Songwriters, Meet Your New Songwriting Partner: The Trio+ Pedal

[00:09] [Music] oh my at home writing songs and recording some basic ideas on your laptop or phone but

[00:21] don't have any other musicians or songwriters to collaborate with this might be the answer to those problems because DigiTech have created a pedal called the trio plus that is essentially designed to be what they call a band

[00:36] creator and Looper but what I want to show you today in this video is how for songwriters this pedal can do so many amazing and creative things and essentially act like a collaborative partner what I love about this pedal and

[00:50] what I want to show you today is not only how tactile it is and how much fun to play with it is but how this can be so useful at the beginning of the songwriting process to generate ideas and give you options that you might not

[01:02] have considered and this is not a sponsored video I'm in no way affiliated product I just love finding different tools that help songwriters not feel so isolated and alone in the songwriting process that actually help us move

[01:16] collaborative way even if that collaboration comes through a pedal

[01:33] essentially the pedal works by playing ideas into it the pedal then detects the tempo and it also detects the chords or the notes you're playing and it essentially creates a bass and a drum track to go with what you've just played

[01:48] if you've just got a little idea for a song but you're not sure what the bass is going to give you lots of different options and we're going to be able to toggle between the genre and the style switches to get some very unexpected

[02:03] because I wanted to come up with something original on the spot and see how the pedal responds so if we just take a cordal Groove to start with imagine you've got two cords that you're bouncing back and forth between so I'll

[02:17] set the genre here to R&B and I'll set the style round to number one and I'll hit the band button here and when it flashes red it's ready for me to play something into it two three a

[02:33] four [Music]

[02:54] volume of the bass and the drums so we'll just take the Bass Down

[03:08] predictable and the bass is just following the chords very simply but there's this button here that says simple bass and if we hit that simple bass and if we hit that [Music]

[03:25] off now we get a more interesting Baseline

[03:37] already we can see that as a backing track this is very useful and I'm interested in using it as a backing track to start writing some melodic ideas or even some lyrical ideas but before we do that let's look at all the

[03:53] got to play with because this is where I think the pedal becomes really exciting that Groove we just heard was not unsurprising but if we press it again

[04:05] and start playing around with genre first we'll start with

[04:21] funkia rock [Music]

[05:24] good and not all of them sound appropriate but there's a few in there different direction to what I was originally thinking and this is exciting as a songwriter when you've got something in mind and then you get

[05:38] another input that takes the idea in a different direction that changes the course of that idea that you're working on I'm going to leave it on R&B and just come across to the style knob here this is this is also a lot of fun

[05:53] is this is also a lot of fun [Music]

[06:28] swung and that's also really interesting when you're in a straight 44 kind of GrooVe and then you mess with the tune so it becomes swung 68 or 34 that can create a lot of unexpected and you know really great sounding results so

[06:43] remember all I did was play two chords A G major and a C major chord into the pedal at a particular Groove the pedal then detected the groove detected the then detected the groove detected the chords and created drum tracks and

[06:56] chords and created drum tracks and baselines for those two chords now I go back and put the Looper [Music]

[07:28] pedal is the ease with which you can blend the elements and mix the volume so that loop I just created the little cordal Vamp that's the volume for that and this is the volume for the drum so you can you can mix them how you want to

[07:44] get the right sound but at this point with a two cord Vamp I would then be in a position as a songwriter to go great that feels like a good platform to build ideas [Music]

[08:10] r [Music]

[08:24] gra and there I'm just creating gibberish I'm just mumbling you know little melodic phrases but the phrases are coming to mind because I'm responding to the track that we're building within the pedal and it's

[08:37] arguable that if I'd have just done it this melody or those little melodic ideas but somehow I feel that's not true somehow

[08:52] somehow I feel that's not true somehow the groove of the bass and the drums in combination with that that cordal idea is what's getting me to think and feel those Melodies that come to mind and again I have no sense of what I want to

[09:06] say at this point there's no lyrics that are really clear I'm just playing around the different musical directions this idea could [Music] take so I like that as a little you know

