Tag: Garageband

The Final Pre-50/90 Song

A little mini-suite. I had my 10 songs underway for my June album in a month project and like a doofus I threw together an extra song at the last minute, and made it three songs in one. (I then added two more, because I’m dumb).

Mostly this was an excuse to add an acoustic guitar (my Takamine 12-string) and a Gibson electric (ES 335 Pro) to a project that had been 100% Stratocaster to that point.

One night recently my two step kids and I all had a really difficult time falling asleep. That lead to some anxiety among the kids who thought that the inability to sleep was a sign that there was something wrong with them. I reassured them that it happens to all of us once in a while and that they should just relax, and then I wrote a song about not being able to sleep because of nightmares. I am a lyrical hypocrite. Accept it, I have.


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Here is the iOS mix.

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June Music is now as done as done can be. It’s 11:45pm on July 3rd. 50/90 officially starts in 15 minutes. I, however, will wait until morning because I am exhausted.

G’Night everyone!

The Second to Last Pre-50/90 Song

This is a June throw away. I wanted to put 8 bars of acoustic guitar on one of the June songs. When I finished I just opened a new project and threw down the first things that came to me. A vocal with some live and let live lyrics, a ton of reverb, and a ton of delay later…

we have a throw away.


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For completeness sake, here’s the iOS mix.

New Song Weirdness

Talk about over complicating things!

This was meant as just a little finger picking noodle. I am hopeless as a finger picker and did this more as an exercise than anything else. It’s four tracks of guitar, all with a different picking pattern. I was curious if I could accidentally come up with something along the lines of the awesome stuff Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett used to do in Genesis. I didn’t, but at least it’s finger picked. The chorus is dumbed down. It’s only two tracks. The break part where the drums go away and the cello comes in (yes, I am a prog nerd) used a pick. I can only do so much, you know?

What are the lyrics about? Well, some days completely suck, but other days don’t. If you persist you can get to the non-suck. That’s sort of the point. I spent all of 10 minutes writing them. Gimme a break, okay?


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Here is the iOS mix too.

Theft

I started a new song tonight, because I’m an idiot. It was really just an exercise. I can’t finger pick to save my life, so I quadruple tracked a little eight bar thing with a different finger picking pattern on each track. I then worked it into a song. 3:15 of song later I had four tracks of rhythm guitar, one track of lead guitar, drums, an upright bass, and a cello. That’s right, kids, a cello.

It wasn’t until it was all done and I listened back and realized the four different finger pick patterns and the chord changes combined to form…

A Led Zeppelin song.

Oh for crying out loud!

And Another New Song

This song makes 10 for the month of June. I still have my one left over thing from May, and there are two more from June that still need vocals.

I kinda want to stop now though. Something about this tune is working for me. I sort of almost… like it. Part of me wants to leave this on top of my alonetone tracks list for a while.

No… I’ll mix the May song next and finish the last two June songs before 50/90 starts next week. I’ll carry on.

I’m not sure what it is about this one that I like though… something…


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I think I have posted this already, but here is the iOS mix as well.

More Fuzzy Voices

I had high hopes for this goofy 12-bar. I don’t know why. It doesn’t live up to my expectations. The vocals are fuzzy again. I’m mad. It does mark the return of the wah wah pedal. I had half a mind to not use it at all after over using it in February, March, and April. Like most addicts, I just couldn’t stay away.


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Here’s the iPad mix. The drums don’t sound as good on this one, but they might be better. I can’t decide today. I might be able to decide some other day though.


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What do you think? Which version is better?

GarageBand for iPhone: Vindication

Yesterday I posted a song that was recorded entirely on my iPhone and had ugly distorted vocals that I was embarrassed to share with the interwebs. I said that there was one other song from this month that was also recorded entirely on the iPhone. This is that other song.

Vindication, or what?


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Short and sweet with atheist leaning lyrics. 1000 years ago I would have burned at the stake for this tune. I love living in the future!

The drums on the iPhone mix followed the guitar and bass much more closely, especially in the verses. I used the GarageBand Drummer again and while it lost a bit in the verses I think the groove is groovy enough to justify it. I wasn’t gonna, but I did.

No Added Distortion

This is a little better than the last one. No unwanted distortion.

I didn’t use the GarageBand drummer on this one. I kept the iPad drum part but changed the sound. Same with the vocals. The guitars are all the same between the two mixes except for the signal processing. I added a slap back delay onto the lead and toned down the reverb and delay on the two rhythm parts.

The real question though is when did everything this month turn into either 3/4 or 6/8 time? Is this what it’s like to play in a swing band?


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Here’s the iPad mix for comparison. Again, not too different.


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As far as the iOS mixes are concerned, I can call the June Music project successfully complete (under RPM Challenge rules). I have written and recorded 10 songs this month. There are two additional songs that don’t have vocals/lyrics/melodies yet. I don’t believe I will have time this weekend to finish them. I think I’ll do them next week in the first three days in July before 50/90 starts on the 4th. Then I’ll have 12 “June” songs and one left over from May, with two different mixes of each song. That will make a nice bandcamp.com playlist.

As of right now I am in for 50/90. I have not been writing at a fast enough pace to feel confident, but at least I’ve been building up to it. We’ll see how it goes.

There is No Excuse for Clipping

Now I know how Rush must have felt when they got the first mix of Vapor Trails…

It’s a good thing these are just demos and not a real attempt at doing anything… real.

So the vocals… the clipping… the distortion. No excuse. It’s spoiled the entire song for me.

This is the second of two songs that I recorded in their entirety using GarageBand for iPhone. My ability to get a good vocal take on an iOS device is iffy at best, but I was just all over the place with my iPhone today.

Tonight, when I did the iOS mix of this one the vocals sounded bad, but they always sound bad, you know? They were worse than most of the songs I’ve done this month, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Then I ported the file to the Mac and I could actually see the waveforms. Uh oh. Then I actually played the track. Oh damn, what a mess.

Sorry about that.


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As soon as I heard how distorted the vocal tracks were I listened back to the iOS mix to see how bad it sounded there. Now that I knew what I was looking for, yeah it’s there. It just doesn’t seem quite as insultingly awful on the first mix.


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I suppose I could go back and rerecord, but June ends on Monday and it’s a kid weekend. I don’t have time to do any more vocal recording. I’m stuck with this, unless I want to fix it next month. I won’t want to fix it next month though. The best this can hope for is that I rerecord the entire song from scratch at some future date.

Fat Finger Syndrome

I posted not long ago about how for the first time ever I used GarageBand on my iPhone to record a song from start to finish, top to bottom. It was a happy little up with people flavored post.

I actually had two songs this month on the iPhone. This morning I finished the vocals on the second song.

Never again.

I had the worst case of fat finger syndrome ever recorded in human history. You want to move the cursor from one block to another? Well hey, let’s drag this guitar segment along with it, and in doing so erase two other segments. Hey, now let’s repeat that nearly catastrophic error like four times!

Never again!