Wait a minute. Maybe I'm misunderstanding here...if that's not a recording, how you are you doing all that at one time?
It's a Roland Keyboard .... an XP60 that has a sequencer built in.
And once I have the seq. done it's saved on 31/2" floppy discs ..... I have them alphabetized and on a gig I grab say, the A-B disc .... stick it in, scroll to the song I want ( about 30 per disc and my current songlist runs around 650 songs) and press play. The sequencer runs the MIDI files which trigger the keyboard to produce sounds.
It's capable of 64 'event's' at one time so you can have up to 64 sounds whether bass/snare/kick/glopckenspiel occur at one instant.
So if you had 64 fingers you could sit on that keyboard and play this live .... it's the same thing, the MIDI track is triggering the sounds same as if pressing a key was triggering the sounds.
Keyboard goes into the PA.
So when I'm programing a seq. like I did last night, I have the keyboard sitting there and the first thing I do is call up the drum set I use on my gigs.
I use the same set on ALL my gigging tracks for consistency and in general, it's the best sounding set it has.
So a different drum is assigned to each key.
First thing I did on this was an 8 bar section of bass drum. A kick that will generally run throughout the song.
Then I added hi-hat and snare and a cymbal or two.
Then I copied that 8 bars enough times to be as long as the song will be.
But it's monotonous since it's just 8 bars of the same thing over and over. Plus there are places in this song where it might need an extra measure or two for a turn-around.
So I go thru and program some fills at appropriate times and at turn-arounds and such ...... I might delete some of the drums in spots because I want a section with a different feel like you'll notice right before it fades out .... that section there is for soloing so I wanted it to be a little different. I only faded it out because none of you wants to hear an entire track of backing tracks .... but I don't use fade outs on gigs ... all my sequences have actual endings.
Then I do things like that intro part ..... and oddities where I might need an extra measure here and there so I just insert them where I want them (they're blank ) and copy other measures to them or do that measure from scratch.
That's why if you had the entire seq. you'd notice a couple of the fills are the same ..... no real reason to spend the time doing something different at each one .... even real drummers might use the same fill more than once in a song.
Then, once I had the drums I did a bass line ...... on some songs once I have a verse I'll just copy the bass for other verses ..... something like Jimmy Buffett you don't need to have a lot of variation.
Last night I actually did the bass all the way thru so it's never the exact same.
Then I didn't want it quite so minimal so I added an organ .... the organ is mixed back ...... more to fill in than to be heard.
I mix all my gigging tracks where it's mostly drums and bass and anything else is way back ..... I want people to listen to what
I'm doing and not the seq. The sequence is there to allow me to play but I work very hard to distance myself from karaoke so I never do cheesy over-produced tracks with horn sections and shit.
If there's a part the song needs I try to treat things as if I'm a 3 or 4 piece band ..... how would I cover it if I only had 4 players to do it ..... forces me to have my own arrangement .... another way to not be karaoke.
I've gotten pretty good at doing drum tracks .... this took me a couple hours but it's a fairly complicated track.
And now, as I do it on gigs I'll refine it ...... I'll notice some fill feels awkward and I'll change it or maybe a cymbal needs to be louder or softer or not even there .... maybe I want a splash instead of that particular crash etc. ..... I can ever go back and decide I hit the key too hard for one bass guitar note and go in and change the velocity to bring that note more in line with the others ..... I can change notes ..... I can change snares ..... I can add and subtract stuff .... save it over the old file ....... after a while ( maybe immediately) I'll get it to where I like it and will quit tweaking it.
Got to bed about 4:30 and I had to get up to help Deb with something ...... going back to bed.
