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In this step-by-step breakdown, I'll show you the simple tools you need to write and record a song right at your computer. Follow along, won't you? We're in for quite a ride.
STEP 1: Get the Tools You Need for Home Recording
Let’s list out a few essentials. You will need:
1. A computer
2. A guitar
3. An interface
4. Some kind of software
I’m gonna make the assumption that you have a computer. Because you are reading these words right now. If you need a guitar, there’s a lovely selection to choose from here … or here … or here.
Now onto the tech stuff: An interface is the adaptor that you plug your guitar or mike into, and then plug into your computer. It is just the device that acts as the conduit for the sound. You don’t need anything expensive or flashy. You can pick up a decent interface for $50 and up from companies like Line 6. I’ll be using Guitar Rig and Rig Kontrol because it is an audio interface and has pedals to control wah, chorus, and other effects. You can also check out something like the Apogee Duet, which has everything you need as well. Whatever you get, all you’re looking for is an interface with a guitar input, an output for your speakers, and a USB or FireWire connection.
So now, with your interface in hand, you need some recording software. Most interfaces come with recording software, so don’t go overboard and spend $1,000 on something. You can get Audacity for free and it runs on both Mac and Windows. Audacity will allow you to record live audio and import .wav and .aiff files, which is the format most of the loop companies make for when we start using loops. I’ll be using Apple’s GarageBand. It comes free on all new Macs and it is only $79 to buy. It’s an awesome application—powerful, well laid out, and very easy to use. For the price, it’s a steal. If you're using a Mac, I'd highly recommend using GarageBand, and you’ll see why as we delve in further.
STEP 2: Find the Beat
We're going to use drum loops to build your song. Not only will the loops give you a solid, endless beat to riff and create over, they are also easily altered when we get down to actually recording. But for now, we are going to use them to inspire you.
I’m talking about some hard-hitting drum loops, played by a real drummer and recorded in a studio. Turn up your monitors and these loops will knock you on your ass. Personally, I always use loops from Beta Monkey Music, a company that specializes in only making drum loops—and they are good. Pretty cheap too, for what you get.
Beta Monkey has been cool enough to give us two sets of beats and a couple fills for you to download and play around with. These are from Beta Monkey Music's Double Bass Mania II. You'll find these beats will work for almost any song you want to build. We're going to start off with a verse, chorus, and two fill beats.
Verse
Chorus
Fill 1
Fill 2
These are good, solid, straightforward beats for you to write to. Of course, you can choose whatever loops you want for your song. Shop around. If the beats you find sound good to you, then go for it. But if I can offer a piece of advice—if you are going to spend money on loops, make sure they are played by a real person.
So download these free beats and start sketching out some parts. Don't get frustrated if what you start playing doesn't grab you right away as the best guitar riff since "Walk This Way." This is a process and it will take some time. Just keep playing, and there will be a nugget in there somewhere that you can work with. Set aside a little time each day to play along and jot down some parts.
STEP 3: Lay Down the Drum Track
Hopefully by now you've cranked up the beats and your amp, and come up with a few ideas. Why? Because now we're gonna record 'em! Me, I'll be following along with you, writing a song myself as we go.
You have four Beta Monkey Music drum loops to choose from, and those are all we need to build a basic song. Once you get used to doing this, you can easily put 10 or more loops in one song, but it’s not necessary—unless you want it to be. Use whatever sounds good to your ears, no more, no less.
To start out, the drum loop we are going to use this time is the one labeled “Verse.” Here’s what to do: Open a new project in GarageBand (or whatever software you are using) and drag the “Verse” loop on the project window. You’ll notice that the loop automatically creates a new track and places itself in that track.
Now we need to loop that for a few minutes. Just hover your mouse over the end of the beat in GarageBand and you’ll notice it turns into a rounded arrow. When you see that, click and drag the loop until you’re comfortable that you have enough time to play.
