Before I start, let me add a disclaimer here. I’m a nonmusician. I play no musical instruments. I have only a very elementary knowledge of music theory and love using this limited knowledge and my imagination on the software application MuseScore to compose sequences of sounds that sometimes may resemble music. I’m an engineer and a mathematician who discovered how interesting music is at a stage in my life much too late to do anything about it. The purpose of this second article on drum composition is to finish the material started in the previous article “Drum Part of Music”, where I shared my thoughts about the drums and provided my approach to creating a drum composition and then adding a bass part and finally a lead guitar part. In this article, I will start with a musical composition that has no drum part. I will show you my approach to adding a drum part to this musical composition.
Introduction
Hey everyone! Thanks to those who have subscribed! This article will complete the previous article “Drum Part of Music”. Please read that article before reading this one! In the last article, a drum part was created and then a bass and lead guitar were added to complete the musical composition. The article was longer than I planned so I saved the remaining material for this article, where I will share my approach to adding a drum part to an existing musical composition. Enjoy!
MuseScore Drum Kit Components
In the previous article, a brief introduction to the software application MuseScore Drum Kit components was given. Before presenting my approach to adding a drum part to an existing musical composition, I need to spend more time on these components. Below is the same figure I included in the previous article.
In the previous article, I gave a quick description of how I use the various parts in my drum compositions. I need to elaborate much more about these components prior to presenting my approach to adding a drum part to an existing musical composition. The first task here is to partition these components into groups, according to how I use them. In the figure below, I define five groups: 1) Bassal, 2) Tomal, 3) Congal, 4) Beatal, and 5) Cymbal. The components in each group are shown. Also shown are some general comments and seven rules for creating a drum part.
Beymer’s Rules for Drum Parts
Now is the time to explain further these composition rules (Beymer’s Rules) for creating a drum part from an existing musical composition. Before we continue, note that the drum part composition from the previous article bent some of these rules and may have broken a few. This is ok! These rules are a guide to get you in the ballpark. Once there you can tweek or fiddle with the notes as much as you wish. If it sounds good, then do it! These rules were not listed in that article because the article was getting too long, so I presented the composition more as a trial-and-error approach. That is, try something and keep it if it sounds good; otherwise, change it back and try something else. Use incremental changes or probes to search for that just-right sound.
Recall from the first article that one purpose of a drum track is to establish a master clock for the band or musical composition. By requiring that every bar (except for fills) start with a quarter note bass drum, a clock tick will occur on a regular interval that can be used for timing. Requiring that the second beat be a quarter or pair of eighth note snare drum (or other component from the Congal Group) will further establish a sense of timing in the drum part. Timing considerations are the primary motivation for the first two rules.
To match a drum part to an existing musical composition, you must first decide what exactly you mean by matching and what part (i.e., the melody, the rhythm, or the harmony?) of the existing composition is being matched. Here’s where I plan to give a much more precise definition of matching a drum piece to an existing musical piece than that given in the Internet articles I reviewed. The Internet articles stated one of two methods: 1) take a collection of existing drum patterns and try each one, finally choosing the pattern that sounds best, or 2) come up with a drum pattern that captures the “feel” of the musical composition. This latter method is the one that irritates me the most! As I listed above, there are three choices for what part of the musical composition you want matched by the drum part. First, there’s the harmony part or chord progression. Next, there’s the melody part. Finally, there’s the rhythm of the musical composition created jointly by the melody and the chord progression. In this article, I will present my method for creating a drum part that “matches” the frequency and rhythm of the melody. Here’s what I mean by “matches”:
The drum pattern in each bar produces a rhythm on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th beats that follows the rhythm of the melody as much as possible while conforming to Beymer’s Rules. Depending on the complexity of the melody and Beymer’s Rules, the rhythms may be exact, or may be only similar. At the very least, the drum part rhythm will capture the slow rhythmic flow of the melody. For example, say the melody rhythmic content is full of sixteenth and thirty-two notes, which is too much for the drums to follow. If the drum pattern was adjusted so as to follow a revised version of the melody where the sixteenth and thirty-two notes were merged to create a simplier quarter and eighth note rhythm, then you could say the drum pattern extracts the essence of the melody’s rhythm. For you electronic guys, replacing the original melody with a low-pass frequency version would result in a rhythm that could easily be followed by a drum pattern. This is what I would call “capturing the feeling” of the musical composition’s rhythm.
The drums are not melodic instruments, but you can create a pseudo-melody by the use of the drums in either the Tomal or the Beatal Groups. Note that I listed the components in these groups in order of ascending pitch (based on my hearing!). There are five differently tuned drums in the Tomal Group and six in the Beatal Group. These drum components produce broad frequency spectrums, but they are “tuned” and could create a pseudo-melody that loosely resembles the melody’s frequency movement in a bar. When the melody jumps upward in frequency, then the next upper drum component could be used to imitate this frequency jump. When the melody drops downward in frequency, then the next lower drum component could imitate this frequency drop. This is what I mean by a pseudo-melody.
That’s all there is to my approach. You create a pseudo-melody with the drum part that imitates the rhythm and frequency variation of the melody. According to Beymer’s Rules, you would choose either the Tomal or Beatal Group for a given bar’s third and fourth beats and then choose drums from the selected groups in such a way to imitate as much as possible the rhythm and frequency variation of the melody within each bar. Another rule, not included in the figure, is that cymbals should not be used when the Beatal Group is used for the third and fourth beats. This is because the Beatal Group elements are essentially cymbals and to do so would cause some undesireable sound effects. I used the crash cymbals to signal that a fill was coming. I used the ride and splash cymbals to make interesting sounds in the fills. Notice that my fills (e.g., see bar 4 below) included not only the drums but also the guitar and piano. They were not your traditional drum rolls, they were just bars that expanded upon the basic melody with all the instruments.
Applying Beymer’s Rules
Ok, time to test out these rules with a real live song. You need headphones to hear the difference in the following audio tracks. I composed the song “My Retirement” last month without drums. Here is the audio from that composition:
Here is that composition with drum tracks created and matched to the composition’s guitar melody:
I like them both, but the drum tracks really do help with background ambience.
In the figure below, you will see the first page of the guitar melody from the “My Retirement” composition and the drum tracks created to match this melody. Again, the first drum track was for the cymbals and the second track was for the drums.
This drum track was created by following Beymer’s Rules. Notice how the drum track attempts to follow the melody with its very own pseudo-melody. Here is the audio track for just the newly created drum parts.
Here is the first page of the finished composition, drum tracks and all.
Well, I hoped you enjoyed reading this article. If you haven’t done so, please go back and read the previous two music composition articles. Thanks again to those who have subscribed to my newsletter!