And so it goes...

I spent part of this weekend tracking drums and writing a bass line for the first revamped, song, "Poseur". I've actually been pretty good about writing notes and ideas down while I was going through listening to the tracks, so I had an idea about what I thought the music should sound like.

One of the obstacles I face when I write music, however, is that I'm primarily a bass player first, guitar player...like...8th. This is not to say that there's anything wrong with being a bass player. I LIKE being a bass player. The problem with it in regards to song writing is that I'm a very drum focused bass player. My lines will invariably follow what the drums are doing. (The most important job of the bass player is, in my opinion, merging the percussion with the melodic instruments.)

So without drums, I have a hard time coming up with interesting bass lines. This makes the drums the first task for any given song that I want to create. Remember when I said I was a bass player, not a guitar player? Well, I'm also a bass player, not a DRUMMER. In the old days, we used 'Bill the Drummer' for everything, which made things easier.

Bill the Drummer (We called him something else on the first album, but I believe he was Bill the Drummer after that...) was the Yamaha SHS-10 keyboard. It was actually a 'keytar,' really. (Trivia: When I first fell upon doing this project, I was going to buy another SHS-10 and use it's generic drum beats for all of the percussion on the album. This plan was scrapped when I found out that the Yamaha SHS-10 was selling for 150-250 bucks on ebay. I should have kept that thing.) We'd pick a beat set the tempo (usually really fast) and start recording. (You can hear how 'quality' this method was in the first couple of tracks I posted about earlier.)

For this project, though, I've got a couple of friends who actually play drums who are going to help me out. Rather than just have them come over with their kits and jam while I come up with some interesting music, however, I'm trying to come up with general representations of what I feel the beat will end up being. This gives me something to play bass along with, and it'll give them an idea of what I want them to play when we record them.

So, the long and the short of it is that I spent the weekend banging out drum lines on the keyboard, going into staff view (in Sonar) and 'fixing' the time on them so that they actually sound coherent.

For the record, here's a clip of the drums I did for "Poseur" which amply demonstrates that I am not, in fact, a drummer: WhyIAmNotADrummer.mp3