4 Guitar Song Sketches - Metal Riffs Currently on the Cutting Floor

Sometimes I set aside about 20 minutes at the end of my workd day to just play and explore some metal riffing to make a quick "song sketch".

I'll fire up GarageBand (and lately my POD UX 1) and capture a song idea.

First, I browse through drum loops. Recently I picked up the metalcore2 set from Platinumloops and I sometimes I'll use one that comes with GarageBand. Other times I'll launch iDrum and make a drum-machine loop. I really like that I can use drum samples from the same kits featured in the Platinumloops metalcore2 set. I spend just a few minutes to setup a rhythmic foundation.

Then I record a few guitar parts in fairly quick succession, sometimes in one take other times it may take 10 tries. The whole process doesn't take too long since I'm trying to finish a full "sketch" or song-section before I need to wrap up my work day. These limitations force me to be not too precious about any given part of the process... just capture some thoughts and performances and keep moving.

Here I share a set of song sketches that are a bit on the rough side. Each of them has a little-something about them that I'd like to grow and imrpove upon. At the same time, each of them has a few rough aspects that keep them from being cool little mini-songs in and of themselves and warrant the "on the cutting floor" label.