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Protip of the day: Scratch Drums and You

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#1 ·
I don't know if anyone else does this, but..

When I setup to record, I have the song, and the tempo, so the first thing I do is lay down a basic 4/4 pattern behind it for the duration of the song. It helps me keep tempo, and decide if I need to play it faster/slower to get the feel I'm looking for. It also makes it easy to cut/paste sections and shift stuff around, since 4/4 is 4/4, and measures are easy to spot and shuffle around.

That said, if youre 4/4 beat is a 110 tempo kick/snare/kick/snare with hats hits on every beat, it'll be very handy. For about an hour. Then you'll start hating it.

At the 3 hour point, as you sit tweaking riffs and tones, writing changes and bridges and shredly solos, the 4/4 will become embedded in your very soul. You'll walk in tempo. If your ass is itchy, you will scratch it in 4/4. Things in the room will start to stare at you.

At the 5 hour point, you will have slipped into an alternate reality known as I Hate My Own Fucking Song. You may have written the greatest set of melodies in the world, but you will be unable to disassociate those melodies from the ever present 4/4 kick/snare of holy-fuck-i-want-to-kill-myself doom.

Do yourself a favor. Stop somewhere after the 1 hour mark, and work on the drums for the sections you have done. Today, I did not, and I paid the price.

:lalala:
 
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#3 ·
:lol: Because I'm arranging the song dude. Have you ever actually recorded a track before? You don't just plop down and bang the whole thing out in one sitting. You have to write and arrange it first, and see what works and what doesn't.

Why the hell would I use guitar pro? :facepalm:
 
#4 ·
Can't say I've ever done that. I tend to write the drums as soon as I have the idea for the riff, and I usually just play to Nuendo's clicktrack while recording the scratch guitars. :shrug:

I still have hope that the gratuitous shredding and viking imagery will come out ahead! You can do it!
 
#5 ·
When I'm writing, I do drums last. The guitar part is the most important (to me, since I'm a guitarist :lol:) and I'd rather write the drums around guitar playing than write guitar around drum programming, ya know?

Basically I just use a standard beat as a click, same as you do, but instead of beep-boop metronome, I have kick/snare. :)
 
#7 ·
Basically I just use a standard beat as a click, same as you do, but instead of beep-boop metronome, I have kick/snare. :)
Yeah, sometimes I do too because I helps me 'groove' a little more. And I didn't mean to imply that I write drums first or anything. I'm definitely a guitar player first. I just mean that once I've written that awesome riff, I like to hear how badass it'll sound with some appropriate drums behind it. Then I move on to the next section of the song, so by the end of the song I only need to go back and tweak the drums, rather than having nothing but straight 4/4 kick-snare stuff that drives you insane.
 
#9 ·
:agreed: Guitarists who are proficient drummers have it made when it comes to this shit. Drums take me FOR FUCKING EVER because not only am I not a drummer, but no matter how good I am with the software, I just think like a guitarist, so I write shitty drum lines.
 
#10 ·
I work in bursts. half hour here and there. i strike while the iron is hot. usually the first 5 minutes of playing each day inspires a few riffs and ideas that will carry me for a little while, but i gotta quit after a bit or else ear fatigue sets in and i too hate my own shit that i loved a little bit before that.
 
#27 ·
^This.

I record everything to a click first. Being that I'm mainly a rythem player, I can record each riff seperately then throw em in FL Studio as samples to arrange the song. Then I either program the drums or record the MIDI from my electronic kit. After that, I'll re-record my guitar tracks.

Gold.
 
#29 ·
When I write a riff that I really like, I usually have accompanying drums for it in my head, so I kinda have to program them in order to record the guitar parts. And, if it's in an odd time signature, straight up 4/4 isn't gonna work. And, if it's heavily syncopated 4/4, it's gonna feel really awkward trying to record to a typical 4/4 drum beat. Of course, I could still record just by getting the accents where they should be and not going any further than that.

So, generally when I write the guitar riff, I want to program the drums I'm imagining in my head quickly. It's rare for me to have a guitar riff with no idea how the drums should go. Although... for my band, oftentimes the drummer will change the drums to something very very different from what I imagined that I listen to and go, ".................................................... That's.................. FUCKING AWESOME!!!!" and stuff.
 
#35 ·
When I write a riff that I really like, I usually have accompanying drums for it in my head, so I kinda have to program them in order to record the guitar parts.
That's pretty much how I am. At first, I could never have imagined recording drums first, but now I just try to program them for what I've already got in mind as far as guitar goes.

I guess I kind of "record" the guitar in my mind, then record the drums I think will go along with it, then go back and add the guitar layers back over the initial drum track. By that point the song has changed, because I've inevitably fucked something up because I couldn't memorize that much!
 
#36 ·
That's all well and good if you can write drums. I definitely can not. :lol: I start with a pattern from DKFH/etc that's close to what I'm playing, play to that and the click, and then go back after and tailor the beat to my guitar track.

If I started out with just drums, it would suck a LOT. :lol:
 
#38 ·
I rarely, move on to riff number 2 before riff number 1 has a drum beat, because as far as I'm concerned, the beat is a way more important factor in how a song flows than the riff. I mean, I think the riff itself it more interesting, but until I know the exact cadence of the part, I can't be sure what should come next.

Then again, by the time I work on arrangement, I usually have a pretty full grabbag of riffs written. I don't sit around to write songs - I noodle out riffs and record the ones that I like to a click track. When I don't have any inspiration, I'll go back to old riffs and work on drum beats for them. And then when it comes time to write songs for a Pharaoh album, I rifle through the riffpile and find the ones I like, marry them to others in the same key/tempo, and go from there. When I need to start filling in the holes in a song, I use the drums to guide me in the right direction, and at that juncture, sometimes a drum beat will precede its riff.

But yeah, your advice is good - don't create an unbreakable association between a bad beat and your riff, or you'll never be able to come up with a more appropriate beat!
 
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