Full song writing on the Woovebox

The final - and most rewarding - piece to "click" on your Woovebox, is how to write complete songs from many, just a few, or even just one pattern. This guide explains how song writing works on the Woovebox and how it was specifically designed to break you out of “cool loop” jail and propel you into song-writing with ease.

To help with creating full songs, on the Woovebox, the notion/goal of song writing is a lot more formalised than on other grooveboxes. Song mode is often an after-thought on other grooveboxes, but on your Woovebox, it is an integral part of its design. In fact, there is an implicit recipe that the workflow encourages you to follow. The end-goal is to take your audience on an emotional journey.

To do so, on the Woovebox, the idea is to create a “concentrated” narrative/theme using your patterns. Then, using Song mode, you turn this narrative/theme into a full-fledged song that tells the story and keeps the listener’s attention. Or, as one user put it;

"So far my workflow has been, make a complete "climax" loop. Break it down in song mode with fragments. Then use spare patterns to do drum variations, etc...I've also been liking conditional pitch changes allowing to squeeze longer phrases from a few patterns."

For this guide, please note that;

• the discussion of harmony and themes is obviously more applicable to some genres (pop, EDM, etc.) than others (generative ambient, avant garde, etc)
• this guide assumes you know how to generally operate your Woovebox
• this guide assume that you have a basic understanding of the basic Woovebox terminology such as "tracks", “patterns”, “fragments” and “song mode”
• this guide assumes that you have an understanding of the step/pattern/track/song architecture (16 steps x 16 patterns x 16 tracks per song)

The Woovebox song writing recipe

On the Woovebox, your song’s narrative/"story" is;

1. Underpinned by a key / scale (or mode) (2/bS/"root", 3/Ld/"ScaL" on your song's GLob page)
   
2. Underpinned by a chord progression on the "Cd" track
   
3. Underpinned by a rhythm on, for example the "Ki", "Sn", "hh" tracks
   
4. Supported by a melodic theme, for example on the "Ld" and/or "Ar" tracks
   
5. Supported by unique voices (instrumentation) to tell the story, for example by using the "Pach" page presets and - preferably - your own sound design

These 5 ingredients are rolled into one or more patterns per track.

These individual patterns on individual tracks are then served together as song fragments in Song mode. Song fragments can serve the same pattern in new/different ways (with different effects, retriggering, gating, etc.) from one fragment to the next. This lets you re-use the same pattern in new ways and in new combinations that are true to the original idea and narrative of your song.

1. Key / scale

They key / scale (or even more narrowed-down; mode) specifies the possible (out of 12) notes per octave that can occur in your song. Different collections of notes will impart a different feel/sound to your song. The feel/sound they impart can be anything from light-hearted care-free pop, to “Star Wars” / “Lord-of-the-Rings” epic, to spicy Latin, to East-European ethnic and lots more.

If you feel like shaking things up when turning on your Woovebox, changing the key/scale is one of the quickest ways to come up with something fresh and new. There is so much more beyond the default, ubiquitous Cmaj/Amin scale to explore!

2. The chord progressions

Chords are incredibly important; they make your audience “feel” something specific when listening to your music, and they set the context for everything else.

They make your song feel happy, sad, epic, serious, melancholic, and a million different emotions in between. They set the context for how your audience should understand everything else going on in your song. The key/scale influences which chords are available in your song and their subtle tonal qualities (due to how the western scale is tuned).

To illustrate how chord progressions establish context; take a vocal sample of a vocalist saying “i love you”. Set against a chord progression with major chords, the message is easily understood as celebrating love. Set progression with minor chords, the message is readily interpreted as heartache.

In fact, given the right musical/harmonic context, something as simple as “i love you” can - subject to a Western audience’s sensibilities - be interpreted with lots of nuance by your audience. Your audience may feel, the statement is about love in the face of adversity/rejection, about secret love, about lost love, etc. All without ever mentioning the context verbally; the harmonies will have taken care of clarifying the context. This is the key to powerful song writing using chord progressions.

As you are by now aware, the powerful chord following feature (4/Ar/"FLW.C") makes it extremely easy for other tracks/sounds to follow along with your chord progressions, emphasizing and/or riffing on the context you wish to convey.

3. Rhythm

The other principal component of a song is rhythm that drives the narrative forward.

