start with the drums or the melody?

[Dubber]

a friend said he always starts with the drums (kick, clap, hihats, ...) and eq & compress it till it fits his needs.

after that he begins with the main melody or bass etc.

in his opinion it's easier to do it in this way because it's harder to add/mix many percussions on an existing lead or bass.

what do you think?

[OmicronMeadow]

While your friend is most likely right in his circumstances, what he says is not an universal truth. It all depends on personal workflow and kind of music. I, for one, start with melody and never get to the drums. My music doesn't have drums.

[AJ Reynolds]

if your making any kind of groove music you should make drums first. it makes it much easier to play keys once your got some rhythm parts done.

[Meow]

Melody (usually chord progression) + metronome is always first for me!

[backplay]

Originally Posted by Dubber

a friend said he always starts with the drums (kick, clap, hihats, ...) and eq & compress it till it fits his needs.

after that he begins with the main melody or bass etc.

in his opinion it's easier to do it in this way because it's harder to add/mix many percussions on an existing lead or bass.

what do you think?

I always start with the bass and build my drums around that.
For the following reasons:
Bass or other instruments are much more important than drums imho.
I always tune the drums to the bassline. So if i start with drums i would be limiting myself with the bass.
Drums are the easiest part, so i prefer to start with the most difficult things.

[Itsmorning]

I would hate to have to start composing a certain way. Compose which ever way you wish. Doing one specific instrument first everytime will limit your range.

[fooddude]

I use just a kick for a simple metronome first. I go back and forth, drums and keys, and like to make them all work together. If i wrote an entire drum hook first before any type of keys work, then I am kinda forced and might be limited to certain progressions or melodies or riffs. Starting with a 1 layer kick for metronome just for rhythm is nice..then add some keys.. then go back and add some drums.. and back and forth.. till everything works together.

[StringBean]

It depends on the feel of the music you want. I find getting a good melodic groove going and then adding the drums to take it over the top is my preferred method these days. It might change tomorrow

[DJ Charlie Hood]

What a great thread. Making music is an art. Being creative involves doing things different and letting the universe lead you and a sound adventure. Be versatile.

I love to set up a melody or chop and arrange a sample have it going and add the drums aftr... it feels soooo amazing..

But I have a close friend that has plaques for producing for ice cube. He is from the westcoast way of knocking drums tracks and laying them down first. I watched him do this and was like daym... your drums are knocking and layed out so perfect. It felt like a hit on that foundation alone.

I go back and forth. Its fun and unpredictable.

[stilts27]

Depends..can be either-or...depending on the mood at that moment.

[target_destroyed]

I tend to start with drums. I find it easier to write other parts when there's already a groovy beat going.

[audioconsult]

most electronic people start with drums but that often leads to boring tracks while the other way often leads to boring beats..especially when done in a daw.. in booth cases a real drummachine is beneficial..you just do more in depth beatwriting an not the typical 1 bar goes on and on daw style that is so dominant on the market.

[SecretSociety]

Originally Posted by backplay

I always start with the bass and build my drums around that.
For the following reasons:
Bass or other instruments are much more important than drums imho.
I always tune the drums to the bassline. So if i start with drums i would be limiting myself with the bass.
Drums are the easiest part, so i prefer to start with the most difficult things.

!!!!

[innoverse]

Originally Posted by Meow

Melody (usually chord progression) + metronome is always first for me!

This.

For some reason, it's way harder for me to keep progressing if I start with the drums. But sometimes it works.

[Brainchild]

I always figured I would just start w drums and build "up" from there until a bass player friend of mine got into a discussion with me one day about how he saw the role of bass in the different metal and punk bands he'd played in. It kind of seemed backward to me.

He said that he always had to be there, in the background, keeping perfect time and holding the melody down, while everyone else was free to jump forward and back around the beat.

It kind of changed my mind about things. I started realizing that I might have 6,000 different drum sounds that I've perfected, and a few hundred nice little rhythms or rhythmic progressions. I can drop those into pretty much any track-in-progress and see how they work. But a single lead or bassline melody truly makes a track. I mean it really defines what the track is.

So these days I will start with pretty much a random drum rhythm that puts me in the mood and then start playing with the keys until the right melody or whatever you want to call it (not usually very melodic) pops out...the right timbre progression.

Since working that way, it has started to seem much, much easier to build other parts (other sounds as well as track progression) around the melody than it had ever been to build up a track around drum parts.

[Antoine8]

It is funny as this was my biggest problem when I first producing. What should come first???

I started with the melody and would arrange my beat to that.
Many producers in particular dance producers will always start with the kick or the bass, or drums and bass.

