May Music Morning

I took the Mazda and the MacBook out for a ride this morning.  We headed out to the current mobile recording studio location and put vocals on four songs.  Last night I finished the rhythm guitars on the last three songs (including three drone tracks on one 4+ minute song, meaning I played one note for 4+ minutes and then repeated it three times.  Yup, sorry everyone), and after this morning I have six songs with finished vocals.

Progress is good.

Untitled

Suck It, Jimmy Page

I just put backwards echo onto two guitar tracks in GarageBand.

By reverse echo, I don’t mean the digital signal effect that sort of makes an echo sound backward, I mean the real deal.  I mean instead of having a sound followed by an echo, I have the echo preceding the sound.

Jimmy Page claimed to have invented the technique when he used it on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (Waaaay down inside… Woman… Youuuu need… Loooooooooove)

Les Paul actually invented the technique using a couple of reel to reel tape decks.  Les Paul was a genius.  Jimmy Page was great, but he weren’t no Les Paul.

I took two tracks of guitar, reversed them, loaded them up with shit loads of echos, exported the segments to iTunes, reimported them into a new track in GarageBand and reversed them again.

Boom.

The echo comes before the sound.

Now I am going to mix that new track in with the original tracks so that it’s kind of subtle, but you can bet your sweet ass it’s there.

I love messing with backward tracks.  I just freakin’ love it.

Lost

I did some good work on May Music last night. Four songs got lyrics and melodies. When I finished I backed everything up. Today the computer crashed and I had to wipe it. I lost yesterday’s work, but I had the backup.

Nope.

The backup didn’t save correctly. Yesterday’s changes are all gone for good.

One Note on Logic Pro Remote for iPhone

Normally when I work on a MIDI instrument track in GarageBand I use the Logic Pro Remote app on my iPad to access the piano keyboard/drum pads/fretboard.  Tonight I had an idea for RPMay Song #5 but my iPad is in the other room and I was too lazy to go get it.

What did I do?

I installed the app on my iPhone.  The last time I tried to do this I couldn’t find it in the App Store.  I thought that, as a new user, I would share the answer to the one question I had to look up.

When you open the app and you’re looking at the mixing board channel and you want to switch to the piano or the fretboard or whatever you need to turn the phone on its side.

Portrait mode = mixer
Landscape mode = pretty much everything else.

You’re welcome.