Fusing Two Instruments in a Composition

by Brian Casel | December 13, 2008 | Add Comment

Sometimes a great song can surround and swallow you up in all of its sounds and colors. Using creative instrumentation and serving your song with melodies that fit right into place with one another are a great way to achieve this effect on your listeners.

We often hear a complete melody or phrase without realizing the sound is composed with more than one instrument or voice. The instruments are similar in tone, and their parts blend nicely into one another.

The key is to piece together the different parts in a way that makes room for one another while keeping the flow of the musical phrase intact. That could mean using counter rhythms — one instrument plays while the other is on a rest. Or it could mean playing simultaneously and blending them together using harmonies and varying aggressiveness. Or using mixing techniques — EQ, volume and effects levels. Most likely, you would use a combination of all of these.

How do we accomplish this type of composition? It’s usually not as methodical as I just described above. More often you stumble upon the perfect fusing of parts through jamming with band-mates, layering parts one at a time while self-producing, or fiddling with knobs and faders in the studio.

The most important thing to keep in mind while you’re knee-deep in the writing process, is to let the song dictate what it wants. Keep your focus locked into the groove of this specific phrase and let that be the road map for where to place your notes. Always remember that adding notes to a melody can often be just as important as adding rests. Check out this article describing the importance of using space in songwriting.

This sound is very common in Hip Hop because it’s all about fusing various sampled sounds to form a unique sounding beat. The samples are often very far apart in sound, tone, and color but when done right, they are crafted in such a way that new musical phrases are born.

Below are a couple of songs where this technique can be heard:

Parallel Universe – Red Hot Chili Peppers
These guys are the funk-rock masters. This song is all about Flea and Frusciante locking in their picking as they match eachother rhythm, but play different notes in harmony.

Ghostwriter – RJD2
You can hear what I’m talking about in just about any track from RJD2, but this one is among my favorites. It’s off the amazing Dead ringer album and it fuses some funky clean electric guitar sounds with a booming horn line creating an instrumental hook with a ton of impact.

Colorbars – Elliot Smith
This off of the amazing Figure 8 album (reviewed here on my other blog). The acoustic guitar outlines the impact notes played by the piano in a beautifully colorful way as it is done all over this album and the rest of Smith’s full-band work.

Thanks for being part of the conversation at Serve The Song. We have a simple comment policy (with thanks to Tim Ferriss) - critical is fine, but if you’re rude we'll delete your stuff. ’Nuff said.