10 Years of String and Tins… in 10 Projects
String and Tins has made a lot of noise in the last ten years. To mark its birthday, the team had a go at crunching down a decade of projects into a list of just ten. Which ones made the cut?
After a decade of recording, creating, curating and mixing sounds, we thought it was a good time to reflect on what we’ve been up to. Quite a bit, it turns out.
We’ve written an earworm for a delivery app and an album of art-inspired music for culture vultures. We’ve popped up in Super Bowl ad breaks and the permanent collection of the British Library. Our programme to boost gender diversity in the sound business is already in its fifth year. And we continue to expand into features: Kensuke’s Kingdom, complete with our sound design and mix, recently premiered at London’s IMAX.
Turning all this hustle into a favourites list has been a bit of a challenge. But we’ve given it our best shot. So, without further ado, this is the String and Tins Top 10…
10) The Day Of The Doctor – BBC/Red Bee Media
The Doctor Who theme isn’t just instantly recognisable. Ron Grainger and Delia Derbyshire’s ground breaking work has almost mythic status among electronic music geeks. So when director Claire Norowzian and Red Bee Media asked us to do a remix and produce the show’s 50th anniversary trailer, we had to pinch ourselves.
The show’s fanatical fans loved what they heard, even campaigning for our version to be released as a standalone track. As a launch project for String and Tins, it couldn’t have been a more exciting start.
9) The Little Mermaid – Audible
We love audiobooks. And we particularly enjoyed putting together this one with Audible. It’s a 45 minute deep-dive into the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, narrated by Leigh-Anne Pinnock from Little Mix.
To build a dreamlike underwater world we recruited some exceptional vocal talent, crunched bird song into aquatic sounds, and waggled drumsticks and chains in buckets of water. Then we mixed the whole thing in 3D Dolby Atmos, to give it that extra cinematic punch.
8) Channel 4 Idents – 4Creative
Broadcast channel idents have a long shelf life and a reach that few other formats can match: so much so that Channel 4’s CMO called their 2023 idents “the most viewed piece of public art in the UK”. No pressure when the brief came in from Mike Skrgatic and Lynsey Atken then :-)
The idents celebrate the diversity of life in the UK, from Friday night on the town to Zoroastrian New Year. Every sound designer at String and Tins got involved, providing a rich sonic tapestry to accompany the arresting visuals of 25 different films and the words of poet John Joseph Holt.
7) No Fixed Mix
Sound design is still a disproportionately male business – so for the last five years we’ve tried to help shift the balance.
Our No Fixed Mix programme aims to give women and people identifying as non-binary a stepping stone into the business, via a series of workshops and assignments. Thanks to sponsorship by industry leaders including Avid, Dolby, HHB, Nugen, Krotos and iZotope they also get some high-end tools to continue their audio journey.
Details of the programme can be found here.
6) Unspoken Words – Max Cooper
Collaboration and the flow of ideas were at the core of this intensive project for musician and visual artist Max Cooper. We worked closely with Max on the spatial mixes of 13 tracks and their accompanying videos.
As well as a mind-expanding trip into the worlds of maths and philosophy, this was a brilliant opportunity to have a proper noodle with the technology and explore its interactive potential. Listening to one of the pieces using Apple head-tracking headphones, for example, reveals a different listening experience depending on the tilt of your head.
5) Did Somebody Say Just Eat? – Just Eat
Snoop Dogg
Katy Perry
Christina x Latto
When we first heard Snoop Dogg’s recording of our Just Eat mnemonic, little did we know what we were about to unleash on the world. This mighty meme of a campaign is now a staple across a thousand playgrounds and workplaces across the UK. It even made a cameo appearance in the London Palladium panto.
But Snoop was just the opening act in a campaign that just keeps delivering. Katy Perry took the food puns and costume changes to another level and the current spot – starring Christina Aguilera and Latto – is as outrageously memorable as ever.
4) Silent London
Anyone living or working in London as the city headed into lockdown in March 2020 will remember the uncanny, uneasy quiet that took hold across the normally hectic streets.
Listening to what was happening all around him, our co-founder Will went on a pilgrimage to capture these moments in binaural stereo. The resulting project, Silent London, is a unique sonic record of this extraordinary time. These audio records have now been brought into the permanent collections of the British Library and The Museum of London.
3) Together Forever – Ancestry
Whatever may separate us, we all love a bit of Rick Astley. So when Ancestry and Droga5 wanted to celebrate our shared European heritage with a cover of ‘Together Forever’, our co-founder Mike went in search of the authentic voices of our continental cousins.
Armed with an array of mics and lyric sheets, Mike and team asked fisherman, shopkeepers and commuters to channel their inner Rick while they went about their business. We then topped it off with contributions from the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, making this a truly European love song.
2) The Stills Series
There’s so much musical talent inside the String and Tins HQ, so it was a particularly proud moment when our first homegrown EP was released in 2021.
‘The Stills Series’ is a series of sonic responses to works of art in the Tate Britain. Over the course of three volumes, our staff have found inspiration in subjects as varied as arctic landscapes, modernist abstraction and the death of the poet Thomas Chatterton. The full set has just been released as a limited edition vinyl album, with images of the artworks inside the gatefold sleeve.
1) Audi – Birth
We have been lucky to be involved in some of the most iconic Audi ads of the last decade, including the beautiful ‘Clowns’ and ‘R8 Rolling Road’ spots, but this powerful work (brought our way by Davud Karbassioun and Ian Heartfield) crossed the finish line to take the top spot in our list. This high-concept film of a sports car giving birth was a challenging one to get right tonally, but the mix of operatic singing and redlining V10 engine helped maintain the brand’s premium spirit. It also picked up a range of gongs for music and sound design.
For more details – and full credits – on each of these projects, visit here.
