I’ve been getting back into playing/recording music in the last few months. Normally I spend a lot of time just playing around with 30 second demos — trying to figure out how it all works. This week I decided to try my hand at jazz arranging/composition. So the goal was to write and record a simple jazz tune.
I started by entering a chord progression into band-in-a-box and choosing one of the bossa nova real styles. I attempted to play a melody in on my Akai EWI-4000s via MIDI but that was mostly just frustrating in BAIB. So I dragged the audio files (literally) into pro tools and started to work over there. After working out some of the latency issues with pluggins I played in a simple melody using the Xpand! solo violin sound via the EWI. Surprisingly Pro Tools was staying out of the way for once, so I added some trombone doubling the melody and tiny bit of harmony in the bridge. So simple tune complete! After much playing around with making the simple tune better and failing, I put down a few improvised choruses on the EWI for fun and it was.
After all this was done I went back to band-in-a-box and exported the midi file for the drum track and replaced the original audio track with a BFD2 drum sampler. BFD sounds so good. Back to BAIB to apply a new style that changed the drum track to congas and percussion and then drag it in.
So shockingly, I now had an entire song to attempt to mix down. I gave the BIAB bass and conga files a bunch of random EQ and put some basic levels and some semi random panning on the rest. So I call it a successful test.
Oh and if you are interested in the EWI, check out this video of Michael Brecker playing one.
