Poopot's Cover Challenge #25 - the letter L

flying_pie

Welcome to the 25th Poopot's Cover Challenge


The winner of our last challenge @IMC1980 ;;;has made his choice for The Chosen Track for the Letter L


which is...

...


the Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret by Queens Of The Stone Age



That's right. We've decided on a long overdue rules amendment and it's now fine to include songs that start with "the" as long as the next word begins with the challenge letter. If you don't want to cover the chosen track then you can choose any song starting with L (or L preceded by "the")

But… if you cover the chosen track you will automatically receive a bonus 5pts as a head start


* RULES:

Entries to be sent in mp3 format to the following Email address:

covers@thefretboard.co.uk

Please comment in the thread when you've sent an entry. And feel free to submit more than one entry if you want.

You may wish to submit artwork to go with your entry. It brightens up the playlist and might subliminally get you more votes but it's not mandatory. 

Entries close at 11.30pm on Friday 29th December 2023... get onto it!!!!
 

A playlist of all the entries will also be posted below:

https://soundcloud.com/thefretboard/sets/poopots-cover-challenge-25-l

TTony

Hmmmmmm …. 

(That’s a thoughtful “hmmmmm”),

flying_pie

And that's a track from me to start off the playlist. 

So I asked my children to choose a song beginning with L and they picked Look What You Made Me Do by Taylor Swift. I had a listen and it turns out it's in A so that means 80s hair metal as far as I'm concerned... so I wrote a hair metal riff in A and just went with it. I asked my daughter to listen to the finished article and after 30 seconds she said "oh my god, that's just cringe" and walked off in disgust. Hopefully that means mission achieved.

thecolourbox

May I ask what you guys do regards drums? Do you type them all in or use existing loops and fills? I tend to avoid using them one these as I don't seem to be very good at them, so would be good to see how you guys do it?

idiotwind

I have two approaches.  One is to use EZ Drummer to just assemble parts from the library.  This is if I'm doing something that is completely "made up".  If I'm doing a straight cover then I'll get an isolated drum track via Moises or MVSep and transcribe it note for note into Musescore.  I can then export that as midi which I can load into EZ Drummer (standalone) and humanize/add in some extra articulations.  I'll then export as midi from there and pull that into Reaper (with EZ Drummer as a plugin now rather than standalone).  I'll generally massage the drum track a bit as I record more stuff - velocities and small timing tweaks - which I just do in the midi piano roll within Reaper.

flying_pie

thecolourbox said:

May I ask what you guys do regards drums? Do you type them all in or use existing loops and fills? I tend to avoid using them one these as I don't seem to be very good at them, so would be good to see how you guys do it?

I enter all my drums manually in the midi grid, fills and all. I copy and paste a lot of bars to save time and then amend fills so that they're hopefully not too repetitive.

I often have a drum track in mind and look at the drum tab then put my own twist on it. And I glue all the bars together and humanize all the notes at the end 

I usually tend to spend more time with different compression, saturation and reverb as I just use the one free SSD kit and need it to hopefully sound different. Obviously this month I used gated reverb on the share and toms for the 80s vibe.

digitalkettle

flying_pie said:

And that's a track from me to start off the playlist. 

So I asked my children to choose a song beginning with L and they picked Look What You Made Me Do by Taylor Swift. I had a listen and it turns out it's in A so that means 80s hair metal as far as I'm concerned... so I wrote a hair metal riff in A and just went with it. I asked my daughter to listen to the finished article and after 30 seconds she said "oh my god, that's just cringe" and walked off in disgust. Hopefully that means mission achieved.

I always like a title with some brackets in there: Look What You Made Me Do (In The Dark)

Habanero

Terrific stuff @flying_pie! The line "I'll be the actress starring in your bad dreams" made me laugh. The picture is good too.

IMC1980

thecolourbox said:

May I ask what you guys do regards drums? Do you type them all in or use existing loops and fills? I tend to avoid using them one these as I don't seem to be very good at them, so would be good to see how you guys do it?

