nor ordinary libraries quite do: hand you texture you can shape as you play.
The comment I hear most is that it's one of the few libraries that doesn't get swapped out for real players on the final production. That means more to me than any feature could. I think it's the emotion that went into these samples, and how good they sound out of the box. It feels like collaborating with a brilliant musician.
Marta has the plugin, of course. She's a composer too, writing for theatre, and she uses these samples in her own productions. The instrument went back to the person who played it, and now it makes her music too. I love that.
The trial lets you play most of the patches, free. Start with a single chord and just hold it. Nothing in there lands quite together, and that's where it comes alive.
Plugins mentioned in this article:
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