Tutorial No.10. Create a 16 bar drum track by assembling 1 bar drum patterns, and add to a melody.

Whilst the composing tools of Musical Discovery are primarily designed for use with instrumental and orchestral music, they can also be used to create drum tracks for use with with popular modern and jazz music. In this tutorial we shall take a popular modern tune arranged for piano, acoustic bass, and strings, and add a drum track to it.

  1. Our tune for this tutorial is "Foolish Things". It needs a drum track to be built in jazz swing style. We need to analyze it, counting bars, and noting at which bars to place standard drum patterns, variations, or bridge passages. Load the tune from the main menu  File -> Load Musical Discovery File   and select "These Foolish Things".
  2. Examine the piano melody track, treble clef, in the staff view, from Main MENU  Edit -> Staff View.  There are 3 tracks, -  base, chords and piano, respectively, with check boxes in the top left-hand corner of the screen. Uncheck base, and put a tick into piano. The staff for the piano part will appear, probably showing the bass clef.  Click on the clef symbol at far left of the staff, this should change it to show the treble clef.
  3. This tune is in ternary form A A B A. The first section (theme A) lasts 8 bars, and is then repeated. The first 7 bars should have a standard swing drum pattern, then it would be appropriate to put a drum bridge passage into bar 8. Then the next 6 bars could have a variation on the standard swing pattern, and bars 15 and 16 could take a 2-bar fragment bridge passage.
  4. Bars 17 to 20 contain the middle section of the tune, theme B. For variety, it would be nice to put another variation of standard swing into bars 17 and 18, then the 2-bar bridge passage into bars 19 and 20.
  5. Bars 21 to 28 contain the repeat of theme A, so put in 7 bars of standard swing, then 1 bar of the single bar bridge.
  6. The whole 28 bars are then repeated to make a total of 56 bars.  This completes our requirements analysis for the drum patterns.
  7. Next we need to create our 1 or 2-bar drum patterns. You can write your own using the staff view, setting the channel to 10 because this is the MIDI requirement for a percussion track. See the help panel on Entering drum and percussion patterns onto the staff screen for more details on how to do this.  Alternatively, you can select a set of pre-written swing drum patterns from the fragment list of the composing board. Open the Composing Board, and from the Fragment Lists drop-down box, select Swing Drum Patterns.  You should see 5 icons appear at the foot of the screen.
  8. Drag icons up to the top row in the order detailed in steps 3, 4 and 5, carefully counting the bars, and taking especial note that icon E (Swing Bridge 2) is 2 bars long, the others are all just 1 bar. Click the orange button to Assemble the fragments, then save to the database, from the main MENU, File -> Save Musical Discovery File to disk.
  9. The composing board only accommodates a maximum of 30 icons across each row, but we need to repeat the entire 28 bars to make 56 bars. Hit the yellow button Clear the composing board to remove the icons from the board, then hit the green button Clear the fragment icons, and all fragments from memory. Then go to Create -. Compositions -> Bulk Changes to Tunes, save the 28 bar pattern as a fragment, with an appropriate name,   come back to the Composing Board, hit the pink button refresh fragment icons  at foot of screen.   Now drag the icon up to the top row,  twice, in order to repeat the 28 bars.
  10. Hit the orange button to Assemble these 2 fragments, go to the Bulk Changes to tunes, save this as a new fragment, named like "Foolish 56 bar drum sequence".
  11. Back in the Composing Board, load the Foolish Things tune as a fragment by hitting F4, checking store as fragment on composing board, and hit the pink button Refresh fragment icons.
  12. Set the composing board mode, using the option button at far right labeled  Multiple Track fragments on top row, then single track rows.
  13. Drag the main tune "Foolish Things" to the first square in the top row. Remember that this is a multiple-track fragment containing 3 tracks, piano, bass, and string chords.
  14. Drag your drum track icon to the row below. Click the orange button to Assemble fragments, and hit the Play button to listen to the result.