[09:21] I like that as a little melodic idea I might just record that in there

[09:53] delicate now I'm going to move between an E minor 9 and a C major 7 and I want to give it a finger picking kind of feel to see how the pedal responds to something more nuanced and subtle one two three 4 and

[10:12] subtle one two three 4 and [Music]

[10:46] option oh that's [Music] [Music] interesting okay

[11:18] to have a jazzy kind of vibe and yet the Jazz option on this genre switch gave me the most pleasing result when I was searching through them and and this is a pedal like this because it's so

[11:31] the different options and hear in real time what it throws back at you it just time what it throws back at you it just feels so creative and playful and also I can't stress this enough you know I never would have come up with that

[11:45] instructed a drummer if I was sitting with a drummer to play that kind of feel now the great thing about playing with a real drummer in a room is that they'll give you so many different unexpected ideas and they'll sound better and and

[11:59] you know more organic because it's a real human sitting behind the kit but if you don't have a drummer who's next door who can quickly come over and set up their kit this is just an incredible alternative and and a very creative one

[12:13] so in this particular case the way I write is I generally think in terms of small melodic fragments so with this kind of GrooVe I'm looking for something that's not too busy not getting in the way but um really matches the mood of

[12:27] way but um really matches the mood of what's been created what's been created [Music]

[12:43] the other great thing about this pedal is you can then use these sequence sections along the top these sequence buttons allow you to essentially move between sections of the song as you create them so now I want to look for

[12:55] the chord progression to develop and go somewhere I've started with the e 9 I've gone to the C major 7 now I need another chord I'm thinking 7 now I need another chord I'm thinking maybe a minor

[13:10] nice that's too [Music] jazzy that's nice so maybe a minor to the F back to the

[13:27] F back to the e to a g okay so we'll try that one two 3 4 [Music]

[14:06] around with a style and get a different style to what we had in the first section let's see what happens when we go back

[14:49] okay and we've got the half time feel that's great

[15:43] and there we have two highly contrasting sections that again have have come up quite quickly they've they've come about because I was just looking for some chords to feed into the pedal the pedal then gave me back all of these options

[15:57] to play with and the ease which we can move around these genre and style knobs means that you can create contrast very quickly and contrast between sections is such an important consideration for us as songwriters we're looking to take the

[16:11] listener on a journey we're looking to make it interesting and and try and create some movement and some motion and do things differently as we go through the different sections you can of course do this inside a DAW and I would often

[16:24] sit and do this in a DAW and create a track that way but having it on the desk or having it on the floor and being able to just mess with it in this very tangible tactile way it just feels good it's fun let's do one more and this time

[16:39] we'll try it in the Indie songwriter kind of vibe with a driving kind of vibe with a driving pulse something like this three 4 pulse something like this three 4 [Music]

[17:05] [Music] oh my

[17:21] was expecting it is a lot of fun though now the reason it's giving me that is cuz I had it set to eepop Let's no go back to alt eepop Let's no go back to alt [Music]

[17:38] Rock Folk [Music]

[18:06] so that feels like a nice a section that we could work great just unexpected you know I don't know what

[18:20] unexpected you know I don't know what this moments where as I was counting that off and playing that original

[18:37] idea in fact I can't remember what the original idea was I was playing that and in my mind I was hearing something subtle and subdued and instead the first thing that jumped

[18:51] out because the genre was set to e poop was this

[19:04] that I would like to develop and and play with more and that's the beauty of to come up with ideas the beauty of having something that you can input ideas into and have it respond in an

[19:16] unexpected way is that you will get so many more ideas to work with having this prompt having this pedal throw something back that was completely unexpected has changed everything about the way this song will now develop and that for me as

[19:29] a songwriter is incredibly exciting to have essentially a little songwriting partner sitting on the desk saying hey maybe you should try this happy maybe you should try this happy songwriting happy experimenting bye

[19:41] songwriting happy experimenting bye [Music]