More songwriting: Highland Fugue
First up, the song! (I’m not going to do a recipe blog style thing where you have to read everything before getting to the bit you’re really after. 😛)
And now, the backstory!
At the end of last year/beginning of this year I put together a song called Sans Metronome, I definitely learnt a lot about mastering and getting the song to actually fit together properly, but listening to it back again after a month or so I realised it was too… upbeat for my usual taste in music (by far the biggest overall genre of music in my iTunes library is metal of some sort). I’m definitely not at the stage where I could play guitar or drums well enough to write a legit metal song, but I’ve always loved the sound of the minor key and wanted to do something a little closer to what I normally listen to.
I was mucking around with my MIDI keyboard with the extremely large selection of synth sounds in the Alchemy plugin in Logic Pro when I came across one called Cathedral Fugue:
Rather than being a single sound, it was arpeggiated so you’d press a single key on the keyboard and then starting from that root note it would play through a bar of 16th notes, and I absolutely loved the progression. I spent probably a couple of hours listening and playing it back on the keyboard trying to transcribe it into individual notes, and decided that I should build a song around it. I’m not good at all on the keyboard so I wasn’t going to attempt to actually play it for real, so I manually put the notes into the MIDI editor in Logic Pro and quickly realised I needed a few different variants to keep the song interesting.
After that I delved into Superior Drummer 3‘s library of MIDI grooves and fills just to put some placeholder drums in to play along to — not only does it have the actual drum sounds but it comes with a big selection of preset grooves that you can just drop into your DAW. I discovered while doing this that they’ve done a really clever thing and each “family” of presets has a number of different variants, each of increasing intensity, so you can mix and match and make your drums get more and more complex as the song goes on:
I had a lot of fun playing around with this and really getting a solid progression going as the song went through.
Next up was the bass guitar which I did a bunch of fiddling around with and then settled on a chugging rhythm mostly on A with a three note walk-up every second bar, then jumping to F then E, and a less chuggy rhythm for the chorus.
After that was recording the guitar, which I’m not hugely good at and it was just rhythm anyway since the “lead” role was already taken by the Cathedral Fugue preset. The song was in A minor and I went for a i-iv-V-i progression with a replacement of the V chord with a VI-V every second-ish repeat through.
Logic Pro’s “Flex and Follow” option was a god-send here, my timing is definitely getting better but it still wasn’t 100% for guitar or bass, and Flex and Follow analyses the beat of the audio you’ve recorded and just slightly massages it to fit against the actual project BPM so it all sits perfectly.
At this point I had a bit of a play around with a number of other synth sounds in Alchemy because the Cathedral Fugue sound wasn’t quite doing it for me. I kept the notes I had already written but flipped through the presets, and stumbled upon one called “Highlands Bagpipe Ensemble” which I immediately loved and really made the whole song click together. This inspired the final name of the song too, “Fugue” from the original Cathedral Fugue arpeggiation, and “Highland” because it sounds sort of bagpipes-ish.
Then finally I decided I should really actually record myself playing the drums instead of just having dropped a bunch of preset MIDI grooves in. I did really like the grooves themselves though, so I sat down and looked at the MIDI notes in Logic Pro and transcribed them and over the course of multiple sessions managed to actually play them back:
It wasn’t too bad at the beginning where the grooves and fills were simpler, but towards the end (like in the screenshots above) they were doing things completely out of the standard rock groove that I’m used to that at one point it took me a solid two hours just to get sixteen bars recorded because my hands and feet were just not cooperating. I recorded each section in chunks because there was absolutely no way in hell I was going to be able to just play along to the whole thing, and each section took generally between 10-15 looped takes until I got something that was correct. You can see in the full screenshot of Logic Pro here how the “Drums” track at the bottom is split up into each groove and fill section:
I had to go through and tweak a number of note positions because they were too far off the timing grid, but by and large I’m pretty happy with how little I did need to change! I didn’t need to do the full quantise option to squash everything into the nearest 16th note either. 😁
The very final step was mastering, and I used a compressor plugin for the first time (on the drums), gave everything a good solid listening through over and over again, changed the positioning of a few of the crash cymbals so the drums flowed better, then made sure it sounded good across headphones, through the guitar amp, as well as the HomePod and our big subwoofer system in the lounge room.
I think this is definitely the best song I’ve done so far, and I’m going to keep practicing some of those Superior Drummer 3 grooves and fills to keep in my repertoire in future because they sound great. And this was just one single family of grooves, there are tons more, but I think I have more than enough here to keep me busy for a goodly while. 😅
