Weekly Beats Ska
By Paisleyfrog on May 18, 2024 3:10 pm
OK, so I lied. Although I'm not doing Dub, but it is somewhat dub-adjacent.
I've been having a lot of fun playing with the sampled dub horns in Logic, and have been getting some good feedback on them. When the thought hit me like a lightning bolt - I NEED TO DO A SKA SONG. So I did. (Side note: my initial plan before I found Weekly Beats was to do 24 songs this year. I'm going to way surpass that, so now I'm wondering about doing 24 genres...)
Anyway, the Dub Horns in Logic work well for Dub (imagine that), but don't work well right away for Ska. I ended up having relative success by layering the hell out of them, along with trumpet, sax and trombone lines. They don't sound too synthetic, or at least they sound decent for stock plugs. I also quantized barely anything - the slightly off-time MIDI helps a lot.
I went through and did a few more edits Saturday morning, so I decided to do it...pulled out my trumpet (after many years) and added a real brass part. My range is terrible now (couldn't get much above a C# on the staff), but that's what pitch shifting is for, right? Took a lot of run throughs (and time to lube my valves back up...like I said, it's been a while), but I think it worked well.
Thanks to horatioromantic for the heads up on using Levi as a good drummer for reggae styles (now called Funky Drummer in the Logic 11 update).
Time to skank, Rude Boys!
RUDE BOYS ACROSS THE NATION
TIME FOR THE WEEKLY BEATS SENSATION!
Rude boy on the microphone
Toasting songs and he's all alone
Gotta finish by next Sunday night
He's writing, he's writing
First chords into Logic Pro
That is awful...I don't know
But I guess we're gonna go with it
Recording, recording
We're all writing songs!
52 weeks long!
Weekly Beats!
Weekly Beats!
We just finished week 19
Songs are awesome, like a dream
So many artists are all posting and toasting
They're toasting
We can see all of the talent here
One thing is certain, oh so clear
We're gonna write songs every week
Till December, December
We're all writing songs!
52 weeks long!
Weekly Beats!
Weekly Beats!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)