Groove, arrangement and multi/tracking
> Developing your rhythmic feel > Isolating parts > Layering > Recording over backing tracks
In the second part of the Songzap for Pianists blog series, we’ll focus on timing, groove and the art of layering parts, particularly from a rhythmic perspective. We’ll play to and off the click, and develop piano grooves that interact with Songzap’s Groove Designer beats. We’ll listen to the left hand as a bass part and examine its relationship to kick drum patterns; and we’ll focus in on right-hand parts as rhythmic stabs, chops or licks that feed off, support and complement the snare and hi-hat syncopation. This kind of thinking will lead us to approach the construction of piano riffs from a different – quite rhythmic – perspective, which could inspire your compositional options. Finally, we’ll take this framework and apply it to existing backing tracks, coming up with piano parts that interact with musical elements found within the arrangement. And we’ll use Songzap’s import and Tracking features to record and develop original but complimentary piano overdubs over existing songs.
Playing to a metronome and/or drum beat, and developing your rhythmic feel
Metronomes are quite misunderstood. I have heard all sorts of comments from up-and-coming musicians about click-tracks, many of them projecting a kind of phobia about what a regular percussive sound may do to their natural ‘groove’. This is myth of course, and most professional musicians will tell you that they develop their groove around a metric pulse, playing with other musicians, or locking in on a fantastic drummer (if you’re lucky to be around one). So, I’d say that your groove ‘signature’ is about how you interact with rhythm – not ignore it – and it’s that uniqueness in feel balanced against a good level of consistency that makes people want to play (or record) with you.
Songzap’s ecosystem is a great environment to practise and develop your rhythmic consistency and unique groove. At the very minimum, you can just use it as a multi-track recorder with an embedded metronome, where you can track (record) your practice and then reflect on your developing performances by analysing your timing. But metronomes can be turned into funky things, if you play around them. Have a look at this groove nugget from master bassist Carol Kaye. See how she makes the click swing? You can imagine and count in your own “one” against a metronome’s pulse, effectively “moving” the click to a different position in your envisioned bar. In the following video, you’ll see me “transposing” Songzap’s click to the off-beat, playing a piano riff that makes the metronome feel like a backbeat. Try experimenting with further such rhythmic transpositions.
Commanding the placement of the click diversifies your rhythmic vocabulary and develops your rhythmic independence and consistency, qualities that are essential when playing with other musicians and recording against pre-recorded elements. (For a more advanced type of metronome, check out RT Sixty’s Atomic, which adds a plethora of cool features to enhance your rhythmic practice…)
Speaking of playing or recording with others, this is where Songzap’s Groove Designer comes in handy. In the previous blog post, I played renditions of the same jazz-blues idea on piano, bass and synth against a beat made with the Groove Designer. Here are the steps deconstructed to build that same drum pattern:
However, the magic of the Groove Designer is that it can be easily modified, quickly and intuitively giving you loads of viable variations. And, you guessed it, beat variations are a great way to practise, challenge and develop your rhythmic feel. So, using Songzap’s Groove Designer here as a virtual drummer, we’ll produce a bunch of patterns, analyse them and then try and come up with piano parts that work with them. This is how most riffs are born: coming up with parts that complement and interact with a song’s drum groove. (See this link for a cool description from Dave Grohl about how he comes up with guitar riffs from the perspective of a drummer…)
Isolating parts for recording, reflection and analysis
The beauty of having access to an easily customisable in-built virtual drummer next to your multitrack recorder, is that you can capture the results of your ‘groove’ jams (on any instrument) and then reflect on and analyse your performances. This should form a daily practice routine for every musician in their lifelong learning, and – as we keep preaching here – practising an instrument and practising recording it should go hand-in-hand. It makes you rhythmically (and tonally) more consistent, it provides you with evolving content to analyse throughout your journey and it prepares you for all sorts of professional scenarios, from recording in a studio to performing live over backing tracks and electronics.
If you’ve been playing for a while, you probably come up with complex and/or syncopated left/right rhythm parts in one go, straight after you first hear a drum groove. This may be instinctual, stemming from your years of training. But if you’re at an earlier stage in your learning journey (and even if you’re not), it may be helpful to break down left and right-hand parts, develop them separately, record them individually and progressively put them together. In the next video you can watch me break down a riff, and practice each hand separately. You’d be surprised how many relatively advanced keyboard players realise that they have a tendency of lagging behind or rushing ahead with one hand, only once they find themselves in a recording studio scenario; and it’s often a producer’s job to identify and isolate the issue, and make the player aware so they can move on with an improved groove. Practising and recording left and right-hand parts separately also allows you to focus on the drum parts/sounds that should anchor you, not dissimilar to how a bass player locks in to a drummer’s kick drums for example – essential in many eras and styles of music. Work on your hands separately against a variety of drum grooves and you’ll discover amazing rhythmic improvement, as well as unique piano rhythms that you haven’t thought of before.
Layering and compositional approaches
This brings us to the notion of increased creative potential! When coming up with piano parts, you can feed off any instrument for ideas. Is the bassline a catchy hook, holding the song down and propelling it forwards? What can our left hand do? Mirror it, support it, avoid it, play against it? What about the right hand? Comp off the left hand, as we did in the previous blog post, or play with it? What inversions, register or voice-leading works for the song, style or particular context? Think about the creative space here as a canvas within a frame. You are both limited and inspired by what the other instruments are doing. They provide variables, or anchor points, in between which you are free to create. And the best way to explore the possibilities is by developing, tracking and reflecting upon recorded ideas. Working out parts inspired by rhythms or grooves is a great way to compose riffs or hooks.
