Music Experiment: “Saturday In May”

UPDATE, 30 May 06: Since quite a few folks can’t play MP4, I’ve uploaded a MP3 version over at Archive.org.

I’ve been toying with Garage Band on and off since I had my Mac. I got down to viewing the Garage Band online tutorials over at Apple.co. Some 4 hours later, I created and uploaded this piece titled “Saturday In May” (well, today’s a Saturday and it’s in May…)

It’s a MEG4 file, 1.9MB, 3mins 48 secs playing time. Wear your headphones to hear the bass especially.

If you have some sense of musical timing, creating a musical piece using Garage Band is really easy. Gotta give credit to Apple.com for coming up with it. If you’ve listened to the audio file and you’re asking, “Wow did you really play those instruments”, sadly the answer is “No”. Wish I were that talented. The drum beats, instruments and the melodies were provided as part of Garage Band. If you watch the Apple online tutorials, you’ll know how it was created (using the sound loops etc).

Here are some details of the loops I chose, and how I arranged them (click on the flickr image to view the notes):

• After I listened to the various instruments and melodies, I settled on the “Strummed Acoustic 04” loop as the underlying rythmn for the entire piece. The Track Volume was lowered for the most part, so that it didn’t drown out the other pieces.
• I chose “Classic Rock Beat 01” for the drum beat. The volume track was lowered for the piano solo portion.
• Bass was “Classic Rock Fretless 01”, and just before the piano solo, I inserted “Classic Rock Fretless 02” for about 2 measures to give the bass melody some variation.
• The piano piece was a combination of the range of loops from the “Delicate Piano” series. Combining each loop from the same series effectively created a full melody.
• The guitar portion was a combination of several loops from the “Classic Rock Steel” guitar series, with a small repeating end part from “Modern Rock Guitar 01”. I experimented with superimposed loops to see what sort of effect it created.

Once I was satisfied with the final result, I saved it as a MPEG4 file (‘Share’ from the menu) and uploaded it to Archive.org. Next, I’ll probably try to record using a real instrument along side the pre-recorded loops.