Once I have an idea about how I will tackle a song, I track the left side guitar to a simple beat which is looped for several minutes at the BPM I want the song to be. After vocals I will do the drums so I can play bass to the final arrangement, I try and use loops where I can, I have a fair amount in the VSTi (BFD3 with about 5 expansions and the 3.3 & 3.4 updates which added new beats) and I own most of Groove Monkee's midi. If I can't find the right loops I will get the piano roll out and write the beats I want but I detest doing it! 

IMC1980

flying_pie said:

And that's a track from me to start off the playlist. 

So I asked my children to choose a song beginning with L and they picked Look What You Made Me Do by Taylor Swift. I had a listen and it turns out it's in A so that means 80s hair metal as far as I'm concerned... so I wrote a hair metal riff in A and just went with it. I asked my daughter to listen to the finished article and after 30 seconds she said "oh my god, that's just cringe" and walked off in disgust. Hopefully that means mission achieved.

Love it, the 80s flag is flying high! Only thing missing was a long 80s fade out at the end whilst the chorus repeats (with a key change?) and the guitar solo screams.... 

Habanero

For drums in the Covers challenge I normally use midi loops or edit a pattern in Logic. For my bizarre reggae tune recently I bought an online midi library as that was proving too difficult. For the Compositions challenge I'd just use the Logic Drummer tool.

I always use midi bass too, as I've never played real bass and I don't think my now damaged hand would cope even if I tried.

stratman3142

thecolourbox said:

May I ask what you guys do regards drums? Do you type them all in or use existing loops and fills? I tend to avoid using them one these as I don't seem to be very good at them, so would be good to see how you guys do it?

I use Superior Drummer 3 (SD3) almost exclusively now, running within Reaper. 

When composing my own stuff, my usual approach is to either start with a midi drum loop I like, or play a pattern on my keyboard and record it within SD3, or program a pattern in the SD3 midi grid. If I play the pattern on my keyboard, I start with the kick and snare,then overlay the hi hat pattern etc. I quantize the patterns.

After finding a basic drum pattern I like, I drag it into the SD3 'Song Creator' window. SD3 then comes up with a whole load of suggestions for the Intro, Verse, Pre Chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Fill and Ending. The Song creator has an 'Amount' option to make elements of the patterns more busy. Also, options to select the 'Power Hand' and Opening Hit of sections. The Power Hand default is the Snare and the Opening Hit default is a cymbal, but these can be moved on to other kit pieces.

I'll use those for ideas (especially for fills), but I usually tweak them.

I usually do all the drum programming in SD3, which is set to follow the playback in Reaper. On the drum track within Reaper I have colour coded 'Empty Items' to match the various sections in SD3, so I can keep track of where the various sections are (e.g. Verse, Chorus, Fill etc) within Reaper in relation to the other tracks.

The reason I let SD3 do its own thing initially, is because it will come up with 'drummer like' ideas for fills etc. But I'll usually tweak them a bit.

If I'm doing a cover, I'll often start by extracting a drum pattern from a midi file I've found on the internet. Sometimes I pay for a midi file from such sites as Hit Trax. Those are a good starting point, but I usually end up tweaking things. Sometimes I program it all myself.

flying_pie

IMC1980 said:

Love it, the 80s flag is flying high! Only thing missing was a long 80s fade out at the end whilst the chorus repeats (with a key change?) and the guitar solo screams.... 

Haha. I originally intended to do the long  fade out chorus repeat solo untill I looked at the track length and felt it was long enough (not to mention that I hate the chorus even with the fun to play but a pain to double track riff)

Thanks guys

thecolourbox

Thanks all for the info on the drums - it's really interesting to hear others' approaches to things and to try and learn from it. Also interesting that the answers actually do seem to back up my opinion that I'm just not very good at drums, as in I need to work at doing them the same way that you guys do. I'm not a drummer nor do I think like one (similarly with bass) so often I tend to either miss out drums and bass completely and just try to fill out the space with other stuff like synths or quiet octave down pedal type things etc. 

