In the month of November I made 15 new beats. Each one was in the ballpark of 30-60 seconds long, with the goal being to create one interesting, mostly finalized idea.
The project was a ton of fun and I got to explore a lot of new sonic space. There were many great comments from other Steemians and the whole thing was generally a good time for all. But, now I have so many unfinished ideas…
Each beat right now is mostly a loop. If I turn each one into a full song or extended beat of some kind, that would result in a lot of new music in my “vault” (15 songs!), which would be great because a goal of mine for 2018 is to release at least one song every month.
With any big project, all you can do is take that first step. I am not sure if I will go through finishing all of these beats by turning them into songs… but I know I want to try a few.
Working on One of November’s Beats
Today I decided to work with this beat from early last month… It was a super simple groove, mostly just something nice to relax to:
The beat is so minimal that it could go anywhere. The first idea that came to my mind was, it will be hard to turn this into a song! I don’t usually make songs built on this feel. It’s uncharted territory for me.
Luckily the riff is strong enough that I figured I could do something. I tried a few vocal ideas but quickly decided against that, turning to some synths instead to find a way into the song. Eventually I found myself working with a warm breathy synth tone and got the following melody going:
photo source: unsplash // Federico Respini
Adding Guitar
The smooth sound of this synth added to the already near-maximal relaxation of the beat. The next step was clearly to add some guitars.
At first my plan was to double the bassline on guitar. I realized that it sounded clunky that way. Instead, by muting the bass and adding an octave-down effect on some of the guitar takes, I could get a more live sound while achieving all the same notes.
The bassline was reasonable to record. My goal right now is to record things in full takes, rather than having to chop up multiple recordings to replace wrong notes. Maybe it isn’t necessary to do it that way, but I think it will make me better at guitar… anyway, because of that, it took longer to record the bass.
Second guitar was the hard part. That took ages to record, it ate up like an hour and a half. Just trying over and over to get it right… the part has a lot of non-repetition in it.
In the end, I like how the guitars came out:
Having two different melodic ideas going against each other is trickier than you might think. In the world of music theory they call it “counterpoint”.
One of the most fun things in composing is to write a second melodic line against the first one. All you gotta do is loop the main melody and try a bunch of different ideas, sometimes for hours, until the next part comes together. If it sounds right to you, it’s good.
Putting it All Together
I didn’t change anything about the original drums. They are simple and get the job done, so to be honest it never even occurred to me to mess with them.
The song is far from complete, it’s still only one section that loops… but this is a much more fully realized loop. If I had a few variations and maybe one other chord idea, like a different progression at some point, it would be more of a full track.
Now that I am making progress on this, I will have to keep going! It feels like it’s only a few days from being a finished song. Already this thing sounds sick… check it:
Every sound is compressing very cleanly against the full mix, allowing the whole beat to pop and be quite loud. This is without a proper mastering session even, just some limiters doing the job quickly.
I love getting to the end of a beat and having the mix work. There were too many times in the past when I was newer to production, where I would get to the end and it just wouldn’t sound good at all. Nowadays I think I am becoming more consistent at getting a real professional product done.
(all I even mean when I say “professional product” is that it’s loud and clear lol. That sounds like such proper terminology.)
That’s it for today, thanks for reading!
