Next in my series of dumb questions.......
As a means of educating myself and learning to use my DAW and work on my recording technique, I have entered into a collaboration with a friend of mine to try to produce an album.
I am doing the engineering, and providing the music and arrangement. (I think I'm wearing too many hats on this). I own the equipment and play bass, guitar, keyboards. I'm lousy at writing lyrics!
He has great ideas and writes lyrics, but plays no instruments. Due to this, he has a hard time grasping the ideas of key center and pitch, and the organization of tempo based measures and arrangement.
A typical project goes something like this:
-He will bring a snippet of a melody that he has recorded on his cell phone, which I transfer to an audio track as a reference.
-I determine a tempo for the song and try to determine a key from something that sounds distinctly atonal to me.
-I'll record another track with piano chords, or a synth pad so that he has a tone or key reference to sing to.
-We record a vocal guide track accompanied by the piano track.
-I end up with a phrase that is most often off key or doesn't follow the chord changes, and may end up being something like nine bars in length. (4/4 time).
-By the time I end up pitch correcting the hell out of it, and chopping it up so that it's eight bars in length, the feel is lost, or least very different from the original idea.
-It takes hours and hours to make progress and complete a song with a LOT of frustration in the process.
Although I'm learning a lot, I'm rapidly reaching the point where I want to tell him to buy a cheap keyboard or guitar and learn to recognize a unison, third, fourth and fifth, and to be able to hear and feel when to change chords, like after four or eight bars for example. A rough idea of an arrangement would help a lot as well, both in terms of writing the accompaniment and being able to easily edit.
I realize this is venting, but any ideas on how to handle this?
As a means of educating myself and learning to use my DAW and work on my recording technique, I have entered into a collaboration with a friend of mine to try to produce an album.
I am doing the engineering, and providing the music and arrangement. (I think I'm wearing too many hats on this). I own the equipment and play bass, guitar, keyboards. I'm lousy at writing lyrics!
He has great ideas and writes lyrics, but plays no instruments. Due to this, he has a hard time grasping the ideas of key center and pitch, and the organization of tempo based measures and arrangement.
A typical project goes something like this:
-He will bring a snippet of a melody that he has recorded on his cell phone, which I transfer to an audio track as a reference.
-I determine a tempo for the song and try to determine a key from something that sounds distinctly atonal to me.
-I'll record another track with piano chords, or a synth pad so that he has a tone or key reference to sing to.
-We record a vocal guide track accompanied by the piano track.
-I end up with a phrase that is most often off key or doesn't follow the chord changes, and may end up being something like nine bars in length. (4/4 time).
-By the time I end up pitch correcting the hell out of it, and chopping it up so that it's eight bars in length, the feel is lost, or least very different from the original idea.
-It takes hours and hours to make progress and complete a song with a LOT of frustration in the process.
Although I'm learning a lot, I'm rapidly reaching the point where I want to tell him to buy a cheap keyboard or guitar and learn to recognize a unison, third, fourth and fifth, and to be able to hear and feel when to change chords, like after four or eight bars for example. A rough idea of an arrangement would help a lot as well, both in terms of writing the accompaniment and being able to easily edit.
I realize this is venting, but any ideas on how to handle this?
From what you said, your friend's "melody" is barely anything. Maybe take his lyrics, develop your own chord structure, then see if he can come to a melody for what you have put together.
