Hello, I have a few “must learn” songs left that I wanted to learn since I picked bass up. My ear is getting better and I’m beginning to learn mostly any song I want to within a few days to a week. But I didn’t want to stop just learning songs of my favorite bands and artists. My long term was to always do original stuff. But I guess I’m just not sure how to. I went to a local show and was incredibly inspired. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now but seeing what I saw kinda made me want to start sooner than later.
I guess my question is how do I get started? Do I start with finding a drum pattern? Guitar melody? Will creating basslines on their own sound inspiring/good? I’ve only ever tried to messing around with electronic music with synths and 808s in garageband/logic
My tutor has me coming up with original bass lines every day right now. Treat it like drawing. Keep a sketch pad around (or a folder to save clips to in this case) and record little clips of your stuff. Learning to be creative is just like anything else as far as learning to play. It’s something you have to work on and learn to do.
Great idea and if you’re thinking about it, I’d definitely suggest giving it a go. It’s not for everyone as some folks are perfectly happy learning existing songs. Creating original music is very rewarding, but can also become frustrating at times.
I’ve mostly tried creating with guitar as I’m more familiar with the instrument, but my goal is to also come up with original bass and maybe even drums.
When coming up with rhythm guitar, I use a mix of going solo on the guitar and other times using drum patterns (usually in EZDrummer 3 or Addictive Drums 2 for which I have quite a bit of midi drums).
Even if what I’ve come up with is only short, I’ll try to open up my DAW (Reaper for me) and get the idea down. If I’ve used drums, I’ll drop the drum track in the DAW and record along with it.
You don’t have to record in a DAW, if you’re not near a computer, recording just using your phone microphone can be useful to keep an idea.
As with anything, it can take time to be confident with recording, but you have to start somewhere and the more you try, the better you will get.
If you’ve completed Beginner to Badass, you should be in a good place to get some great ideas.
You just need the 21st century version of a 4 track recorder.
GarageBand has some feature to give you tracks of variety of genres.
I have Logic Pro X but I found that GarageBand offers me plenty of flexibility for my recording. If I need extra fancy wizardries, I’d just export to Logic and go from there.
I guess there is a technical aspect and a creative aspect to making your own music.
There are many helpful apps for the more technical side, ranging from EZDrummer and similar to plug-ins that let you create guitar patterns/strums/arpeggios etc. (e.g., UJAM’s Virtual Guitarist series) and the same for piano/keys (e.g., EZKeys). All this from within a suitable DAW that has you covered from recording to mixing to mastering (with, possibly, a few more plug-ins for specific tasks).
It’s potentially much more challenging on the creative side. You could start with drum patterns, or a MIDI loop from, e.g., EZKeys, or expand on your own snippets of bass line ideas that you might have. This is a longer process and it often pays off to give this time and let ideas sit and mature. That said, there are also plug-ins and apps that can help you on the composing side, often by helping you creating good sounding chord progressions (e.g., Scaler).
Once you have all ideas collected, polished and arranged, and either programmed or played/recorded, you could view this as a demo or as the final product. That depends on your ambition level at that point. Perhaps, the programmed drums are too “stiff/artificial” and you’d rather have a human play them and record them. There are websites for that, such as Fivrr where you can find musicians who play the tracks you might be missing or want to replace. (Fivrr offers paid services; you could also go to places like Kompoz and find collaborators for free).
It’s a fun and rewarding process, and there are so many possibilities these days to arrive at really good end-products!
I can only speak for myself but it’s what inspired you to write the song. Sometimes the lyrics fall on you and then I write chords based on that, drums to follow, bass line. Maybe its a guitar riff that that you write around, or a bassline and the lyrics come last. But after I have all the pieces and parts figured out and its time to record its always drums, bass, guitar, the guitar hook, the guitar solos, vocals. Again that’s just me, I’m sure everyone has developed their own formula for the writing and for the recording.