I think that it’s fair to call this Thing A Week a failure and I don’t really have a great excuse. I set out to write a song that revolved around the piano and bass and I ended up with a nice riff that didn’t go anywhere.
This tends to happen to me a lot. My Garageband folder is full of 30 second long riffs and fleshed out song chunks, but I often hit a wall and I’m not sure where to go from there. Last week I sat down and tried writing some stuff influenced by a couple songs that either did piano and bass or just bass licks well. The main ones I referred to were Erase Me by Ben Folds Five and Sic Transit Gloria…Glory Fades by Brand New. They are both awesome songs and I especially love the way the piano and bass work together in the Ben Folds song but my ideas just weren’t working. I ended up with some weird meandering minor bass parts thrown over some really weak piano parts.
I came back the next day and switched to a major key and started with the piano part first. From there I came up with something that I liked and wrote a simple bass part that just harmonized the piano roots in a few parts.
And that’s where I got stuck. I spent a bit of time playing around with some sparse guitar parts and a few of the new amp models in the new version of Garageband. I also played around with the new Drummer feature of Garageband. It was pretty cool and maybe the most redeeming quality of Garageband X (the removal of the old keyboard shortcuts and export to mp3 are driving me nuts and might send my back to version 6!). The drum sounds are great and it’s a big step up from the midi drum parts I had been working with in the old version of Garageband, but I did feel a bit uncomfortable with the loss of control over every single hit. I suppose it’s a decent compromise.
So here’s what I came up with. I ended up just doing some random guitar riffing and bigger chords at some point, but it really just felt forced and didn’t take the song anywhere. Take a listen, though, because the piano/bass part turned out pretty nice:
I’d like to keep working with this song. It’s different than most of the stuff I’ve written lately. I think that throwing lyrics over it will be a bit of a challenge just because I don’t quite trust my voice for something this mellow, but it’s a fun part and I think it could turn into something cool.
This week I’m leaning towards either a project with Python (I’ve been meaning to brush up on my Python for a while) or something artistic. I’m still not quite sure.