I thought it’d be fun to run through the nuts and bolts of “The ’40s never died” – it’s pretty much loop-based, and building up and getting rid of these loops is a good way to create dynamics. Steve Lawson has an excellent video tutorial on live looping, irreplaceable in the arsenal of the solo musician. In the studio, looping means you can record the constituent parts of a song really fast and then arrange the song in your daw or sequencer of choice. I used Garageband.

Let’s consider the instrumental version of ’40s never died (the vocal version is similar, but the bare bones are visible more in the instrumental). So, the song starts off with a fretless bass riff:

With a nice big slide from the b to the f# (the 7th fret down to the 2nd). It’s a four-bar repetition, so we just set that going on a loop. [disclaimer: as you can probably tell from the video, the loop that I recorded is longer than 4 bars. But I don't vary anything because I am a very boring man]

Next comes the main guitar riff (at 0:11):

Here, I’m varying the top notes I play (on the last beat of the bar) pretty much to taste: between 7, 9, and the slide from 10 to 11; for that reason, I’ve looped quite a few bars to capture this variation. Again, you could easily play four bars and loop that.

Some drums come in at 0:27. This was just a “jazz kit” in Garageband. I don’t know to annotate drums but the part is incredibly simple.

At 0:41 we liven the bass part up with a bit of Les Claypool-inspired tapping:

All of that stuff on the top two strings is tapped. You can keep the bass part going on the the E string at the same time; but to be honest, you can get away with just doing the tapping; the main bass part will be looping underneath.

At 0:59, the tappy bass is replaced by the “loud guitar”:

The four notes at the end of the first three bars are left-hand muted, for that satisfying chucka-chucka sound. In the fourth bar, we kick on the tremelo pedal. The tremelo is timed for a triplet feel – so in that bar of four, we strum each beat 1-2-3-4 but the sound is 1-da-da 2-da-da 3-da-da 4-da-da. If you don’t have a tremelo, you can just strum the triplets 1-2-3  1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3.

And this gives you quite a lot of variation to play with. Just by dropping stuff out and bringing stuff in, you get a sense of development and dynamic in the music. You get different textures by just using some of the parts (e.g. Main bass plus loud guitar) and having the parts as loops gives you a lot of flexibility to try out different arrangements. Which is a great tool for a songwriter to have, even if the loops don’t make it into the final version of the song.