A useful rule of thumb is considering rhythm in the context of mind, head, hips or feet archetypes depending on your goals are preferences;

• Mind; Rhythm can be cerebral by keeping your audience guessing (for example Jungle) or demanding active interpretation as a narrative element (for example a ticking clock).
  
• Head; Rhythm can be used to make it easy to bop your head to in a chair, on a couch, on the road, or on a treadmill (for example straight four-to-the-floor with side-chaining or heavy compression, possibly employing rhythm-breaking breaks/drops)
• Hips; Rhythm can used to give an audience room to latch on to rhythmic elements for individual interpretative whole-body motion (for example club music with increased swing/shuffle, polyrhythms, and employing non-rhythm-breaking breaks/drops)
• Feet; Rhythm can be used to simply give an audience something to dance/“shuffle”/tap/fist-pump to in a communal/social setting (patterns that are not too challenging, are less ambiguous and have predictable build-ups within their targeted genre)

Thinking in these four archetypes can let you add (or take away) ingredients that pull your song in the right direction according to your vision.

Rhythm is not just confined to percussive elements. Chromatic instruments can also convey a clear rhythm or “drive”. For example, a Moroder bassline.
The Woovebox goes through great lengths to tempo-sync a great amount of other things as well to help with rhythm. From the delay units to the LFOs and so much more.

Humans love patterns and there are loosely, two “types” of rhythm. The most obvious one is upfront, in your face, that anyone can appreciate as periodically recurring elements, for example most kicks, snares, and hi-hats.

Then there are latent rhythms that are harder to verbalise by the common person, but can be “felt” and add that deeper complexity to your song. These can take the form of simple, easily detectable polyrhythms such as basic 3-note arpeggios or can be more complex, harder to detect polyrhythms, for example a bassline pattern that is 13 steps long with lots of conditional triggering. What all these have in common that they will, at some point, repeat and sync-up if played long enough (which may be far past the run time of the song in complex cases).

Everyone’s tolerance for polyrhythms or latent rhythms is different, and what may seem random (undetectable) to some, scratches someone else’s cerebral itch. Rule of thumb, is to use prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, etc.) for things like pattern lengths, LFO rates and playthrough counters. Using combinations of larger numbers will result in more and more complex latent patterns that are harder and harder to detect consciously. E.g. when using a track with, say, a pattern length of 13, for another track pick a pattern length of 11. You will notice that it will take many, many playthroughs for the two patterns to sync up again and repeat (every 11 x 13 = 143 steps in fact; nearly 9 bars).

4. Melodic theme

A melody can be as simple as a hook, and a hook can be as simple as a few notes (as many an EDM anthem will show you). Conversely a melody can be a complex sequence that plays out over many patterns. There are no rules.

Ideally though - on the Woovebox - the melody’s components or notes can be re-used and re-arranged by making the melody’s constituent steps dependent on the playing chords. In other words, coming up with a melody while one of the “follow chord” (4/Ar/"FLW.C" on a track's "GLob" global page) modes is engaged (for example, one of the "transpose"/"trs." modes) is highly preferable. With some clever use, this is allows for further thematic development and riffing in song mode (see below).

5. Instrumentation

Similar (but much less literal) to the “i love you” vocal sample example, the timbres (instruments) you choose to do the “story telling” can take on a different emotional quality/meaning, depending on the scale and chords. For example pizzicato strings can sound playful, or - on the other end of the scale - poignant, or allude to physical phenomenon/happenings (rain, tears, drops), etc. depending on the harmonic context (chords/scale).

On a more practical/technical level, the sound design of the instruments on the Woovebox should be in service of the song, in the sense that, for example, patch timings (such as LFO rates) should serve your overall song. An example would be a filter LFO/sweep that is set to have a period (“rate”) of two bars (32 steps) - that is if synchronisation of the sweep to two bars of the song is desired of course.

The Woovebox “secret sauce”

Conditional trigger / chord-follow / tempo-sync all the things!

In traditional DAWs and grooveboxes you typically have to explicitly specify a lot of things manually; exact notes/pitches, exact timings, exact triggering. On the Woovebox these aspects are - preferably - algorithmically inferred. This means that, wherever possible, your Woovebox tries to make musical sense of the fewer pieces of data.

