This is is a project song based on a song I wrote call Far Away Lands. I've written most of my music with just guitar and voice and I am working on my recording production skills so that I can get my music down on tape so to speak.  This was recorded in Logic.

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It's in simple 4/4 time and the tempo is at 112 BPM.  It’s a pretty straight forward backbeat rhythm, nothing fancy really. I start it using the side stick sound and then move to the snare. Just a simple way to build and adds a little drama. It also distinguishes what is essentially the intro from the verse. I only added a couple of small fills, really just snare rolls to move into the next section, and in the chorus I have the snare hit twice as sort of a slur. Then for the outro the drums lay back to just kicks and hats. As for the drum sound, I chose the roots kit in Drum Kit Designer just because I liked the kick and snare sounds.

I like copying the bass drum for synching up the rhythm of the  bass line. I’ve always kind of just mirrored the bass drum when writing base lines anyway and actually copying the midi in Logic makes that so simple. I kept the baseline pretty simple throughout mostly just playing the roots of the chords but I did throw in a few octave jumps and in the chorus section I kind of mirror the melody a little. 

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This first half of the track is in the Key of C and the chord progression is: 

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C Am G F C Am G F C F C C Am G F C

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The second half of the track is in A minor and the chord progression is:

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Am  Dm  C  Em  Am  Dm  C  Em C  Em  C  Am  Am G  F  C

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This song is actually based on a song I wrote a long time ago on guitar. The keys of C and its relative minor, A minor are rather convenient on guitar and probably the first key you learn just like on keyboard. The way the chords fall on a guitar gives it a nice descending harmony that sounds good to me and I’ve used it many times. As far as how I came up with the melody, it’s based on the vocal melody that I guess I’d say developed organically as I came up with the words that I wrote. The melody basically follows the chords and has sort of a motif that descends as the harmony descends.

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For the instruments I mostly used the built in library instruments from Logic.  I added a couple of ES P Synth pads, one for the bass and one for the harmony.  I also used a sample of a marimba in the Q-Sampler to add a little percussiveness to the melody line. Finally, I added an audio track of myself just strumming the chords on a guitar. 

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For mixing, I always start with the drums and try to get a good balance of volume without any one track over powering the rest. I also used a nice tambourine loop that just happened to fit the rhythm of the piece perfectly. Then I try to make sure the melody floats above the harmony and usually move them to opposite sides of the stereo field. For time based effects, I routed the drums and tambourine to bus one for some light reverb and I routed the melody line to bus 2 with a slap back delay to fatten it up a little. I used EQ and compression on the piano, harmony and guitar track and just some EQ on the synthesized pad track.