By David Templeton | From the November/December 2025 issue of Strings
When Vitamin String Quartet (VSQ) first began recording and releasing classical-style arrangements of pop songs, everyone involved understood that certain members of the public could view the endeavor as highly whimsical, even a bit absurd. Aerosmith. Eminem. AC/DC. Tupac Shakur. Madonna. Skrillex. Transformed for two violins, a viola, and a cello? Hilarious, right?
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But to the producers, engineers, arrangers, and musicians who collaborate to bring every new VSQ album to life, one guiding principle is front and center—this music is no joke.
“I’m always very conscious of how easy it could be for VSQ to be taken as a novelty, and I’m always very careful that that not happen,” says James Curtiss, director of A&R/creative director for CMH Label Group, which produces all VSQ projects. “Yes, there is novelty in the idea of a string quartet version of dot-dot-dot, fill-in-the-blanks, any famous pop artist you can name. But this music is not some goof. It’s not a joke. These are great musicians bringing all their skills and experience to what you could call an alternative interpretation of some of the greatest melodies ever written. VSQ is real music, and it’s good music. Which is why we’ve done over 400 separate projects to date, and why the touring act is increasingly in demand. The music of Vitamin String Quartet does what all great music has always done. It moves people. It moves people because it speaks to them in a language they understand.
“And I could also add,” he notes, “it’s a pretty great way to introduce new people to the pleasures of listening to a good classic string quartet.”
Vitamin String Quartet had its genesis in 1999, several years before Curtiss gave the thematically connected series of projects its memorably nutrition-adjacent label. The project was named after Vitamin Records, the L.A.-based label through which CMH Record initially began releasing CDs with semi-anonymous string quartet tributes to popular musical acts. It wasn’t until Curtiss came on board in 2005—and he made the decision to start releasing those recordings digitally on burgeoning services like iTunes—that the project finally got the name it’s been known by ever since.
“Myself, and the other people who were spearheading the initiative, were saying, ‘It’d be great if we gave this series a name, so that if someone finds a string tribute to, say, Metallica, they will see the artist’s name and click on it and see all the other things,’” says Curtiss. “At that point, people were already writing in and asking for sheet music, or asking, ‘Hey, can the ensemble come play the wedding I’m about to have?’ We got requests from schools to have the musicians come and play for their students. It was becoming this whole thing.”
Unbeknownst to those letter-writing fans, there was no actual “ensemble” performing the music, but a large stable of players from which musicians were selected for individual recording assignments. To this day, even with the addition several years ago of live concert tours, Vitamin String Quartet tends to shift its personnel depending on who is available.
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“It’s a rotating cast of musicians, along with a team of producers and arrangers,” says Curtiss. “We’ve refined everything now, so if you count the musicians who work in the studio, the musicians who do video content, and the musicians who go out on the road doing live shows, we’re looking at a pool of maybe 16 to 20 people.”
One of those is cellist Derek Stein, who’s been playing on various VSQ projects for about 13 years. A founding member of the avant-garde ensemble Gnarwhallaby and known for his work with the critically acclaimed music collective Wild Up, Stein is a ferociously active, constantly working L.A. musician acclaimed for his musical elasticity and ability to adapt to large or small projects. He played on the Grammy-winning recording Harry Partch: Plectra and Percussion Dances and is a frequent collaborator with Curtiss on an array of Vitamin String Quartet undertakings.
“If we have a ‘first call cellist,’ then it’s Derek,” says Curtiss. “He kind of does it all. He’s one of those players who goes on tour, he gets in front of the camera, he does social media content, he works in the studio when we’re recording stuff. He’s even done some arrangements. He’s someone we can look to as a band leader, someone with enough experience with what we do to lead the charge on any given project.”
Given his breadth of knowledge and expansive skill set, Stein is in such demand that he rarely sits down in the studio to record every track of a full VSQ album. One exception is the new Vitamin String Quartet tribute to Billie Eilish. “Yes, that’s one of a handful where I actually played on the whole record,” Stein says. “It’s a fun recording. I’m really happy about it. We had a great time doing that one.”
Stein’s relationship with Vitamin String Quartet began long before his first recording as part of the team. “The first time I heard VSQ was in the late ’90s or early 2000s,” he recalls. “At the time, my favorite band was No Doubt, and whenever I’d go into a record store, I looked in the No Doubt section to see if there was anything in there I’d never seen before. And this one time, I looked in and went, ‘What’s this? A String Quartet Tribute to No Doubt.”’ I’d been playing cello since I was four, and already had a love for classical music, and was thinking, ‘This sounds super interesting. Let’s check this out.’ And I have been hooked on VSQ ever since.”
