A New Mini Song - Pushing Hard

I decided to push this one all the way to a full song and I've added the VERY ROUGH work in progress song below as well so you can get a sneak peak at where I'm going with this but listen with a big pinch of salt because it's very very much WIP stage haha!!

With these songs I'm trying to consciously push myself forward a little more each time. Sometimes it will be apparent but other times it won't be.  I'm going to need Tom & Zak's help on this one because I think it's worth getting right and a few sections aren't quite gelling plush I need to push technically as well to get it really sounding great.  I'm deciding whether to add two extra chords in for the verses to mix them up a lot more so I'll play with that idea and practice the drums, work on the solo and getting comfortable on the piano so that when we go to lay it down I can do the various parts well enough.  That's the theory anyway!

Anyway back to pushing - on this song I tried a few new things, actually quite a few.

It's is a different key for a change, at the moment it's over two chords ... are you ready?   Yes one is ..... Bm hahahah!  The other chord is Cm which has a fun sound.  But like I said I'm thinking of adding two more for the verses to give it some movement.  The rest I like at the moment.

I actually looked for a drum beat to replicate and this was in a Trip-Hop song (I love the lazy funky sound of trip-hoo beats). I chose this one because of the high hat sound as I've been struggling to play with open and closed high hats and I wanted a push. So there was two things here, the skill push and the transcription.

Then the bass guitar again I pushed on thinking dynamics not just notes and focusing on really knitting it to the beat. I also put in a couple of long slides which I love as I haven't done them before.

The rhythm guitar is based off of a funky rhythm that Tom gave me to learn last week and it felt like the ideal time to try and incorporate it. I had to really focus on control to get it sounding nice and clean.

I thought about space so I added a breather in there which became that cool pause with the bass slide - I love that tension & release it's got that really cool "falling" trip-hop feel perfectly.

On the piano I really thought about adding to the song not just playing over the top and it took several attempts to find the right groove and I focused on rolling into the chords to continue that lazy chilled groove that was going on.  Even though it's very simple it really adds a complimentary vibe.

The guitar melody I thought of a few things, repetition, finding a riff that I could use as the main hook. Then I focused on rhythm, soloing over the chords, dynamics and getting a few faster runs in there. I also focused on playing more than one note at a time so you've got some double stops and the "intro" i used barring as a means to put in a fuller melodic sound before going into the more funky riff.

So these may only take a few hours to put together and they may not be amazing & they're only 1min long but there is a lot of thought and effort that goes into them so I'm always learning something. I'm pushing myself and testing new areas out. I was listening back over the last four I did and I'm very pleased with these, they are all different and each one has its own area where it shines.

Time to learn some more and get solo practice, theory and lay down some more 1 or 2 bar "songs" for Toms next lesson. I hope my emptying out my brain helps make this journey and these songs a little more interesting if not more fun. 😊