When I was a little child in my delectably quaint village, there was one particularly memorable dish that my family used to indulge in every Saturday . . .
Just kidding. What’s with every online recipe blog beginning with the originator's life story? Not the only strange phenomenon in these strange waters we trudge through daily in the internet age, I suppose . . .
This post is going to be something of a recipe blog. But we’re not making split-pea soup or pine-nut flatbread or Confit de Canard. For that matter, we’re not even in the kitchen (unless the acoustics are good.)
Far be it from me to proclaim to be an expert of song construction. But I’ve done it a while. If you have ever wanted to write and record your very own basic ass little indie rock song, perhaps this is a little recipe you can follow.
Will it be a good song? I don’t know. But it will be a song, and that’s the most important thing.
Your ingredients?
Acoustic guitar (again, let’s keep it basic)
1 computer
1 digital audio workspace (or “DAW”) installed on aforementioned computer
1 microphone (could be your computer’s webcam mic)
Believe it or not, that’s all you need. You may be asking yourself, “What about talent?”
As I said, those four simple ingredients are all you need.
Step 1: Get A Rhythm
The rhythm of your song is going to be heartbeat, the origin, what drives it forward. Since we do not have access to a physical drum kit in this scenario, we are going to start with building one digitally from scratch.
If you are a slave to Steve Jobs’ empire, Logic Pro X and Garageband are two DAWs that use similar interfaces (the latter of which almost serves as a “demo” version of the former), and what is nice about these DAWs is that they come with a built-in “drummer”, rather than a plugin that needs to be downloaded and fiddled with separately.
Regardless of whether you are using the built-in Logic/Garageband drummer, or are using a different DAW and sourcing your drums from a plugin or elsewhere, within any DAW you will be able to control your tempo.
If you want a slower, more melancholy/atmospheric ballad, you may opt for a slower tempo somewhere between 75-100. If you want an upbeat heater, you might go down the pathway of 120+. The choice is yours, and best of all, it is made incredibly easy on you via the DAW’s interface!
From this point, you can conceivably mess with the sonics of your rhythm essentially until the end of time. You can add all sorts of filters and different dynamics to your drums: gain, reverb, chorus, EQ. The world truly is your oyster here, but for brevity’s sake, let’s keep focusing on the actual song construction.
Step 2: Merry Melodies
Now that your rhythm has been laid out across the DAW, you now have basically free reign to do whatever you want over the top of that. For the sake of this exercise, you remember how we included that acoustic guitar in the ingredients list? Well, let’s bust that out.
Here is where you will also need access to your microphone. If you are using an external mic, you will need some sort of USB mixer that plugs into your computer, but again . . . for the sake of this exercise, let’s just use our webcam’s microphone, yeah?
Yes! You can just record acoustic guitar onto your webcam’s microphone and it will record straight into your DAW! Very remarkable, very lo-fi, but very practical if you are just trying to record a little indie rock ditty.
For those keeping tabs: We now have a drum loop beat and acoustic guitar laid down in our DAW. Just by sheer instrumentation, I guess we’re well on our way to making an early career Beck song. Radical!
Step 3: Vox?
Here is where we can get brave . . . Do we want to add vocals? Do we have a nice vocal melody to go with whatever our acoustic guitar passages are?
If we do, here is where we can add that in. Just sing it through your webcam mic, just like how you recorded guitar.
At this point, we now have our drum base looping, some acoustic guitar passages, and (ideally) some cool/unique/interesting vocals to coincide along with the acoustic guitar. The vocals and guitar being recorded through the webcam mic gives the song a nice lo-fi feel (if you have read additional entries on this blog, you know we are very about that), while the drum loops (depending on your filter implementation) give the tune some levity.
Now it’s time for perhaps the most fun part of recording . . .
Step 4: Flourishes!
While the drums/guitar/vocal amalgamation is the crux of our song, where many songs truly find their personalities are in the flourishes, the little flavorful textural accessories that elevate a song into another stratosphere.
In the case of this particular song, it feels like we could conceivably throw anything in here as a flourish. It could be tambourine, or glockenspiel, or bongos, or even more drum machine goodness.
But considering we didn’t include any of these in our original ingredients, let’s think about potentially adding in more guitar and vocals.
Try adding a complimentary guitar part to the one originally recorded; Maybe something in a similar vein with a similar melody, but higher up the neck and in a different octave?
Or of course, there’s the age old Beatles trick of double-tracking vocals for fullness. You can sing your same part over again in as similar or different a way as you wish, but another voice will certainly make the recording fuller and the vocals cut through like a knife.
Review
Whatever flourishes you decide to have, congrats, we now have the very basic bare-bones of an indie rock song. We’ve got beats (fresh from the garden), we’ve got melodies, we’ve got flourishes.
Now you can export your track to an MP3 and send it to all your friends.
Or, if you are mortified by the sounds you just created, you can delete the entire thing and never show anybody.
Either way, you can now save this recipe to the scrapbook for later use. And you didn’t even need to wade through somebody’s life story first.