Meet Us

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The String Teaching Library did not start with a business idea. There

was no plan to create a library for string instruments -no idea that one day 

we would spend hundreds of hours writing, testing, changing and rewriting

pieces for students. There wasn't even a name for it. There was just music,

teaching, and the two of us.

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Puy and I have been together since 2011, and throughout that time we’ve

done almost everything side by side. Not always in the same way, and not

always in the same place, but always as a team.

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We have been doing this together for a long time​

We started working in Spain not long after we met. We created a duo and began

playing weddings and events. Within a few months, we had so much work that we actually had to start turning people down. Alongside that, we worked in music schools in different places, teaching, performing and learning what it really means to make a living from music. Then, work became less predictable. We still had events, but not much else—so we decided to make the move to the UK. ​

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We have done a bit of everything since then. We have worked hard, adapted, started again, learned from every place we have been, and wherever we went, people seemed to remember us for the same thing: we cared about what we were doing and we gave it everything we had.

That is probably the simplest way to explain who we are. We care.

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Puy & Pablo

Puy is a trained viola pedagogue, a teacher, a musician, my partner and my best friend. She is also the first person who hears almost everything I write. When I finish a piece, or sometimes when it is nowhere near finished, she listens. And then she usually says either:

'Yes' or 'No'

I don't always enjoy hearing 'no'. But after fourteen years, I have learned that it is usually worth listening to her.

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Puy sees things I don't see. She hears a piece not only as music, but as a teacher, as a pedagogue. She thinks about the student who is going to play it, what they are capable of doing, what might be difficult for them, what might make them lose interest, and what might make them want to try again. And, annoyingly, she is often right (shhh).

The music gets better when I listen to her.

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I’m Pablo—a violinist, teacher, and musician. I have been teaching for more than 15 years, and before that I spent around 20 years playing in orchestras. In 2011, I started writing music simply because I enjoyed it. There was no bigger plan behind it. I wasn't thinking about creating a library or writing educational music. I was just learning, experimenting and enjoying the process. Then Covid came, and with it came something I had never really had before: time. Time to learn things I hadn't learned before. Time to experiment. Time to write. Time to make mistakes and try again.

And slowly, I began to take composition more seriously.

But The String Teaching Library still wasn't there. The real beginning came in...

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the winter of 2024 (it all started with a question)​

I joined one of Puy's classes, and we started talking about a problem we had seen many times before. There were students who were just beginning to learn the violin but, for whatever reason, even after a long time, still weren't ready to put their fingers on the instrument. They could learn rhythms. They could learn bow patterns. They could make sounds. But much of the music available to them was built around the idea that the left hand had to be involved very early.

So Puy suggested something very simple.

'What if you wrote music for them?'

Not exercises.

Not something that felt like a simplified version of a real piece.

Actual music.

Music that sounded attractive and exciting, but only required the student to work with rhythm and the bow. So I started writing.

We tried the pieces with our students.

And something happened that caught our attention.

Some of the children who were least interested in playing the violin wanted to play the new pieces again. And again. And again.I remember thinking: 'Parece que funciona'  It seems to work. 

Puy looked at me and said:'Sí. Más.'  Yes. More.

So I wrote more.

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The classroom became our test

There was no rush. We simply kept going.

As we worked with different students, new questions appeared. What about this level? What about that bow stroke? What if the student is ready for another string? What if we change the speed? What if we make the rhythm more challenging? What if we approach the same technical idea in a completely different way?

The classroom started giving us the questions, and writing became our way of answering them.

I would watch what students were learning, where they were struggling and what they enjoyed. Then I would go home and write. We would try the pieces. Some worked. Some didn't. Some needed to be simplified. Others needed to be made harder. Some sounded good on paper but didn't work in the hands of a child. Others surprised us completely.

So we changed them.

We tested them again.

And we kept doing it.

In a little over a year, what had started as a small idea became around fifty pieces, from very simple open-string music to pieces using all four strings, different bow strokes, different speeds and a growing range of technical ideas.

But the number itself isn't really the important part. What matters is how those pieces came to exist; they were not written first and tested afterwards. They were written because we had students in front of us.

The classroom was the test. The students were the reason.

And every time a piece worked, we learned something that helped us write the next one.

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Then we shared it

At some point, we started giving the music away to other teachers. Completely free.

We wanted to know whether the pieces worked outside our own classroom, with different teachers, different students and different teaching approaches. We expected people to give us feedback. We didn't expect what happened next. Teachers asked for more. Then they asked for more again. Some even offered to pay for the music.

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That was probably the moment when we stopped thinking, “This is something we are writing for our students,” and started thinking, “Maybe there is something here that could help other teachers too.”

From September 2025, we began taking the idea seriously.

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Why The String Teaching Library?

We talked about making a book. Perhaps a collection of open-string pieces. Perhaps selling individual pieces. Perhaps doing something completely different.

The more we talked about it, the clearer one thing became. We didn't want to create another method book. We wanted to create a library. A place where a teacher could find exactly the piece they needed for a particular student, at a particular moment, working on a particular technical idea. Because one of the things we had learned from teaching was that students are not all the same. Sometimes a student needs five different ways to work on the same technical problem. Sometimes the piece that works beautifully for one student does absolutely nothing for another.  Sometimes what a teacher needs is not another whole book. They just need one good piece. That is why TSTL is built around individual pieces.

It is also why we wanted backing tracks from the very beginning, with different speeds, so students can experience the music in a different way as they develop.

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And it is why we care so much about the editions themselves. We want the music to look beautiful. We want the illustrations and design to catch a student's attention before they have even played a note.

Because we believe that teaching music is not only about what the student needs to learn.

It is also about giving them a reason to want to learn it.

And after all these years, we think the real test is actually very simple.

It isn't whether a piece looks impressive. It isn't how complicated it is. It isn't even whether a teacher thinks it is useful.

The real test is what happens when the student finishes playing.

Do they put the violin down? Or do they look at you and say: “Can we play it again?”

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So, here we are.

That question is probably the best explanation of why The String Teaching Library exists.

We don't know exactly where this journey will take us. We don't know how big it will become, or how long we will keep adding to it. But we know why we are doing it. Because this has never really been about producing sheet music. It is about everything that happens before a piece reaches a student: the years of teaching, the conversations after lessons, the problems we notice, the ideas that don't work, the pieces that have to be rewritten, the arguments about whether something is good enough, the hours spent at a desk, the hours spent in classrooms, and the thousands of small decisions that eventually become one piece of music.

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It is fourteen years (and counting) of doing things together. Years of playing. Years of teaching.  Years of learning. And now, years of writing.

TSTL is simply the place where all of that has come together. We built it slowly, piece by piece, student by student, lesson by lesson. And perhaps that is why we care so much about it. Because it isn't something we decided to make. It is something that grew out of the life we were already living.

This is The String Teaching Library. And this is us. Puy and me. Teachers. Musicians. Partners in life.

Still working together. Still listening. Still writing.

And still trying to create something that makes a student pick up the violin and say:

“Can we play it again?”