stumped on etude #7

I’m having the hardest time with this one. The question and answer part I more or less understand – at least, when it comes to melody. But I’m struggling with writing for percussion in general, and fall completely flat when it comes to figuring out how to express an answer (or consequent) with just rhythm, much less in response to a melodic question.

So I’m trying to get a better sense for writing for percussion. Found a pretty in-depth tutorial that sent me way off the deep end. I realized, to start with, I need a good collection of percussion samples – ones that would cover a decent frequency range. This recommended breaking up the full range into a few buckets:

• low: <100hz
• low-mid: 100hz–1000hz
• mid-high: 1khz–8khz
• high: >8khz

So I started picking a few drum samples, but how do I know what frequency range my drum samples are? There’s something in FL Studio that can do it, but that’s an extra $100. I eventually found a plugin for Audacity that can do it, but it’s a random script from a forum post, and I don’t know how accurate it is.

In addition, another Youtube video I watched recommended tuning your drums to the key of your piece – which makes total sense – but then it leaves me in the tricky place of that’s basically impossible for me to do with the pitch tools in FL Studio, since I can’t check my work (Audacity still only works with the raw WAV).

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Honestly, this is probably all overkill and I really should just get over myself & try to move on. I should settle on a core set of percussion samples, and try to start building out a rhythmic phrase using them.

I’m thinking the best approach might be to write out the whole phrase just using percussion, with a purely percussive question + answer structure, then mute the question part, and build a melodic phrase on top of it.

• Etude 2.3 - percussion experiment.mp3