355 - A Little Bit Krafty

Day 355. One thing I really like about using digital tools for making music is that you really don't need to be all that musical in order to make something reasonably interesting. Take Auxy for example. Auxy is a very cool iPad app for making sequences and arranging them into tracks. It's very simple to use and with a bit of thought I think you could do some very cool things with it. It's very forgiving for non-musicians like me, as you can literally jjst mess around until you get something you like.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here is my first attempt at making something with it. I thought it sounded a bit Kraftwerk-ish, which is probably the style of music that is the most obvious type of thing to make with Auxy. Have a go yourself and see what you come up with.

344 - Strings with Pluck

Day 344. Another musical composition idea made on flight GA715. The strings in GarageBand are really interesting and you need to take some time to explore how they work. They can do all sorts of sounds from bowing, plucking, pizzacato, as well as several different chord inversions. Worth playing with. Here's a simple little riff using a variety of string sounds.

192 - Statewide

Day 192. As I've said previously I often find myself playing with GarageBand when I'm on a plane, just messing around with loops and tracks. It's amazing how quickly it makes the time pass when you're the creative groove. Today's create was a little piece I put together on the flight coming home to Sydney from the Sunshine Coast.

145 - An Audio Tool

Day 145. I've always enjoyed building audio tracks in GarageBand using loops. It would be nice to have a non-Mac alternative to GarageBand but there really isn't much around that competes with it. Maybe Sony Acid Pro, but that's quite expensive).

So when I set an audio looping task for my students recently I had to start looking around for alternatives for those who don't use BYOD Macs. And I found it in AudioTool, a powerful, sophisticated, free audio editor that runs entirely in Chrome. Yes, that's right. In Chrome.

Here's a little rhythm track I knocked together on my first attempt. I think this has LOTS of potential in the classroom.

And here is a screen grab of the editor...

Best of all, the tracks you create are all built on Creative Commons licences by default, so it supports remixing and open sharing really well. Build on the work of others and let others build on the work of yours. Love it!

086 - Feeling Loopy

Day 86. today I discovered an app called Loopy, a loop based audio recorder for iOS. Just record a sound, then just dub over and over to create some interesting sequences. This sample was made (as my first attempt, so be nice...) to show how a basic rhythm could be made using nothing but my own voice.

079 - 42 Seconds

Day 79. Today's create is a result of messing around with an iPad app called ProKeys. This was one of those apps that I had on my iPad but hadn't really played with much so I didn't know what it could do. I thought it was just a playable keyboard app, but in fact it has some pretty sophisticated digital synthesisers built into it, as well as a multitrack recorder. I made this track by overdubbing 4 keyboard tracks over each other. I'm not much of a musician, but it was fun to play with.

Getting it off the iPad and into the blog was a little fiddly. I had to connect the iPad directly to my computer with a cable, and open the track via iTunes. I then did a minor edit to the audio using Adobe Audition before uploading directly to SoundCloud (which is actually an export option inside of Audition. Nice!)



There is no copyright on this: I put it in the public domain so if you can use it for something, go for it.

067 - A Clash of Cultures

Day 67. Take GarageBand for the iPad. Create multiple audio tracks. Build layers of sound using several built-in Apple loops. Choose loops that are from various cultures that would not normally go together. Put them together anyway. Build some kind of song structure. Be creative. See what you end up with.

This is what I ended up with.

056 - BYO iPads Information for Parents

Day 56. Our school is launching a BYOD iPad program for our Year 5 and 6 kids this year. Tonight we held a parent information evening where I was asked to speak to the parents about the reasons, rationale and strategy for its implementation. We thought it would be a good idea to record the session for any parents unable to attend, so I decided to make it my daily create for today.

The slides were created in Apple Keynote for OSX, then exported to a PDF file and imported into SlideShare.com. The audio was made with a Rode lapel mic plugged into my Nexus 4 phone, and recorded with an Android app called Easy Voice Recorder. The audio file was then transferred from my Nexus 4 to my Mac using a wireless file transfer app called AirDroid, edited in Audacity, then uploaded to SlideShare and synced to the slides with their slidecasting feature.

Sadly, slidecasting in SlideShare is about to be discontinued on Feb 28. I don't know of another service that does this syncing of slides and audio, and I have used the feature quite a bit in the past so I'm disappointed to see it go.