The composition so far has turned into surf rock due to the drawn out chords and featured bass. The tone was clean and bright and the style likely came from listening to and being in the process of learning Green Day’s Last Ride In. I’m very happy with how the drum beat sounds and I’m fond of using samplers as I understand how I can utilise slices of a sample in my own music.
The guitar part is fairly simple as it loops G and F chords without E in G and A in F, although A is the variation that brightens the overall sound and signals the end of the first four bars.
The chorus sounds brighter and fuller in comparison to the verse as much more is added to make it more complex and the chords
The chords overlapping the chords played for a bar are played quieter as I intend to use it as a subtle effect to add some complexity and variation. This is where the song lost the surf rock feeling and gained more of a synth-y feeling since parts became more complex and synth sounds fitted alongside the reverb I added to these bigger chords.
The bass for both the verse and chorus are below:
It’s a simple loop in C with a descending pattern following the first two notes of each phrase. The verse is completely different to match how different the guitar during the chorus sounds to the verse.
This part shifts the focus on the highest notes in the pattern, particularly the last two notes of the loop and the note on bar 2, beat 3-4.
The drum beat remains the same during the chorus and the verse and was made using slices of a sample using the simpler tool.
The simpler tool looks like this:
It allows me to manually slice the sample and place each section into a drum rack, which allocates each individual sound to a note on a keyboard. Here’s how each clip was organised on the drum rack.
And this is how it relates to a keyboard.
I added a drum buss to alter how it sounds slightly and make it have more of an impact.
What I have for the whole song so far is this:
I made some small changes since it still sounded empty and didn’t meet the two minute minimum mark. Now each part sounds like this (not final duration):
They’re organised like this, the top line being the intro and bottom being the outro.
Every part except brass has reverb and both guitar parts have some delay. I’ve adjusted the volume of each instrument to sound more balanced and realistic as drums are likely to be louder than a synth part and some sounds were naturally louder than others.
Once I had the general layout of the song completed and parts that make sense in order, I experimented with tone and effects for bass to make it have more impact and sound natural. I think I changed the tone from clean to bass, raised the presence, turned the dry/wet setting to the right a little more and experimented with the stereo effect.
The Final Composition
Above is the entire track. At the very end I added a piano effect that doubled up the chorus jazz guitar part that played during the verse in-between the choruses to keep the energy high. I believe I changed the dynamics during both choruses to gradually change by around -3.5dB and return to 0 at the end of each to give the verse in-between a little more of a punch. I also faded out the outro section gradually with the end of the brass part hitting -15dB and the very end of the composition being -30dB.
I uploaded the track to soundcloud.