It doesn't help that the band I like the most (White Stripes!) has no bass and the drumming is obviously fairly basic, and also the tempos are pulled around all over the place (which fits with my playing styles as well really), so setting up loops at the same tempo seems really hard for me hence I often play/record without a click or metronome. Setting up tempo tracks for my rubbish ability to stay in tempo is a nightmare! I've three songs in mind for this challenge, hoping at least two of them come off - two of the three require proper acoustic drums really, the third will be my usual "bed wetter" vocal plus guitar type scenario.

I mostly use a Native Instruments vst called Drum Lab which kind of blends together acoustic and electronic drum sounds, as for my original stuff I tend to like the influence of electro type sounds, but I think Cubase has something called Groove Agent which will hopefully save me having to buy something as that just works on midi as well. That's what I used on the last composition challenge but I find it hard to humanise as I'm just not used to doing it I suppose. Sounds very clinical and very much like a drum loop on a keyboard or something.

mrkb

^ I’d be happy to put some real drums to a track for you - let me know if you’re interested. I’ve got a drum kit mic’d up at home. You wouldn’t have to use them if they didn’t suit what you wanted.

thecolourbox

That's very kind thank you, I will bear that in mind. I'd probably need to be basically finished before I could ask about that though as I do tend to change my tempos a lot as I'm going when using a click track (hence my guitar parts are often a bit rough as I have to keep redoing them when I decide to decelerate or accelerate etc), so might be a bit tricky to arrange but could be worth a go at some point. One of my potential L covers is a fairly traditional drum part I think so maybe when it's basically finished I could refer to you. The other one is a White Stripes song which I'm fairly sure I can play in with my fingers on my keyboard as it's very basic

flying_pie

@thecolourbox I'm definitely not a drummer too. As they music I like to record relies on drums then I had no option but to try.

I have learned more about drums over the last few years and it definitely helps when I'm trying to communicate an idea to our drummer in a band setting. I would reiterate that using drum tabs for existing songs is a great start for understanding the instrument. It's definitely easiest if you have a source song that you're plundering for the drums - in my case for L it was Bark At The Moon by Ozzy but I didn't need to use the tab as it's very basic and I ended up changing the beat for different sections. For I it should be pretty clear that I used the tab from War Pigs and a selection of Beatles tracks.

And it's great to know that @mrkb is more than happy to play real drums for us all

thecolourbox

While browsing through my music recording filing and creating a folder for my first L song, I found something I did in 2015 for my sisters wedding - she had like classical style arrangements of classic rock songs (I played Don't Stop Believing for her aisle walk lol) and this was one of my initial ideas when she was going to have a string quartet instead of me, I did my own arrangement for string quartet of Living on a Prayer.

Turns out I was doing Bridgerton soundtracks 5 years before they were themselves!

Something a bit different anyway so thought I may as well share

IMC1980

thecolourbox said:

While browsing through my music recording filing and creating a folder for my first L song, I found something I did in 2015 for my sisters wedding - she had like classical style arrangements of classic rock songs (I played Don't Stop Believing for her aisle walk lol) and this was one of my initial ideas when she was going to have a string quartet instead of me, I did my own arrangement for string quartet of Living on a Prayer.

Turns out I was doing Bridgerton soundtracks 5 years before they were themselves!

Something a bit different anyway so thought I may as well share

Living on a Prayer was in the running for my "L"  choice, this would be cool to hear! 

thecolourbox

I forgot to say in my comment that I've emailed it in

Yes can imagine your voice singing that one! You'll be pleased to know I'm not attempting to sing that lol

I can't find my original file to add some better dynamics so have just sent the audio in as it is

IMC1980

thecolourbox said:

I forgot to say in my comment that I've emailed it in

Yes can imagine your voice singing that one! You'll be pleased to know I'm not attending sing that lol

I can't find my original file to add some better dynamics so have just sent the audio in as it is

Nice, looking forward to hearing it mate