The Bad Blogger

That's me - I've not been as good as I could be in my blogging - I have had a couple more sessions on the music - three I think since I last blogged. I have been working on the same section - the folk tunes.

Session 1: I have firstly added some strummed mandolin, and some strummed and picked acoustic guitar to the first tune (The Beech Grove), and some strummed Mandolin to the last tune (Bob's Your Auntie). I did this "at speed" (192bpm)

Session 2: I added some electric guitar - heavy rock overdriven guitar to the second tune (Daisy Chain) and that continues into the 3rd tune, but after the first time though changes to a less rough "skaga" sound (like slow Ska). The middle tune is going to be pretty heavy rock. This also was all done "at speed".

Session 3: Drums. First of all I spent some time choosing an appropriate rock drum kit sound, and then  I programmed drums for tunes 2 and 3. Tune 2 is heavy drumming, starting with tom fills (I extended the number of toms in the kit for this), then stabby kits to go with the chords I ahd recorded and finally becoming a fairly consistent heavy rock beat. What makes it heavy rock? Well the pattern for one, but I also have discovered that half-open hi-hat gives a loose rawness to a rock pattern (it's something one of the drummers did in church one Sunday). Lo and behold, combine that with the guitar and it sounds pretty rock-like, which is interesting when the tune us being played on mandolin - in fact it' s coming out as a nice rock/folk hybrid right now. Moving into tune 3 the drumming tightens and lightens somewhat, switching to ride cymbal to give a more "rolling" feel (that's what I always feel about ride cymbals instead of hi-hat, they make the sound push on or roll along better, possibly from association with swing jazz), and then into the second time through switching to a light reggae-like beat to go with the skaga guitar. This is turning into something altogether interesting, a coming together of Ska and Folk - unlikely combination I know.

A really standard rock beat in 4/4 is to play bass drum on beat 1, snare on beat 3 and hi-hat on all 4 beats. There are lots of variations and stuff but that's the basic "back-beat" rhythm. To get a "light reggae feel" like I described above I basically use the same thing, but the hi-hat only plays on beats 2 and 4. This give a completely different bouncy feel (and is really easy).

Now all of the drumming here has been programmed so far, so I have been through doing some humanising of volume, I will also (but have not yet done so) "humanise" further by introducing slight variations in the positions of the beats. Cubase can do that for me with random variations (not enough to make it feel wrong, but enough to loose the metronome-like feel that programmed drums can give)