I (Heart) GarageBand

Last night, I sat down to play around in the studio at around 7 PM. I cranked out three guitar lines, a bass line, a keyboard part and a drum part before I started feeling tired. I figured it was around 10:30 or 11, based on what I had created from scratch by that point. Nope. It was 8:30. For some reason, the time warp that used to affect me in my studio in Bayside isn't present in my new studio. I can get a ton done in an hour and a half. Mostly, that's because of how easy GarageBand makes getting tracks down and how easy the editing process is.

So there's this great tune I put together in 90 minutes, and it's all finished, save for the vocals and the outtro. Gimme another hour to bang that out.

Maybe the various GarageBand communities out there already have this, but I'd love to see a contest along the lines of "Who Can Write and Record the Best Song in One Hour?" That would be both fun and easily accomplished.

First Messings With GarageBand

Last weekend, I was playing around in the basement and I decided to lay down an instrumental that I wrote many years ago. It's this acoustic guitar tune I often play when warming up. I always heard it in my head as something you'd play for a young kid (a new nephew?), kind of like when Eddie Van Halen played "3:16" for his son, Wolfgang. Anyway, after messing with it a while, I added some more instrumentation, which is all me. For the acoustic guitar, I used my Brian Moore C-90P, with the piezos run right into the input jack of my Mac's USB soundcard. There's a clean electric guitar there, too (faintly in the background), for which I also used the Brian Moore, but with the magnetic pickups. I played the drums and did my best to quantize them. There's also the Warwick bass I bought from a client about a year ago - Yep, that's a real bass, and I've never played bass before. There's a keyboard line in there, too.

Check it out: Alex's Lullaby Groove (MP3, 2.3 MB)

Comforting Thoughts

I was on the verge of crying my eyes out at Irit's memorial service this weekend. I'm sure Lauren felt my hand's vise-like grip on hers as we sat in the back row and listened to four very moving tributes. Irit was one of the few people in the industry I could talk to about personal things, and after the memorial service I found myself thinking about the time she counseled me when my mother had cancer. The sheer number of media industry people who came to say goodbye to Irit was a testament to her ability to personally connect with EVERYONE around her. She was just that type of person.

I Liked Steve on ATS

So I listened to Steve Hall joining Mr. Jaffe on Across The Sound last night, and I think he did a good job. I particularly enjoyed the bit about contrasting how MSM publications and blogs deal with their competition. I've always looked at the Internet in general as this red-headed stepchild that MSM marketing trade publications want to touch as little as possible. Sort of like the notion that you want to clean the birdshit off your windshield when a seagull craps on it, but you want to spend the least possible amount of time actually cleaning it off.

Of course, MSM publications have, on occasion, embraced blogs and the Citizen Publishing movement, but only to the extent that they hope some of the "cool factor" will rub off on them. They typically don't embrace some of the cornerstone values of the movement, including transparency, giving credit where credit is due, and having actual conversations via comments/trackbacks/etc.

Anyway, back to Steve. I think he was comfortable in his own skin and certainly knowledgable. I dug the history of AdRants portion. Wonder what other folks are thinking abou his performance... I guess we'll find out next week when Jaffe reveals the results of the survey.