343 - Oh!

Day 343. As I may have mentioned before, whenever I fly internationally I seem to find myself whiling away the time by messing around in GarageBand, coming up with riffs and musical ideas. Rarely a whole song or anything major, just a few bars to lay out an idea for rhythm and melody. The flight to Bali was no exception and here one I created on flight GA715.

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.

226 - Canberra Groove

Day 226. I had the pleasure today of working with some year 5 and 6 classes at Holy Family Primary School in Canberra. We got to do some creative stuff with the iPads, and one of those things was learning to compose music in GarageBand. As I was demonstrating how to get started I threw these tracks together, and quite liked the groove it created, so I finished it off on the plane this morning. Enjoy.

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.

177 - Drums and Guitars

Day 177. Being an ex-bass player, I really dig a good grove. In fact, just building up a good rhythm and percussion track, laying down a nice clean bass track, and adding a few simple riffs can sound pretty sweet. In this little audio piece I made in Garageband I started with a basic drum track, then added some bass, then added some guitars, then added some more guitars, then some more guitars, then some more drums and then some more drums, and, well, you get the idea. It builds up, has a few breaks, then subsides again. I kinda like it.

Feel free to use it or remix it.

163 - Cinematica

Day 163. Today's create is a short piece of music (24 bars) made in GarageBand on the iPad.  I like to dabble in GarageBand and just put together short tracks, trying to match sounds and rhythms. I think it's a great way to learn more about using the software and a fun way to spend an hour or so.

I seem to discover something new each time I play with GarageBand. It's an incredibly powerful app, and very impressive that music editing like this can be done on a tablet.

115 - Trans Tasman Groove

Day 115. For some reason I always seem to find myself playing with GarageBand on international flights. Not sure why. Anyway, today was no exception, and I composed this little 24-bar riff while flying across the Tasman from Christchurch to Sydney. I don't claim it's perfect, it's just an idea.



I do think though, that getting students to use Garageband to come up with simple riff-style compositions, even just bass and drums to get a good groove happening, is a great way to get them started with GB. Start with a drum track, add some bass, then keep layering in more sounds. I want to do that activity with my Year 5 kids this term.

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.

013 - Remixing Chris Pyne

Day 13. Our new Education minister, Christopher Pyne, is not impressing me. So today's Create turns a recent radio interview he did on the ABC into a musical remix. To make this, I used Audio Hijack Pro to grab the audio from this interview, then I extracted individual sound bites from the audio track using Audacity, then remixed them using GarageBand. I chopped and remixed his original words, then added some bass and drums to turn it into what you hear here.

In case you can't tell, I'm not a fan of the changes that Pyne is proposing, and I think he is somewhat of a fool who should keep his party politics out of education.



If you'd like to have a crack at remixing this yourself, feel free to do so. I can even send you the original sound bites if you want them.