bass THEN drums?

WEBCYAN

WEBCYAN

New member
here's my situation...

70% of my songs are written on bass. I then build guitar in layers over that providing lots of good counter melody.
I write the bass to a click track and then put the guitar over that.
My drummer then takes the guitar track and plays drums over it to the click track. THEN i add in bass in time with the kick drum.

2 problems with this. 1 is that the drummer gets a pathetic feel for the songs. there are parts with minimal guitar but heavy bass and if hes playing over just guitar that feeling is lost. another problem is on my side. Without the bass first I tend to not have a very concise view of the overall structure.

can i do this...?

what i would like to do is record the bass and guitar to a click track, then have my drummer play over the bass and guitars using that same click track.

Is it all that important to always play to the kick? If I play in time to the click track well enough on bass and then the drummer does his thing over that would it still gel?

If so it would make everything ALOT better.
i mean, there are plenty of songs where the bass seems to not stay with the kick at all and it just does its own thing but still sounds fine.
 
WEBCYAN said:

Is it all that important to always play to the kick?
Click to expand...

No, I dont think so.

I have found that the best songs get written with the song, the songmelody as a base. Alternativly on a piano. Many songs that start their life on guitars and sometimes on bass get a little lifeless as if the singing is too much second in command to the guitar. I do think that bass is a better starting point than guitars though. It sucks that I play guitar and not piano...
 
thanks.
i understood the first sentence but then you totally lost me. ;)

but the more i do think about it the less important i think it is to even try to play only to the kick.
 
I think the most important element would be a consensus and familariity on the dymamics of the song itself. Once this is know by the drums, bass, git and whatever. the song can be recorded with the lackey beginings of a click track. The rhythm stays the same and the dynamics (ie the intentisty/volume/cold stops/flavors) can be cut around the kick without becoming a slave to it. Get the timing down and the insensity and any stops and fills then go back and make it real. All sparked by a solid click-timing track that includes the kick and the, very basic and dumped on the final mix, bass.

How is that?

Theron.
 
WEBCYAN said:
but the more i do think about it the less important i think it is to even try to play only to the kick.
Click to expand...

I think the kick & bass need to work together but
DO NOT need to be the same. You can have kick
and bass play off eachother the same way a
guitar & piano do.
 
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