String Line-Up Sizes

As soon as you're dealing with recording real instruments you will most likely run into the dilemma of needing to balance between budget and line-up.

A very often seen approach to save money is to reduce the string line-up as from a certain point onwards, adding more instruments to the string sections will only marginally influence the sound and substance.

Still, it is important to know what is to be expected with the line-up you're planning for and whether you need to adapt your writing in order to be most effective with them.

One essential thing to acknowledge beforehand is that a doubling in player numbers does not mean a doubling in volume. In fact, the factor is about four. So four violins are about twice as loud as one and 16 violins are about twice as loud as four. So the sheer volume is not a primary reason to increase player numbers but it is more the substance of sound that increases with more players and it will sound "bigger", not much louder.

There are several factors that influence how big or small  a string section sounds besides player numbers.

1. Room

In a larger space, even a smaller string line-up will sound quite impressive. The smaller the room the more defined and focused the sound will get which will increase the details in sound but decrease the size impression. A section of 8 first violins in a larger space will probably sound bigger than a section of 12 violins in a smaller studio.

2. Live or Record

If you're planning for a live performance in a concert hall, providing enough fundament with the strings for the rest of the orchestra is essential. Especially with larger concert halls, in order to create a balanced sound for every listener in the audience it is rather essential to have enough players on string sections. That's why it might not be uncommon to see very large string line-ups even with pieces like Beethoven Symphonies which at his time were usually performed with a much smaller string line-up. If your target is a recording, it might indeed be easier to reduce the size of the string section as you can "dial in" volume and substance of sound by pushing the close mics or using EQ's on them in the mix. Of course that doesn't mean to ignore balancing but there is some room to fake a bit of size in such recordings. And as you don't need to create enough substance with the orchestra to create enough substance with a listener that sits far away from the orchestra you might get away with a smaller line-up.

3. Microphoning

Depending on what the microphone situation is, it will have an influence on the size impression. A proper set up Decca Tree with Close mics and the additional AB, Rears etc. might give you quite a bit of possibility to create a quite big size impression. If however the micing situation is different, things might become trickier even with very large line-ups. A common thing that can be seen and heard regularly in open air orchestra recordings is that the string players will often have individual clip on microphones on every instrument. It takes a very skilled engineer to create a halfway decent section sound out of these many close mic signals. And yet, even large string line-ups sound rather small with this method.

4. Players

A common problem with semi good orchestras is that there often is a decrease of "playing enthusiasm" the higher the stand number of the section gets. So while the first two or three stands of the first violins play quite substantial and with a strong tone, the last few stands might play at least one dynamic degree softer and more "frightened" sometimes faking tricky passages or even not playing them. With great orchestras and session players you of course don't get this problem but if half of your sections are playing "scared" this will also diminish the size impression.

5. Writing

Of course, the way how you write for your strings has a very big influence on how big they will sound. A lot of divisi writing in high registers will even make a very large string section sound pretty small while cleverly using reinforcing harmonics and orctave doubling single lines with a small line-up might sound surprisingly substantial with even a quite small line-up. Of course, there is way more to how to orchestrate in a way that a small orchestra sounds big so I will write a dedicated tutorial on this in the future.

So after these genral remarks, the question of course is, how many players are actually necessary for which effect.

In general, the lower the instruments the fewer you need to match the substance of the higher instruments.

A common symphony sized line-up might be

12 First Violins

10 Second Violins

8 Violas

6 Celli

5-4 Contrabasses

or as a common line-up shorthand it would be written out 12/10/8/6/5

Taking this as a base line is a pretty good starting point in order to figure out what you might be needing.

As with strings usually two players share one music desk, it might be desirable to chose numbers that are dividable by two, however in smaller line-ups it is not uncommon to see odd numbered section sizes.

As a rule of thumb, the smallest line-up that still sounds like a symphonic line-up is around 7/6/5/4/3

However with such a line-up you might want to adjust the writing already avoiding divisi if possible and trying to accumulate as many players as possible on high violin lines.

Any numbers below that will start to sound more like a chamber ensemble. 

The smallest section should particularly with violins not be two but three players as slight intonation differences between two players will become very obvious while a third player will start to even these out. This is particularly true the higher you go. While two players in a viola or cello section are not ideal, too, they are more tolerable in these regards.

Interestingly, many learning composers are quite surprised how "impressive" a line-up of let's say 3/3/2/2/1 already sounds if written effectively and played by good players. You might not get the symphonic size to pull off something like E.T.'s Main Theme with such a line-up, but consider that many musical pit orchestras play with such line-ups without always sounding like a "slightly bigger string quartet".

There are of course also reasons to divert upwards from the 12/10/8/6/5 line-up.

In music where there is an increased brass section with 6 or 8 horns and a generally brass heavy writing approach, you might need to increase the line-up to something like 14/12/10/8/6 or even 16/14/12/10/8. In specific cases even line-ups bigger than that might be useful.

The before mentioned E.T. score is an example for such a thing. As the main theme for this movie is a string heavy piece with violins playing in their highest registers, in order to maintain substance in this very high register you need a lot of players. Williams had 20 first violins on this score to maintain the substance.

In the American studio system there often is a different approach to first and second violins which is often just one big violin section of at least 26 players (often 30), where the scores are written in a way that in standard configuration they have one divisi for that violin section (effectively splitting it into 1st and 2nd violins). However it is easier to change to a 3 note divisi in the violins in such a case as it is with two fixed violin sections as seen in traditional line-ups. With the big violin section all players see the divisi on their parts and can spontaneously split up into for instance 3 sections of 10 players each while if you had a fixed 1st and 2nd Violin section you would need to come up with an elaborate scheme of uneven divisis within the sections to create the same effect. (E.g. 16 firsts and 14 second violins means a two part divisi for 1st violins (5 desks note A, 3 desks note B) and another two part divisi for second violins (2 desks note B, 5 desks note C).

However, in Europe this approach is very uncommon except for London where you can see such line-ups. But it is way more common to see a fixed first and second violin section in recordings.

Of course, I can only give a rough overview about which thought processes should go into deciding how many string players to hire for which case and it needs a lot of experience to get a feeling for what will be needed for which case but you can use these factors as a starting point for consideration.