Sure, it's fun to just write the basic music-guitar or keyboard and voice-but even adding a bass and/or drums will "thicken" the sound. Add strings, more percussion, backing vocals or other instruments, and your overall sound is more complex, and often more professional sounding. Here are a few ideas to enhance your basic song that you may not have tried.
EXTRA PERCUSSION
Abba used to say that all hit songs had a tambourine in them, but even a little extra chime hit here and there, wind chimes, a rain stick, or a shaker can add a lot without a lot of effort. Much of rock music sounds thicker because the drummer is whaling on the cymbals most of the time, and that overring creates a nice filler inbetween other main notes. Many bands of all styles add a percussionist to play congas and other instruments above and beyond the drummer's part, and some, like my last band, even used a hand-triggered second drum track that we as well as the drummer played our parts against. If you are just writing on your computer, this is even easier-just play around with an additional percussion instrument track and see if it helps add a little depth to your sound. Anything you can do to fill in those awkward-sounding empty spots in your song can help. Note, though, if you don't hear any awkward empty spaces, don't bother adding a worse-sounding awkward percussion instrument where silence would have been more effective for your tune. Use your ears and have fun with this.
KEYBOARD MAGIC
For centuries the addition of stringed instruments and their long, sustained notes has been a staple for adding atmosphere to songs, but computerized keyboards allow you an entire arsenal of sounds to choose from. Try playing your basic musical chords held out for their duration using one or a group of instruments on your keyboard. You might even just try one note of each chord, and use it like a backing vocalist as a nice long undercurrent for the rest of the musical action occurring. Think of what your song is about and the genre it is in, and try adding an instrument that is appropriate from your keyboard and try using that as your underlying instrument-violins are kind of standard in Country, for example, and a clarinet, cornet or sax sounds great in Jazz. If you are looking for a fresh sound, try one of the newer patches on your keyboard and maybe even play with the parameters of the sound if you can and try that to add a really modern element to your music. Sometimes tried and true is better-I got a surprising sound out of combining the metal and accordion patches on my keyboard that sounded great on a hard rock tune we were writing, and the long notes were easy to sing against while playing live, which helped me, since the vocals were a little difficult. Once again, play around with what you have available, and turn that musical soup into a stew by thickening your musical sauce.
