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.

<embed height="50" src="/2008/11/bass.mp3" controller="true" autoplay="false"/>
<small>download if embed doesn't work</small>

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.

<embed height="50" src="/2008/11/drums.mp3" controller="true" autoplay="false"/>
<small>download if embed doesn't work</small>

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:

<embed height="50" src="/2008/11/piano_bass_drums.mp3" controller="true" autoplay="false"/>
<small>download if embed doesn't work</small>

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.

<small>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.</small>

Syndicated 2008-11-16 21:17:02 (Updated 2008-11-16 21:17:03) from James Tauber's Blog