Years later, while playing with Wild Up, Stein was preparing for a concert at UCLA, waiting in the green room before the show, when the personnel manager came in to announce that something called Vitamin String Quartet was looking for new string players in the L.A. area. “I got the contact email, and I probably sent that person a message every day for the next ten or 12 days, until I finally got a response and set up an audition,” Stein remembers. “That was in 2012, and ever since then I’ve been playing with them every chance I get.”
VSQ has both a live performance facet and a studio recording facet, in addition to various publishing efforts and other pursuits, including licensing of its recordings for movies and television shows. “For me, there’s only a little bit of overlap,” Stein acknowledges. “I mostly stay on the live end of things, though lately I’ve been doing more recording.”
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Most of the time when he records, it’s a single track or two from an album focusing on the music of a particular year. He recently worked on covers of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” Most of the time, the recordings are built one musician at a time, with the tracks mixed together later by the engineers. But every so often, the four selected musicians actually get to record together at the same time.
“One of those was a recording of songs by Björk,” Stein says. “And it’s a really good one. I’m really proud of that album. It’s titled Vitamin String Quartet Performs Björk, and if you’re a Björk fan, I would recommend getting that one. It’s so good. The first violinist was Paul Cartright, a very busy session player who we’re lucky enough to get from time to time. The violist was Lauren Baba, who is awesome, and then the other violinist was Amanda Lowe, who’s played with us a lot, and has been a very big part of VSQ, though she’s doing other things now. It was a great team, and we all felt really committed to doing it right, and to this day, I will put that album on and listen to it when I need to feel good, and it works every time. I love Björk.”
While the recording projects tend to mix and match players, Stein says the West Coast touring quartet has mostly stayed the same. “We’ve been pretty lucky,” he says. “Though being accustomed to swapping people around in the studio is good training for when something goes wrong on tour.” He recalls a Northwest tour in 2023 that was set to end with two performances in Anchorage, Alaska, and on the first day there, the group’s violist slipped and fell on the ice, breaking her wrist. “We moved our Friday show to Sunday and flew another violist up from L.A. in time to play our Saturday show. And he just popped right in, and we had a great show.”
Asked what the appeal of this kind of music is for someone who was trained to play classics, Stein says that personally, he feels he has a knack for it and that playing music by his favorite composers, classical or pop or rock or hip-hop, is always tremendously satisfying. That pleasure is compounded when performing for an audience that’s just recognized the opening strains of a favorite piece of music.
“It’s just really, really fun,” Stein says. “I have never been sitting on stage during a Vitamin String Quartet show and started thinking, ‘You know what? I’m really bored.’ That never happens. I love performing for a captive audience, and VSQ provides that over and over. It brings me a lot of joy.”
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In recent years, the audience has been visibly growing, in part because of the VSQ’s music having appeared prominently in several episodes of the popular television show Bridgerton. The songs they’ve covered for the show include Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” Coldplay’s “Yellow,” and Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You.” “We’ve been doing a lot of the Bridgerton stuff in our live shows,” says Stein. “In fact, in the show we’ve been touring for the last year or so, we do songs by Taylor Swift, the music of Bridgerton, and a few other things. That’s how the show is marketed, and we do get a lot of Bridgerton fans along with the Swifties. And a lot of people tell us afterward that they’ve never gone to a string quartet concert in their lives until now, and the hope is that they will be curious about it and maybe go see something that wasn’t used in their favorite TV show.”
Reflecting on Curtiss’ remarks about this music being more than a mere novelty, Stein says the team takes its job very seriously and works hard to sound as good as it possibly can. “We’re no different than any other classical quartet,” he says. “We spend hours working on the little details. We work on doing the same bowings, making sure our articulations match. We talk about how to respond to each other without ever second-guessing one another. We go out there with the goal of being the best we can, bringing the highest level of professionalism and expertise to this music, even if we’re not playing Beethoven or Brahms.”
Though the choice of songs played comes to the musicians from Curtiss and the rest of the team at CMH, Stein says that on occasion they’ve suggested additions to the set list that end up becoming huge hits, as was the case when they added Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” to a recent tour.
“Of course, if I could do anything at all,” Stein admits, “I’d love to do something by No Doubt with Vitamin String Quartet. Since that was how I got into VSQ to begin with, I think doing a cover or two would be amazing. But that said, I have so much fun being a part of this, I’m happy to play everything they bring to us. I have no complaints whatsoever.
“But playing a little No Doubt,” he says, “would be really cool.”
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