The result, as you likely have already found, is something called emergent complexity; simple rules interact to form a complex system that exhibits complex behaviour. It allows just a few, simple, well-considered patterns to sound complex, refined, polished and intentional, particularly once combined in your final song. All while taking much less time to put together and polish. Working any other way would be unnecessarily laborious and would get frustrating quickly on a device with just 16 buttons and a single encoder.

Using Randomisation

The Woovebox is uniquely suited to random generation, because everything interacts and adapts to everything else to “make musical sense”. So if you, like many, suffer from “blank project paralysis”, use randomisation to get you started; whether it’s chords, arpeggios, basslines, patches. At worst you won’t like the result and roll the dice again. At best you find gold. But most likely you will quickly find a potential diamond in the rough - something that you can shape into something you do like and can make your own.

Song Mode; where the full experience comes together

The preceding 5 components of your song’s narrative are laid out (arranged) in song mode. It’s where that “cool loop” gets transformed into a compelling, complex, full piece that plays out over multiple bars and minutes of music.

Song mode is where you turn up/down the temperature, expound on your narrative by giving some instruments room to tell their story in the context of others, or set up introduction or conclusions by invoking risers or fallers.

For completeness sake; Song mode allows you to program a sequence of fragments, where each fragments mutes/plays/fades/filters/gates/chord locks any of the 16 patterns for any of the 16 tracks for a specified duration. Upon completion of a fragment duration the next fragment is played. And so on, and so forth. Pattern chaining is respected. So if you have a chain of four patterns on a track, with the first pattern of your four-pattern chain starting at pattern 1, then instructing a song fragment to start playing pattern 1, will still see it play pattern 2 once pattern 1 has completed playing, and so forth, for the duration of the fragment.

The 2-loop rule

A great rule-of-thumb for arranging your song’s fragments, is that, in order to keep the interest of your audience, something “new” needs to happen within - at most - 2 playthroughs of a loop (aka the “2-loop rule”). This “something new” can be as simple as bringing in (or dropping) an instrument, or as complex as entering a second movement with a completely new melody and/or chords from a different pattern.

Transitions are like the seasoning that makes fragments go together. For example, you can introduce instruments by a fade-in or opening a track's filters. Vice-versa, you can conclude a instrument’s part by doing a fade-out or closing its filter. Another great way to conclude a instrument’s part, is by playing it for one bar using a re-triggering effect and/or a gater effect. The latter (re-triggering and/or gating) is also a great way to get more mileage out of a pattern, as it can radically transform a pattern while still making it recognizable and “fit” the song.

In the common case of a 4-bar loop playing twice, an easy way to do a transition, is to do something different on the 8th bar (drop something, choose a retrigger pattern, etc.). To do so, make a 7 bar fragment, and clone the fragment. For the cloned fragment reduce the length to 1 bar and make your change (drop, retrigger, etc.).

Semi-automatic improvisation of melodies

There are many, many ways in which things interact to form new (but musically meaningful!) sounds. For example, if you have a chord progression and have a chord-following melody spread out over a four pattern chain, you can make your Woovebox “improvise” something new by starting the melody playback at the second, third, or fourth pattern of the chain, rather than the first. All while starting chord playback as normal E.g. this causes your melody to be “out of sync” with the chords. However, you will hear the “out of sync” melody be adapted to the playing chord (“follow chord” FTW!), which generates a brand new sequence of notes that is unique, yet seems to fit the melodic theme of your song eerily well.

Going back and forth between song mode and track (pattern creation / sequencer) mode

As you refine and build out your song, expect to go back and forth between Song mode and the individual tracks a lot.

For example, as you arrange your song from your 256 (16 patterns x 16 tracks) potential patterns, you will likely find areas in your song where you want to add or change things beyond what your current patterns contain/do. E.g. you may want to create additional patterns, or maybe make a tweak to one of the fragment’s patterns.

While you have a specific fragment playing in Song mode, you can “import” that fragment’s pattern configuration (e.g. with the right patterns selected, tracks muted/playing, etc.) by holding the value button in and long-pressing the track (01/Cd - 16/A8) you wish to switch to. After switching to that track, the fragment configuration will keep playing (minus any scheduled play effects such as filters, fades, etc.). To switch to yet another track, switch to Live mode, then repeat; e.g. hold the value button in and long-pressing the track (01/Cd - 16/A8) you wish to switch to next. And so on, and so forth. This way you can work on a fragment and hear what it would sound like in Song mode.