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.

227 - Class Act

Day 227. After yesterday's daily create of some fairly funky music with a heavy downbeat and bassline, offset with synth and wahwah guitar, I realised that I often use the same kind of approach to writing music in GarageBand. Start with drums, lay down the bass track, then build up with guitars or keys or more drums. Today I wanted to try building a music track in a completely different way, since part of the daily create process is about trying new things and not falling into the trap of doing things the same way every time. Mix it up. Do the opposite.

So in this track I didn't use drums and bass at all, instead starting with strings, and building the sound in layers. Its different and I quite like it.

 

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.

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.

102 - You Will Create Something

Day 102. I completely forgot where I found this quote, but I remember really liking it at the time so I recorded myself reading it. I then forgot all about it, and only just found it. I think it has great wisdom in it.



Note to self: Would make a good remix with music...

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.