Writing a Bass Part
Lesson 3 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Writing a Bass Part
Lesson 3 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Lessons
Introduction and What you're going to Learn
00:20 2Writing a Chord Progression
11:37 3Writing a Bass Part
10:19 4Building a Drum Beat
08:57 5Writing a Melody
17:15 6Arrangement - Part 1
14:23 7Arrangement - Part 2
19:06 8Vocal Demo Melodies
04:31Lesson Info
Writing a Bass Part
Hello and welcome to this lecture. We're going to be looking at adding a base part to our chord progression. Previously, we wrote out these chords and the chord progression was 1564 and in this key which is C major, which is all the white notes, it's CG A minor and F. So what we did is actually rearrange some of these notes by using inversions. So it's basically just changing the octaves around. So the chords sound a bit smoother. Let's just have a quick listen to this chord progression again. And then we're going to add a base part. OK. Nice and simple, very common core progression. And now we're going to add a base part. Now let's actually copy over this midi information to the base and let's open this up. So you remember we did change the order of some of these notes. So going back to here, we have one. So in this case, it's ac and with the bass part, we want it lower than this, we want a low solid note to make the soundscape a bit fuller. So let's put this down an octave and the ne...
xt one we have a G that isn't a G because remember we used inversions, we changed the order of the notes. So let's find the G here. So we have CD efg this one here. Let's put this down two octaves actually. Oh maybe too low. Just one octave. Here we go. We don't want it too low or it will just rumble and sound a bit messy, but we don't want it too high because we do want that low base sound. So I'm actually just going to mute these other notes because we might be looking at them later on. OK. The next chord is an A minor. So this note here is an A if we count up in C CD EFG A, remember we change the order with inversions. So let's just drop this down an octave and mute these other notes. And then we have the code here, which is an F so go from C CD ef this note here, drop this in octave as well. Im these other notes. Now let's play this chords back with these base notes and it should sound a lot fuller and deeper and just make a lot more sense with the bass notes as well. Because when we're using inversions, we're swapping the order of the notes, we're kind of losing that root position and the bass reaffirms that root position. So we will really want the base just to make our chords stand out stronger and sound a lot more powerful at the moment. There's not that much movement. The bass has a few different roles. It's not just about adding that lower note in the harmony. It's also about adding movement. The bass guitar is a rhythmical instrument. So we're going to add some rhythm here. There's a few different tricks and tips that we can actually do, we can actually add something called an RP. So what an ar por does is it plays all the different notes in the chord. But when there's just one note like this, it just repeats the notes and it kind of sounds like someone's playing the bass of a Plet or pick. So we can actually type this in, in the midi information like this or we can just use NARP to most digital audio workstations will have an NP. I'll show you how to do this first. It's a quick and easy way of adding some movement to your base notes. Then after we have a look in this midi editor and then manually add some movement in. So in this digital audio workstation, which is logic pro, we can easily add an arator in your daw. There should be a quick and easy way to add an arator as well. So I'm actually going to change this to eighth notes. So you can instantly hear now, it kind of sounds like that rock style bass when they're using a pick just by adding an arpege and that is literally just adding our p onto these single notes. You can add movement quickly, we can of course turn off this arator and actually add this in manually if we wish. So that was actually playing eighth notes. So you'll notice in the bar here it goes 1234 every beat of the bar. So in 44, this time signature we're in. So we have four beats, 1234 in the bar and eighth notes is just two of these notes every beat. So let's just copy these over, make sure it's in the right place. And if you do make a mistake, you can always use something called quantize, we should move the notes to the closest amount that you set. So let's play this back. Now, there we go. Same thing as playing the Arpa Gator. Well, I'm actually just going to use the Arpa Gator for now because it's just a really quick and easy way of just adding some movement to your base. So let's turn the arator back on. Now, what we're going to do is add some passing notes to the bass part. So when you're playing the bass, think of the bass guitar, when you go between one chord and another, just to make it sound a bit smoother, you can add passing notes. So if there's a big jump between the different notes, you can add notes in between this to make it sound a bit smoother and to be honest, a lot more exciting. So you might notice here, there's a big jump between these two notes here between the C and this G. So we can add a passing note really though. When we're adding a passing note, we can use notes that aren't in the chord or the scale as a passing note if it's quick. But just to be safe, we're going to use one of these notes here, which are the notes from this first chord, which is ac major. So we have this note here, which is an E and this one here, which is a G. So the second note is a G. So I wouldn't really use a G before, but we can just add an E beforehand just as a passing note to add a bit more movement to make it sound a bit smoother rather than having this big jump at the start. So let's put this back to about here. And now let's add in this E note and just change the size you can see in the bar here, it's the second half of the quarter notes. So it's an eighth note and the Arpe Gator is set to play eighth notes. So it's just going to play this note once. So let's play this section back and you'll be able to hear this passing note before it goes to the note G. There you go. It makes the bass sound a bit more interesting and it stops that big jump happening. So let's go along this here between G and A, this is quite a small distance. So we don't really need a passing note here here between A and F we could if we wanted to add a passing note. So let's add one here as well. The jump isn't too big, but just for this example, we're gonna add one. OK? So let's actually look at this chord here, which is an A minor. So these notes here is AC and an E. So here we already have AC. So you notice here that in this distance here, we only really have a G, we could go up if we wanted to and go to this note here, which is AC it won't make the distance sound smoother, but it could make it sound a bit more interesting. So let's just add AC here and let's just hear this section that works. But to be honest, I'm not going to have a passing note here because I just want to make the jumps of the distance sound a bit smoother. And going back to the start, we have this c here as well. And the distance between this first note and the last note is pretty big. So the distance between this C and this F I would add a pass note at the end as well. So between C and F, it's a big distance. So at the end, I'm going to add a passing note here as well. You could add ac but we are going to be going to the note C so I might not add that because we're going to that note anyway, in the call of F, you can see up here as we used before, which is the major third, which is an A, you could also add that as well. If you wanted to, to do that though, we will have to jump up again, which will make the jump even bigger or we can jump down. So this, it's still a big distance. Even if we have the A, we've still got an even bigger jump. Now, if we can have the A up or the A down in octave. So what I'm going to do now is add another note this time, not one that's in this triad, not one that's in these three notes. Remember we're in the scale of C major, which is all the white notes. So there are certain notes that fit better than others, even though all the white notes technically do fit. So I'm actually going to use one of the notes from the C major chord. So if you look at C major, we have ac, then we have an E, then we have a G. So let's have a look at this now. So we could have an A going down. But that is a semi toone difference. So we can get a bit of clashing when we use semitones like that. So I'm actually going to jump up to the note G. So we have a bit of movements and it's not quite as high as the note A. So let's add that now as well. And that's here, what this section sounds like going from this last chord to the first chord. Because for any chord progression, you want to make the loop work, you want to make it go round and round and round and sound seamless. OK. So there we added a note from the other chord technically still fits in this chord before. But we can also experiment with other notes. This is just a way of adding a bit of movement to your base part. So we've added rhythm with the AR P and we've added different notes with something called a passing note. So that's just a quick and easy way of adding a base part. So having a base part will add that thicker, lower harmony and it will also add some movement to your song. So in the next lecture, we're going to continue looking at writing a song. So thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
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