Guitarist Recording Collective: May 2005 Part 3

Now being fairly satisfied with the guitar sound I started to work on arranging the piece in Cubase SX.

First thing to do was to calculate the tempo.

Listening to the loop section I came to the conclusion that the loop consists of two bars of 6/8. Armed with this info, right clicking on the loop in Cubase SX and activating hitpoints I was able to calculate the bpm to be ~65 bpm. This now allowed me to accurately create sections, loops in Cubase’s Project Window. In order to ensure clean joins between loop sections I also had to chop off the silence at the start and end of the main loop.

Next I decided on the layout for the whole piece, opting for:

| intro | head | head | solo | head | outro |

Over the head and solo sections the following chords, as mentioned in Part 1, were used:

|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 F#13|Am7b5 D7#9|Gm7 C7|Gm7 D7b5#9|

For the outro I wanted something different, wanting to end on an upbeat vibe by resolving to FMaj7, therefore I came up with:

|Gm7 F#13|Am7 D7|Gm7 C7|FMaj7 |

Now that the structure was there, I recorded the backing guitar over the drum loop coming up with the following:

‘head’ backing

Once the backing was finalised I had a foundation with which to build on. Next task, to come up with a melody/head.