Studio One Improvisation

Let me take you with me – on my journey of creating new beats each day. In this video you can see my usual workflow of having one idea, starting off with just one instrument and then layering multiple tracks beneath the original one.

Tuned Percussion

In this loop, the Marimba plays the fundamental part. I was playing around and really loved the crappy sound of this instrument.

Drums

For the drums, I have chosen to go with a really simple MIDI drum beat. At the end of every 4 bars, there is a Fill-In, which just consists of a few consecutive snare hits.
Furthermore, I have added some slight reverb to give them a little more space.

Lead

For the lead, as I was not planning on fiddling around all too much with the instruments in this one, I just went with the first instrument I tried, which was the Foghorn from LABS. It has a really breathy sound, but also gives me some of that iconic saw tooth synth character. The riff that i chose for this loop was the first one I recorded, and I think it is really catchy.

Strings/Pads

The strings really do not do anything special in this case. They just play each chord of the ones that I used in this loop. You can pretty much just use any type of pad.

Bass

The bass probably is a little bit more interesting. There are a few things that come to my mind here:

• When recording the bass, it is helpful to remember the current chord that is being played and to really feel the vibe that the current part of the song gives you. When keeping that in mind, it becomes easier to come up with a way of choosing the right notes for your bass and the rhythm of it.
• So what I like to do when improvising bass lines is to transpose the MIDI channel one octave up in order to more precisely be able to hear the pitch of the notes you are playing. Sometimes the bass notes can be a little tricky to differentiate between, when playing really low notes. After getting a good take, you can simply transpose the MIDI track back down and voilà – you are left with a great bass line.