Earlier, I mentioned how easy it was to put a song together using the parts that are included as “sound loops” with Apple’s GarageBand. In other words, you don’t need to know how to play a “real” instrument, in the traditional sense.

For your listening pleasure: “Gimme Gimme” (mp3, 1.4M), which I made completely from prefab parts. (See if you can identify where the loops repeat themselves: drums, guitars, cymbals — each is a separate loop.)

There’s a longer entry in here somewhere about creativity, composition, and working with chunks of information, but I don’t have time to write it now. Hopefully later. The 3X5 cards I’m laying out on my desk as I revise this article remind me of the little round-edged rectangles GarageBand uses to represent the different components of a song. I’m trying to work out some useful parallels. I love reworking these songs. I hate rewriting. I’m hoping to achieve some kind of crossover effect, however.

Like Randy, when I first started up GarageBand, I had no idea how to work it.

Notice how the sides of the GarageBand window are simulated wood (click above for a slightly larger image). This is an interesting (or is it ironic?) gesture towards the current vogue for vintage, analog equipment. The White Stripes, for instance, record only on vintage, ’60s-era equipment.

One of the things I really like about this program (and I’m sure there are other programs that work the same way) is how it turns one sensory experience, sound, into another sensory experience, vision. All the parts of a song are laid out in front of you and they scroll from right to left as the song progresses. If the song is short enough or the screen wide enough, you can view the whole song as a static object, like a short text, from start to finish. You’re not forced to listen your way from start to finish in order to get a sense of the whole. It makes understanding the structure of songs much easier.

I need something like this for the rest of my life. When you’re right there in the middle of your life, you’re not sure what’s coming next and you can’t remember all the details of what went before. And it’s hard to pay attention to more than one track at a time. With a real iLife program, that would no longer be a problem. You could step back and say, “Aha, this class needs a bit more reverb, but the other one’s doing fine. I’m going to turn down the volume on this committee assignment for a little while so it doesn’t distract from the research track. Up ahead we can see where the tenure decision is made, so let’s jump ahead and see what’s going on there. Then we’ll come back to this part and make sure everything leads up to where it’s supposed to.”

Well… read on for a more prosaic explanation of GarageBand as it actually works:

Continue reading →

Here’s something fun to start your week (MP3, 1.88M).

In other news, ragweed is just about killing me.

…but I’m going to see Sonic Youth, again. And this time PJ Harvey is on the bill, too.

The tickets were $20. On top of that, Ticketmaster took another $9. Dear record industry, if you want to know why people are copying music from each other without paying for it, it’s because Ticketmaster took the money that would have gone toward the purchase of new CDs.