We are only using one loop right now because at this stage, all we're looking for is some inspiration for the song. We’re just gonna get the beat going, click play and record, and have at it. No pressure, just playing. What we are really doing here is sketching, loose and fun, on a disposable audio canvas. What you come up with could be the verse or chorus or any kind of usable idea. It doesn’t really matter what it is, just as long as we have something to work with.
You can make the beat as fast or slow as you’d like. Find a tempo that’s comfortable for your playing level and go with that. I’m going to use 120 beats per minute. I find that a good rocking tempo for the music I like to play, but it’s also a comfortable enough pace that I am not racing to keep up.
Now, with the drum part looped, let’s create an audio track for your guitar and get you plugged in and cranked up. Depending on what interface you are using, you will need to choose Input 1 or Input 2. Give the guitar a strum to check that you are getting a signal into your software before you start recording.
At this point, you can take a minute to set your guitar tone. You can use software applications like Guitar Rig or AmpliTube to shape your tone, or you can use a good ol’ stompbox like the Line 6 Pod X3 Live. I’ll be using the Digitech RP500 digital stompbox.
So now you have your beat picked out and loaded in, you have your guitar plugged into your computer, and you have selected your tone. Now click Record. You should hear your drum loop playing and if you strum a chord, you should hear and see your guitar recording in the audio track.
Start playing to the beat. It doesn’t matter what you play at this point, you are just looking for a combination of chords that will become the basis of a song. Here is the most important thing: Don’t worry about making mistakes. Don’t stop playing. Don’t shut off the recording. Just keep going.
As promised, here is the MP3 of me doing the same thing you are doing. You can hear quite a few mistakes in there, but as I go along, you can hear that I start to zero in on an idea.
After you find that little sliver of music that you like—and it can be a whole chord progression, or even just a few seconds—you can start to flesh it out as you’re playing. Keep at it, and that will take us into Step 4.
STEP 4: Tighten Up Your Guitar Track
I hope you were able to come up with something useful while playing with the drum loops. If it takes you a few times, don’t worry about it. Let it take as long as it takes. If you’ve gone through the exercise from the last step and have a rhythm that you like, you are ready to move on. What we are going to do now is narrow down the section of guitar that you chose to use and work on that a bit.
As you can see in the audio clip and screenshot above, I chose a total of 16 seconds that I’m going to work with for my song. You don’t need a lot, just something that grabs you.
I am going to use the part I chose as the verse―it just seems to have that cool beat that a singer can rock out to. I will also use a variation of that same clip as the intro of the song. Using it as the intro gives listeners a recognizable theme when you cut into the chorus.
You may think that using the same chords for the chorus and verse is a bad thing to do and sometimes it is, but other times it works. What will make it sound different is the way I strum the chords. This is a nice trick when writing a song that allows you to use a cool beat and keep the theme of your song. I’ll do it this way just to make things flow a bit better.
Now that I have the verse and chorus sections worked out, I am ready to start piecing things together.
You’ll notice in the clip I included that I go from strumming A and G in the chorus to a hanging D at the end. That gives the listener a heads-up that a change is coming. In the intro, that change goes into the verse―this is where the singer will start when we finish writing the music.
After a couple of bars of the verse, I go back to that hanging D (yes, another change is on the way) and head into an eight second bridge. Keeping things easy, the bridge is G, A, G, and a hanging D and then into the chorus.
Notice how I put that hanging D at the end of everything I do―it’s a good effect that works when transitioning to different parts. You don’t have to write a lot of chord changes to make a great sounding song. It’s the way you play them and the changes that you put in the song that makes it memorable. Look at songs like the Troggs’ "Wild Thing" as a classic example. Three main chords and it’s one of the most recognized songs in rock.
We’re still not at the point where you have to have everything really tight. Play around with your chord progressions to make the parts of the songs that you will need. I’m using a pretty standard verse, bridge, chorus layout, but you can do a verse, verse, bridge chorus, or anything else that you want.
