Wasting Time in Garage Band

[Xtreme]

I'm a recent convert to Apple hardware (still using a PC desktop, though) and I've been toying around with GarageBand, which comes packaged with Macbooks (and I think all new Apple laptops and desktops these days).

Though I am a musician, I am a performer and am currently studying music education; composition for me is typically something done to either vent creative tension or just to simply complement my other studies. Basically, I don't plan on professionally composing or studying composition formally. I've done a few piano and small ensemble pieces, but that's about it.

Anyway, this "digital composition" world is somewhat new to me - that is, the world of composing with pre-recorded (sampled or synth) sounds and going straight from a mental idea to a recorded digital sound, rather than writing it down in between. The thing I like about this is the instant feedback - if 5 instruments sound cr@ppy together playing certain line, I'll know it right away rather than having to gather 5 fellow musicians together and figure that out.

Also, it allows me to get a shareable product without having to know how to perform competantly on all the instruments - I don't have to be able to kick out a guitar lick myself to be able to hear it on my computer anymore.

The downside is frequently terrible-sounding instruments. Often the non-musical ear can be fooled, but to a musician, fake strings and wind instruments are nearly offensive-sounding. I think I can fake a guitar and drums decently well with the right tweaking, but brass and woodwinds are universally terrible when synthesized, in my opinion.

To get to the point, the following is something I did in GarageBand today, took probably 1.5hrs to 2 hrs altogether in about .5 hr sessions (yeah I know, need to find a better way to waste time). Everything is done within GarageBand, and all the tracks (except drums) are recorded via me "playing" them on my Macbook keyboard, a cool feature in GarageBand. There are a couple of real recorded spots and real instruments that I did because I couldn't get them right on a computer keyboard.

I was originally going for a sort of film or movie background-track kind of idea, but I got away from that as the piece progressed a bit. I may eventually ellaborate on the couple of themes and stretch it out some, allowing for better development and transitions between the themes. Right now it's very rough, on the whole. It's not finished yet, but I figured it was far enough into the process to get some comments.



Anyway, without any further adieu, here the damned thing is. (About time! Phew!)

All crits, comments, compliments, brutal flames, etc etc are welcome and appreciated. This is, of course, just done for fun, but I'm always looking to improve anything I throw out.

It's .m4a, not sure if Windows Media Player deals with that yet. Don't have time to convert it at the moment to .mp3 or something.

http://cbautista.l2p.net/music.....ration.m4a (right click-->save-as might be necessary)

[Stwong]

It's a shame that this has no comments yet, since it's pretty awesome.

The strings actually don't sound terrible at all to me, they just sound ever-so-slightly synthetic. I don't consider that atrocious, and I've been playing violin/viola for quite some time now...

If there's anything that could possibly be wrong with it, I'd have to go with a lack of huge dynamic variation--it's pretty mellow overall.
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Stwong.net

[Xtreme]

Yeah... I was wondering if I was "out of the loop" and it was actually terribly worse than I expected...

[Stwong]

AAC is Apple's lapdog, WMA is Microsoft's lapdog, Ogg Vorbis is Linux's lapdog, MP3 is still the standard.

foobar2000 can natively handle all of them, though, so I'd recommend installing it if you're on a PC.

In regards to being out of the loop: people are just lazy and want quick gratification. Music is anything but quick gratification.

Also, if you're really into this, get an actual 5-octave MIDI controller. You won't regret it.
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Stwong.net

[Xtreme]

[spock]

[Xtreme]

Not that you should buy these particular adapters, but this sort of adapter is what you're looking for. Honestly, I don't anything about the quality loss by using an adapter of this sort, but it hasn't been anything noticeable to me on mediocre guitars and amps.

1/4" --> 1/8" or 6.3mm --> 3.5mm
http://www.fullcompass.com/product/291749.html

1/8" --> 1/4" or 3.5mm --> 3.6mm
http://www.fullcompass.com/product/289073.html

Those just popped up first on Google, but any electronics store should have those adapters. I like to have a couple of each for versatility and flexibility, personally. Since the Macbook's quick enough, I can even output a clean guitar sound (undistorted) straight from the amp, distort or alter it on software level, and then output it back to headphones or speakers for on-the-fly feedback.

Summary
So usually my setup for recording something like this would be along the lines of:

Guitar --> Controllers --> Amp --> [1/4" to 1/8" Adapter] --> Computer Sound Card --> Software-Level Modification and Recording --> Headphone/Speaker Output [you can convert back to 1/4" here if you want to go back to your amp or another amp]

Pros
Now I can match the guitar's final output sound to the synthesized output sound to try to minimize any differences. I can make it hard for a listener to distinguish between my guitar capabilities and my keyboard capabilities since both the guitar and synth are being put through similar software modifications.

I can even have a software metronome going or can record my guitar part over the accompaniment on-the-fly and have all of this outputting to my headphones. So it's like I have a synth band to record with, rather than trying to just record each part individually and then match it up later. It's a more musical process than a post-editing process, which I appreciate as a musician.

Cons
With this many different pieces of equipment and a moderately low budget, I can create a "quality bottleneck" at a lot of points. And it can be very difficult to find the culprit.

For example, if my cable is messed up, I might spend an hour trying to figure out what's wrong with my sound card, or what's wrong with my amp when, in fact, those aren't the problem. If I were just going from guitar to amp to recording, it would be a much shorter chain with far fewer potential problems.

Once you bring on-the-fly software modification into the picture, you can open up your output to a lot of good things; however, you can also introduce many potential issues that aren't easy to pinpoint.

This hasn't been a major problem for me, just throwing this out there.




Honestly, the reason I'm toying with guitars and keyboards right now is because the mics required to make high-quality recordings of wind instruments (trumpet, namely) are extremely expensive. Particularly when compared to the cable to connects an amp to a sound card. My trumpet professor told me his "middle price-range" recording mic cost him $850.

[spock]

Ok, thanks a lot I had a 3.5mm --> 3.5mm cable around, so I bought a 3.5mm --> 6.3mm and I'm using that between the amplifier and the line in.

It seems I have to put the volume of the amplifier really low, because otherwise my sound card makes it all sound really bad.

Thanks for the help.
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