Archives // Second City Strings

Acoustic guitar and violin covers of punk-rock, pop-punk and post-hardcore songs by Birmingham based Second City Strings.

The Kids Aren’t Alright | Violin & Guitar

Wednesday 27th February 2019

Another cover from the recording session we did during half term last week. I can’t believe this song is twenty years old already, I remember when it was released!

Brother’s Blood | Violin & Guitar Cover

Thursday 21st February 2019

Ed and I spent an hour or so this afternoon recording the violin and guitar covers we’ve been working on lately. We started learning ‘Brother’s Blood’ back in January after seeing Kevin Devine play the Camden Assembly. It’s a song that Kevin usually ends his set with and it doesn’t matter how many times I hear it, it still gives me the shivers.

Although nothing compares to Kevin stood on stage, back from his microphone, belting out the finale to this song, it was fun to transpose it and play the melody on violin up on the E… I’d love to play it in the correct tenor range but I’m a violinist and lack a C string (somewhat annoying given my love of punk-rock and post-hardcore and preference for the tenor vocal range. Maybe one day I’ll get myself a viola too). We’ve also been working on a super fast, palm mute version but didn’t manage to get a good recording for that just yet.

We’re getting much better at being in front of the camera. When we first tried filming ourselves playing last autumn we found that we would take turns to mess up every single take, just because we were nervous. I’ve been setting the camera up to record more of our practice sessions recently though, which means that it’s not as intimidating when we want to record a clean take.