When you have your layout done, it’s time to record your new guitar part over the drum loops. Still no need to worry about the other loops at this point, you want to get the guitar down first.
Mute the original track that you had and make a new audio track. Make sure it is getting a signal from your guitar and click record. All you need here is to run through the intro, verse, bridge, and chorus. If you can do it a couple of times, that’s even better, but practice getting through those parts.
Now sit back and listen to it. That’s 20 or 30 seconds of a song that you did. This is all yours and that is something to be proud of.
STEP 5: Give Your Song Some Structure
If you listen to what you have so far, your song may sound kind of bland. That’s okay though―until now we weren’t really concerned with flare as much as getting the ideas out of our head.
What we’re going to do next is fairly simple, but it will change the sound of your song dramatically. With the structure of the song done, we are going to add drum fills and a chorus groove to the sound. What this will effectively do is break the song up into different sections, but if it’s done right, it will actually make the song flow more. That may sound like a contradiction, but it’s not.
Take a listen to any of your favorite songs and you’ll notice transitions in the song that take it from verse to pre-chorus to chorus and back again. You may be used to listening only to the guitar, but this time listen to the transitions from the bass and drums too.
Some of the changes may be subtle―sometimes just a snare hit or a bass turnaround, but they are there. That’s what we’re going to do today.
What you may not realize is that in the last step of building this masterpiece, we actually already laid out the places where the drum fills and chorus grooves will go. So, let’s get started.
Remember when we laid out the drums and we looped them across the entire song? Time to undo that. It was just a placeholder until we got to where we are now. In GarageBand hover the mouse over the end of the drum loop until it turns into a circular arrow and drag it back toward the beginning of the song.
The intro of my song starts on bar three and ends at 11. I’m going to stop the loop one bar before the intro of the song. Why, you ask? To leave room for the fill we are going to insert.
What we are going to do here is place the fill at bar 10 and let it run until bar 11. When the fill ends, we will pick up the verse drum groove again. Your project should now look like this:
And sound like this:
Doesn’t that sound much better? A little fill to break up the song makes all the difference. It let’s the listener know that something is about to happen and it does―we head into the verse.
The next break in the song is on bar 18 where we purposely left that hanging D chord. This is where we transition from the verse and into the chorus. Let’s grab the second drum fill and place it at bar 18―it will extend perfectly to bar 19 where the pre-chorus starts.
Just one more step: We are going to add the drum groove for the pre-chorus and chorus and then we’ll play the song and see what we have. The pre-chorus starts at bar 19―we are going to use the same drum loop that is in the verse for this. Because we have a nice transition with the drum fill, we can use the same loop, but still have it sound different.
At bar 23, the chorus begins and that’s where we will use our chorus groove. Now your project should look something like this:
And sound like this:
Play around with your arrangement a little and put the drum grooves and fills where they suit your song. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
STEP 6: Add Verses to Your Song
What you’re going to do now is take your different parts and repeat them, so you will have more than one verse and one chorus. For simplicity we’ll assume our song has an intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, break, chorus, chorus. That should give us a song in the 3:00 to 3:30 minute range.
This is where you are really going to see why GarageBand is so good. In the track menu of GarageBand there is a menu item called “Show Arrange Track.” Click that and you will notice a grey bar that gets inserted above the audio and drum tracks. It’s easy to spot because there is a “+” sign beside.
If you click the “+” it will put a blue highlighted bar in your track. Basically, the blue bar designates the part of the song it is over as a complete section. So the first part of my arrange window is for the intro―you can drag the Arrange Track highlighter to be wherever you want, thus designating a section.
If you double click the blue arrange bar you can name it as I’ve done with mine.
Click the “+” again and another arrange highlighted section will appear. If you setup the song like I did with the fill sections between each part, it’s easy to tell where you need to stop the arrange highlighter. So you need to go from the beginning of the verse to the beginning of the chorus.
Click the “+” two more times and label your entries as pre-chorus and chorus.
