Overdub your own vocals to someone else's song to make a duet. 

Hey thanks alot. I definitely love all of Grandaddy's work and wish they were still together.

I first saw "orchestron" mentioned in the liner notes to sparklehorse's "it's a wonderful life album" so i looked it up. The orchestron and optigan were early versions of synthesizers that were only in creation in the 70's i think. Organ-type instruments that functioned based off of optical discs full of samples of strings and horns and whatnot. the key to their interesting sound is that this early optical technology was slightly flawed giving some of the samples a more dirty texture. listen to the song "It's a wonderful life" by sparklehorse and notice how the string arrangements, though beautiful, have a sort of shakey and brittle quality to them.

 I've been wanting to use string arrangements for a long time, but short of kidnapping a bunch of college music students, synth is the only option. if I use synth i would prefer to find a way of replicating the 70's string synths: mellotron, optigan and orchestron. the others that I have heard just sound like cheap casio strings to me which are great, just not what i'm looking for.

http://tenderbreed.bandcamp.com/

This is what i've been working on this summer. Getting ready to reassemble the recording setup at my own house so the project is in a very transitional state at this point. I'm still looking for a good way to replicate the sounds of an optigan and an orchestron so if anyone has any pointers please let me know.

I don't know much about midi. We used a casio as a midi controller in fruity loops but it wouldn't work when we opened adobe audition fruity loops wouldn't play. Should we try a different program?

Real instruments that imitate strings that I have become enamored of: Mellotron, Optigan, Orchestron. These instruments are so expensive and unobtainable. Does anyone know how I can get some string sounds similar to these?