Less Is More… But Lyrics Do Need A Melody

I planned to start today by working on the melody for the verses of Didn’t Feel Safe, but immediately heard a motif I liked which I recorded on my MIDI keyboard and ended up putting in the introduction. Then I got inspired to improve the bass line; so I’ll get to that melody later.

Three Practical Principles

Three important principles I learned in Introduction to Digital Music were:

Less is more
Complexity arises naturally from the combination of simplicity
Layer Cake Orchestration^TM

With all this in mind, I shortened the first note of my bass part so that it doesn’t ring so long, to give more space for the drums and other low frequency parts to breathe and come through. While the bass part sounded great in isolation, it needs to be layered in with all the other instruments to sound good in the final mix.

The resulting bass rhythm look like this:

, Less Is More… But Lyrics Do Need A Melody — Bass riff with a little room to breathe

Adding A Real (Synthesised) Bass Guitar

I’ve been playing with a string synth for my bass up until this point, and while I like some aspects of the sound, I really want it to sound more bass guitar-like. So, I added a bass guitar track using the same MIDI data. In the process I learned that bass guitar parts are typically notated one octave higher than played.

The Logic Pro synthesised bass guitars follow this convention, so I needed to transpose the synth bass part up an octave when copying the MIDI data onto the bass guitar track so it didn’t sound like a big unplayable fart. I retained the synth bass but turned it way down and combined them both into a summing track stack, ready for my next step.

Since the bass and the kick drum are in the same frequency range, I also added side-chain compression from the kick drum to the bass track stack, based on side-chain compressor settings I stole from one of Disclosure’s Twitch Music Production Tutorials. I did this by setting the Drum track to multi-output, sending the Kick drum to Bus 7, and setting it as the Side Chain in the Bass Compressor. Now I can have the bass up nice and loud, without it muffling the sound of the punchy kick drum, giving me the best of both worlds by improved Layer Cake Orchestration^TM. Sweet.

Here are the side-chained compressor settings:

The Elusive Verse Melody

Next, I moved on to creating the melody for the verses and making a scratch vocal recording of them. I did this by improvising over the chord progression for Verse 1 with the lyrics, and then refining the melody over a few vocal takes.

Here are the lyrics for Verse 1:

Saturday morning down the hall
The science show is on
There’s tension in the house again
Something is feeling wrong
Mum and dad are cranky still
From the fight they had last night
Never seems to get resolved
Just waits to reignite
Doors slam in the kitchen
Best stay out of sight
Car ride with dad to soccer
Is tense and filled with fright
At least while I’m out on the field
I’ll get a brief respite
‘cept for the bullies in the game
And no escape tonight

Once I was happy with my scratch recording, I created a MIDI recording of the melody played on piano which I could them listen to through my headphones while recording the vocals for Verse 2 and 3. This helped me further fine tune the melody, and in the process make a few changes to improve the lyrics. The whole process was highly iterative and working in the DAW was what made it practical.

The lyrics for Verse 2 are:

Sunday morning off to church
Wish I could sleep in
Bible stories don’t make sense
And all the boring hymns
Sitting next to mum & dad
What should I believe
New Testament is really old
And God I cannot see
Minister is preaching
A sermon about love
When we get home they fight again
Yelling heavens above
Dad spends all the afternoon
Out in the garage
Cursing underneath his breath
While fixing up mums’ car

I used Logic Pro’s Score Editor window to display the melody as a prompt while recording the vocals for Verse 2. This reduced the number of errors I made since I could sight sing a bit to avoid obvious mistakes like leaping up when the melody line actually went down. Without this, I didn’t always remember whether some intervals leapt up or down without the visual prompt because I made a lot of variations to the melody while I was constructing it.

Here is the Score Editor window with the Verse melody:

Once I was finished with it, I muted the Vocal Melody track since it’s only there to help with the recording process. I’ll use it again when I record scratch vocals for Verse 3, and the real vocal takes in the studio.