Try creating a pool of riffs and recording them for future reference (in the next blog post in the series we’ll explore structure, so having variations of musical ideas will come in handy). What happens if you create a ‘gear-change’ in the rhythmical busy-ness of your riff? Perhaps, drag the hi-hat control of the Groove Designer to the right to add sixteenths to the drum pattern, and create a variation in your piano part that reflects that to some extent. Or transpose your piano hook to a new chord, and explore key changes. As you move things around, the modular/harmonic movement will start sounding like a song part, whilst keeping a consistent rhythmic signature.
In the previous blog post, we also explored a constructed three-hand performance (bass, chords and melody on the piano). What else can we do with layering? And if you happen to own other keyboards (or a keyboard with multiple sounds), what about layering a range of sounds in different registers over your main piano part? A classic combo might be: held Hammond organ chords over piano parts in the chorus, for example. See the next video for a demonstration of some of these ideas.
Recording piano parts over backing tracks
In this final section, we’ll import a track already created externally and bring it into Songzap to experiment with new piano parts for it. To import an external track, you will first need to upload it to your iCloud account.
It helps if you already know the tempo of the track you want to import, so make sure you create a new song in Songzap, then go to the Groove page and set your new song’s bpm to match that of the track that you’re aiming to import (your imported track should be trimmed to an exact bar start – not anything random – for perfect alignment). Of course, you can just import an external track without matching its tempo to that of Songzap, but you won’t be able to use the in-built metronome (or add Groove Designer beats) in sync to it when recording keys parts.
Note: Depending on the nature of the imported track, additional rhythmic elements may be helpful to aid the recording, especially if the external production is not very percussive (an ambient track, for example, or a track featuring sections without drums).
In the following video, you can watch me import one of my own productions (made externally) into a new song in Songzap, match the bpm and check the synchronisation of the in-built metronome against it. You can create a new song in Songzap by tapping the Plus button at the top of the front page, and change the tempo of your new song from the top-right of the Groove page notation screen (the song tempo and time signature cannot be changed after recordings have been made, so it’s important to do this at the very start). The track I’ll be importing is in 4/4, so I won’t be changing the time signature from its default setting; but feel free to do so, should your external track be in a different time signature.
The next step is to go to the Tracking page and tap on the Import (Audio) button. You will be presented with a menu offering three options: ‘High-Speed Bounce’, ‘Import from iCloud’ and ‘Cancel’. Choose the second option, which will import your external track (stored on your iCloud account) onto Track 4 in Songzap (you will get a warning that any existing audio recorded onto Track 4 will be overwritten, but this is not an issue if you’re working on a new song). Once your external track is imported, the fun can begin…
You can mute or lower the volume of the Groove Designer drums playing alongside your imported track by bringing down the drum-mix volume fader near the bottom-right of the Tracking page. Or you can switch to the Mixer page and lower the individual drum faders one by one. Don’t be surprised, however, if you like how the Groove Designer beats and your external track interact. For this example, I’ll mute the internal drums completely, because I’ve imported a pretty percussive external track. But tapping on the Metronome button at the top-right of the Tracking page will let us check that all is in sync, even without any additional beats. (You’ll notice that there is a breakdown section later in my imported track, where the metronome will come in super-handy.)
Now, the creative part… Let’s imagine that the producer of the track has asked you to come up with complementary keyboard parts for it. How do you go about it? The first task is to listen (and ask for direction or musical references). What elements exist in the track that can act as a springboard for ideas? Just as we created left- and right-hand parts earlier inspired by the different drum parts of our Groove Designer beat, so can we zoom in – with our mind’s ear – to the beats, bass and other elements of a pre-produced track. There are no rights or wrongs here (as long as we play in tune and in time), and there are possibly as many potential piano parts for a song as there are piano players – every one of us will come up with something unique in some way, even if we play within the same stylistic frame and interact with similar elements from the song’s instrumentation.
In the video below, you’ll notice that the hip-hop nature of the drum beat in my imported track inspired me to play a low – and somewhat sparse – left-hand bassline that locks with the bass drum pattern. My right-hand part is also sparse, mirroring the snare and hi-hat patterns rhythmically, though the velocity of the piano stabs varies to create a dynamic that favours the snare. Of course, I had to work out the chord sequence of the track first and study what the synth bass was doing, both in terms of register as well as its motif. Although the register of the left-hand piano part is low, I made sure that it ‘sits’ with the synth bass tonally, doesn’t overcomplicate it melodically and hits the bass-drum pattern, too. So, even a simple, foundational two-hand riff like this takes many rhythmic, harmonic, melodic and dynamic elements into consideration. But what about variation? Even for a cyclical production like this, the new keyboard parts have got to remain sensitive to the overall – or macro – dynamic of the piece, so they don’t end up becoming too repetitive. Altering small details can go a long way – here are a few things I tried for this (which you can hear in the video):
- Alternating between left- and right-hand parts for different sections of the song
- ‘Gear-changing’ the right-hand stabs from quarters to eighths (sometimes even triplets) based on what the top-end percussion was doing in the track (the hi-hats, rides and shakers), as well as any structural shifts
- Increasing the velocity of my playing for choruses (or “B” sections), and decreasing them for verses (or “A” sections)
- Coming up with a much more legato, rhythmically sparser and altogether different part for the breakdown section (this is where the metronome came in handy, as there was no obvious percussive reference in this section of the track)
- Layering some fun soloing improvisations and an organ part to help the evolution of the piece!
Try something similar by importing your own choice of track into Songzap, record left- and right-hand parts (together or separately) and overdub additional layers. And remember: always focus on groove, using every rhythmical tool at your disposal as a reference – beats, metronomes and funky, syncopated instrumentation.
See you in the next post, for more on song structure, dynamics and composition. Keep recording and practising!