Paul and I have known each other for quite some time now. Our friendship has helped us work closely together in writing Stringtastic. We find that we agree most of the time, but sometimes we’ve had to have long conversations to find the best way to move forward.
There is hardly a single piece in Stringtastic which has not had some input from both of us. We have influenced each other’s work in many ways: sometimes it has been a question of reworking the melody to better fit the pedagogy, other times, reworking the harmony. Someone might come up with the germ of an idea, which inspires the other to write a tune. One of us can become inspired by the other’s composition and a contrasting section might occur to us. It’s then a question of watching the other’s face while playing it to him to see whether he likes it!
On occasion, one of the pieces might simply be too long to fit in to the appropriate place in the book. Sunshiny Day was originally two lines longer, but it was just too long for a first finger B and open A piece. Paul suggested the need for a cut and I worked out where that cut should be. The result was a tighter composition that better fulfilled the brief.
I did a lot of the work on the piano parts, trying to make them both effective and easy to play, while Paul did the heavy lifting on the band backing tracks. The nice thing about working in collaboration is that we all have our own particular strengths. While we both have the ability to play the piano and do the technical work on the backing tracks, for consistency we divided these tasks. Having said that, Paul wrote some brilliant piano parts and I orchestrated several of the backing tracks.
We both feel that the pieces in this book are much better from our collaboration. We are looking forward to continuing to work together on the next book.
