Today was a great day spent on building percussion for one of the songs for my DS project.

I met with my professor to get some additional perspective on what needed to be added to the bed track for “My Life”. He suggested that I edit the timing of the piano to match the synth VST that we previously recorded. This synth VST was quantized, so it made sense why the timing was off. He also noted that the arrangement of the tune felt a little “flat”, and suggested I add some percussion to help elevate the track. I knew how to do this because I had done it for my pop arrangement of “Dreams”.

To do this, I decided to use the pop percussion drummer in Logic. I began by importing the drum kit performance into this session so I could build the dynamics of the percussion loops. The beginning started pretty energetic, so I wanted to have tambourine and snaps present. 

For the verse, I wanted to keep the groove going, but with different percussion instruments, so I decided to use a conga and shaker. I kept looping this groove until the re-intro occurred, and then went back to the first re-intro groove I had before. For verse 2, I added a bongo part and made the shaker groove a little more complex. I also made sure to add breaks for the percussion based on where the shots were in the arrangement. 

For the third re-intro, I wanted to keep similar to the post-chorus of “Don’t Start Now” by Due Lipa, so I added in hand claps and kept the energy up! Immediately after this, the bridge came down dynamically, so I stripped it down to just snaps on 2 + 4. After a bit of this, I added tambourine and shaker back in, followed by the main groove again with shaker.

After the acapella vocal part entered, I added the tambourine back in, and then finished with a groovy bongo and Conga part. 

I enjoyed crafting this percussion part, and I am looking forward to the next part of sampling the kick and snare performance!