I am now beats straight up first, followed by whatever else i feel is is needed, but this I think also depends heavily on what music you produce. The way a dance music producer would start a track would be very different to way a rock producer or band would start a track. This is however a guess, but I imagine in a rock song where the feature is the vocal, the drums would come second as they would need to fit the vocal.
Again just a guess.

I have sometimes built a song around a simple stab only, but i think the biggest reasons drums come first is becasue they fill the whole frequency range and therefor require much space in the mix hence making them first. Again a guess!

All guesses here, not much help sorry!

[fooddude]

Good tip on the bass...makes sense. Maybe I'll try it out next time - simple kick for a metronome, then some kind or bassline/riff/melody, then lay chord pads on top to which ever notes hit..then add more drums, synths, fx, etc, and whatever else to make it all work. It's nice to not get too stuck on one side/aspect too long; I find that bouncing back and forth from percussions/rhythm/beats then to keys/melodies/chords is best for making it all blend together better and not too bias/heavy on beats nor keys, for me...i dunno lol

[tonemaker]

Three things:

1) A lot of succesful sound engineers find advantage to mixing the drums first, then bass, then everything else.

2) A lot of successful composers find advantage to composing chords first, then turning that into a song structure that is built upon with greater ease. The melody and/or vocals is one of the elements developed towards the end, and yet each type of instrument is often added by a specialist musician who excels at their individual instrument.

3) A lot of modern DAW music doesn't really do either of these things. Maybe that's why so much of it sucks? Well anyhow a lot of modern DAW music starts with a ripped-off drum loop, adds a bass, and then everything else is an afterthought. Hence, if you analyse some such modern music it has neither a melodic center, nor a harmony/chord center. It's just drums and bass and afterthoughts. In the better instances of this somebody clever at least made up a good melody to overdub over the top of it, but this is not the same as composing a structure and developing a melody out of it. In some of the better cases the bass sounds good too, but why can't we have good bass AND harmony AND perhaps a lilting lead?

I'm not against mixing while composing. It's what I do too. But this is a major road-block to other forms of musical creativity. I think a lot of loop-based music which suffers from "loopitis" comes about from mixing while composing in a DAW instead of composing first using chords and developing other elements out of that framework.

There are those who can come up with a melody first and then put chords to it, but I'd say that is becoming a lost art known by those already heavily immersed in music theory.

I'm not saying that good music can't come out of a DAW-oriented perspective. Of course it can and it does and has. But if you are a one-man band and not a team of specialised session players, then it will be hard to come up with something NEXT LEVEL.

Let me know what you think about this. Peace

[bouzoukijoe1]

bassline groove first! then drums! unless it's drum-centric music, drums should act like an accent, otherwise it always sounds too detached.

[Barfunkel]

I always start by putting a kick drum first. Then maybe add a nice chord sound or two from the Monomachine. Then I put a hihat in there somewhere. Then I get bored and record the whole thing and move on to the next track. Repeat ad infinitum.

[jarlywarly]

I start with white noise.

[Beermaster]

It really depends on the type of 'music' you're creating - if its stereo-typical EDM of many kinds then it's less about melody and harmony and more about the beat. If it's a song or a form of music then you'd be crazy to start with a beat first as without some idea of pace and word scan, melody and phrase you could be making completely the wrong rhythm with the wrong tempo and groove....flying blind !

If it's base level dance stuff...take out your brain and go with the flow

It it's music with some level of originality and form ....think ahead and plan what it is you're saying before you speak !

Beer.

[msl]

I just start with two oscillators and detune.



.

[msl]

Originally Posted by backplay

I always start with the bass and build my drums around that.
For the following reasons:
Bass or other instruments are much more important than drums imho.
I always tune the drums to the bassline. So if i start with drums i would be limiting myself with the bass.
Drums are the easiest part, so i prefer to start with the most difficult things.

+1 this

[lowkey]

I start with silence :P
It doesn't matter what you start with. For me I often get a little drums going for timing, then get a bassline...but other times the main melody...depends what comes out of me first

[Serra]

whatever comes out first. but one thing that works to is to spend sometime giving the song a proper groove once the basic elements are there, this could inspire the things to follow, and probably get the track finished more quickly

Superstringz - Revolver (Original Mix) Gung Ho! Recordings - YouTube

[Jonny_silva]

Melody for me, most important part of a song period. The melody is the part everyone remembers about a song.

[AikiGhost]

Melody. Drums are easy. Getting a good melody is what makes a track good standout from the mundane IMHO.

[bad andy]

I start with an idea. And I take that inspiration wherever it leads me. That idea can be a bass line, a drum groove, a chord progression, a melody, a cool synth sound, an emotion, anything really. I find it's good to approach composing from different angles each time - keeps things fresh.

[sleepwalker]

Melody. I can't even imagine writing drums without a song.