Guitarist Recording Collective: August 2005 Part 1

The task for August’s Guitarist Home Recording Collective was to:

The task is to compose a piece of music where the main melody/lead part/ must have a minimum number of two notes played at all times.

ie NO single notes will be allowed.

I had recently obtained August’s Computer Music magazine which features a cover disc with loads of free Chilled/Lounge audio samples/beats/loops etc.

A quick browse through them I found a beat which inspired me to create a more chilled/ambient piece for this month’s task.

To begin with, my usual approach, I quickly created just a drum backing using the loop in Cubase to play some ideas over. My initial thinking with the ‘minimum of two notes’ was to have a rhythm backing which used triads of the form:

C - x-3-x-x-5-3
D - x-5-x-x-7-5
Em - x-7-x-x-8-7

etc.

which have a nice quailty to them with defined high notes combined with supporting bass root note. Forms favoured in many styles, by Martin Taylor, Beatles’s ‘Blackbird’ etc.

I came up with the simple progression Bm - C - G which worked over the backing loop. The guitar was run through the POD set to the Line6 Layer patch for a crisp cleanish with a touch of tremolo.

Prog 1

As it stood the guitar part sounded a bit stark to my ears and really didn’t have the vibe I wanted, so I fiddled around with a few plugins and found one in my Waves package called ‘Mondo Mod’. This cool plugin can be used to swirl audio around the stereo spectrum, processing the guitar in Prog 1 and adding a touch of compression gave me:

Prog 1 (processed)

Deciding to use this as the backbone for the ‘verse’ I tried out a couple of ideas for a ‘chorus’ and quickly came up with the following 8 bars, keeping use of the Mondo Mod for depth:

Prog 2

With these two backings I now had a framework to work on adding melody lines.