Here’s the cool part. After the first chorus, you are going to want another verse, right. Copy and pasting individual files is a real pain and luckily we don’t have to do that. Because we made the Arrange Track we can just click and hold on one of the arrange sections and copy it to another place in the song.
Click and hold the mouse button down and while you’re dragging hold down the option key. This will make an exact copy of your verse with all of the guitar parts and drums in place and ready to be played.
Do the same thing for the pre-chorus and chorus sections. Now double up the chorus at the end and you have a song that a singer can lay down a vocal track too.
There are only two more things we need to do before you invite the drummer and the rest of the band back in to jam your new song. Add bass and a space for a guitar solo.
STEP 7: Add a Bass Track
When I demo a song for my band, I like to have it as complete as possible. That means I want to have drums, a bass track, and vocals. The fact that I don't own a bass doesn't stop me from getting a bass track into my song.
The first way is to use bass loops, but I find that difficult because the loops don’t always match the song that I wrote. The second way is to add a virtual bass instrument and play the bass track on a keyboard. I play keyboard worse than bass, so that’s not really an option either.
What I do is play the bass track using my guitar and a pitch shifter. It sounds enough like a bass for a demo and then I’m able to give the guys a good idea of how the song will sound.
A pitch shifter is an effect pedal that allows you to change the pitch of your instrument. Most will let you do coarse and fine adjustments so you can dial in the sound you really want. In this case we want to shift the pitch of our guitar way down so it sounds more like a bass.
Here’s what to do:
1. Plug your guitar to your audio interface or computer as you normally would. Nothing is really going to change with your physical setup.
2. Open your music recording application and add a track. I use GarageBand, so I’ll open that.
3. Now you’ll need a pitch shifter. I’m going to use an application from IK Multimedia called AmpliTube. It has many different amps and effects including a pitch shifter.
4. In the AmpliTube stompbox section add a pitch shifter.
5. Turn the coarse knob on the pedal down twelve steps or one octave.
Depending on the product you use, you can also add a bass amp to give it a bit more thump and realistic sound. I’ve added a bass amp from AmpliTube SVX just to add some depth to the sound.
Now, since you wrote the guitar track, you know what chords the song uses. Instead of playing the chords, you are just going to play one note for the bass track. So, in my song I play A, G, and D chords in the song. For the bass track I tried a one finger note on the low E 5th fret, 3rd fret, and the D note of the 5th fret of the A string.
Okay, record enable the new track that you made labeled “Bass” and get ready. Press Record and play along with the song using your one note bass.
This is by no means a replacement for a real bass track. I would highly recommend you have a bass player do a track for your finished song, but this is a really cool way to add a bass to your song without having a bass.
I pumped the volume up a little bit on the bass just so you could hear it. Don’t worry about any mistakes you make, it doesn’t have to be perfect—you’re just looking for enough to show the band your new song.
STEP 8: Wrap Up Your Song
You don’t yet have vocals or guitar solo in your song, but that’s not hard to add. In the last step where we laid out the different parts of the song’s verse, pre-chorus and chorus, you can just add a section for the solo.
As for the vocals―I’m probably the worst singer on the face of the earth, so I don’t do singing. When I get to the point that we are now with a song, I’ll send it to my writing partner and he’ll come up with the lyrics. He’ll come down to the studio and rattle off a couple of quick takes and that pretty much wraps up the process.
That’s when it’s time to bring the band back together and take a listen to what you’ve come up with. This is where you decide if you want to pursue the song and take it to the next level of jamming it out and generally tidying it up.
It’s important to note that I let everyone have the freedom to come up with their own parts for the song. The drummer doesn’t have to play the exact fills that I laid out in the song; those are just a guide. Same with the bass player―the reason you have these guys playing in your band is because they are good at what they do, right?
I really hope you had fun going through the process of laying out a song on the computer. Remember to have fun doing it. Technology is just another tool, like your guitar or amp, to help you write and create music.