Song Project: Adding Bass and Drums
Let's take the piano riff I previously wrote and add a bass line. This was entirely improvised but you'll hear it's very rhythmically similar to the left-hand of the piano part, even down to the 3+3+2 accents except in the third bar of four where 3+2+3 is suggested.
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And now let's add the drums. I took a standard kick, snare and high-hat pattern that comes with Logic Pro and modified it to give a machine-gun rhythmic interplay between both high-hat and kick drum.
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While the interplay between kick and high-hat makes for an interesting rhythm, we'll eventually want to vary it subtly throughout the song to keep things more interesting. We'll worry about that later, though.
Here's a combined version with piano, bass and drums:
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Note that all tracks had some compression and EQ. In a later post I'll talk a bit about that.
Then we'll add a few more tracks before moving on to composing the chorus, putting together the overall song structure and, of course, adding the vocals.
All material for this project is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license so you are free to redistribute and remix with attribution but under the same license and not commercially.
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Comments (2)
James Tauber on Nov. 17, 2008:
Thanks Adrian. You made my day.
Last Modified: Nov. 16, 2008
Author: James Tauber
Adrian Sutton on Nov. 17, 2008:
You have no idea how jealous I am that you can come up with this kind of stuff. I'm a reasonably creative person but music composition has always been completely out of my depth, despite so desperately wanting it not to be.
For the record, if you had a "pre-purchase this" link somewhere I'd have probably clicked it by now, despite knowing how long a journey it is from here to a salable recording.