The Music Room
Initially this page will go along with the Computer Room but will be specifically about Apple's wonderful new GarageBand program which helps musically challenged people like myself make reasonably good quality music by combining pre-recorded loops and MIDI notation.
A few Don Eitner original songs
Loopdy Loop (version 1.2) - my second GarageBand composition, based entirely on royalty free Apple Loops (some that came with GarageBand, others that I downloaded on the web). Version 1.2 has been slightly touched up over the last two years. Time: 2:45.
Fifty-nine Seconds - this was the first piece I composed, using some obscure little MIDI program. I then imported the MIDI into Apple's GarageBand and added some effects. The title was simply due to the length of the song (which before adding some effects was 59 seconds). Time: 1:02
Inspiration
I will also use this area as my general purpose music room, highlighting musicians of special importance to me; my musical influences, though I do not purport to posess anything near their talents so my music will probably not sound anything like theirs.
I'll begin with my most recent influence, Cosmicity who has recently announced (in 2004) that he's retiring that name to release some differently-styled music under his own name of Mark Nicholas. In a world filled with talentless guitar and drum bands, Cosmicity/Mark stood out for me between 1999 and 2003 as the most creative and talented artist. I do have a tendency to find groups in the midst of their careers and then have to work backward with their albums, and this was the case here, as Cosmicity released an album a year since 1994 before I first learned of him in mid-1999. Every album has had at least two or three really good songs. I put together an 80 minute personal CD of what I consider to be "the best of Cosmicity" and filled the thing to the very end with 19 tracks. I could have gone on to a second CD with at least half a dozen others.
Official video for the 2008 release by Mark Nicholas (formerly Cosmicity) of a cover of the 80s hit "Maniac" |
Official Cosmicity video for the 2004 track "Sedgwick" |
Prior to finding Cosmicity, I was adrift, searching for new talent. All the groups I liked had either stopped making music or had stopped making listenable music by 1994. I was heavy into Kraftwerk, the godfathers of such musical genres as industrial, technopop, trance and synthpop. I also had great respect for Seven Red Seven who, very sadly, had broken up in the middle of recording what would have been their third album. Their first two, "Shelter" circa 1990 and "Bass State Coma" (later remixed and re-released as "Liquid") circa 1994 were true masterpieces of the synthpop phenomenon which had begun in the early 1980s and became ever more powerful through the early 90s thanks to world famous, multi-platinum awarded groups such as Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and Human League. And yes, I was still listening to the classic 80s hits of all those groups, but they had all disappointed me after 1993.
And in the 1980s I was just a kid. I listened to a lot of rubbish but found several gems which stood the test of time and inspired me. Most of them I've already mentioned above, but add to that Duran Duran, The Cure, Thompson Twins some bits and pieces from New Order's now 25+ year repertoire.
This of course is not to say that these are the only groups I listen to. I still own and ocassionally listen to CDs by Siouxsie & The Banshees, Faith No More, Madness, Cetu Javu and Yaz (Yazoo if you're in England).
But back to GarageBand
When I bought my first Macintosh in early summer 2004, I didn't have enough money to buy both the system and the iLife 2004 bundle which includes Apple's GarageBand program. By the end of summer I did get it, and have been fiddling with it ever since. For someone like me who doesn't have any formal music training and has a difficult, though not impossible, time keeping a beat and composing layered multi-track music, GarageBand is quite simply a dream come true.
GarageBand is part of Apple's iLife
GarageBand comes loaded with maybe a couple hundred pre-recorded samples (samples of real people playing real melodies on real instruments) plus a large collection of programmed MIDI pieces you can include, all royalty free, in your own music. You can layer and combine as many real instrument and programmed instrument tracks as your system can handle (in other words, the faster your processor and the more memory your computer has, the more tracks you can have). I've had up to about eight total tracks going at once with no complications, though the software allows for several dozen and I'm sure my system could handle that.
Since its release in early 2004, GarageBand has sparked such intense interest from users all over the globe that there are now dozens of sites specifically dedicated to this great program and more pop up every day. Some famous artists have begun releasing CDs of their own original loops for use with Apple's GarageBand -- the one I have my eye on right now is Vince Clark's "Lucky Bastard" loop collection -- for those who may be in the dark about good music, Vince Clark was the creative force behind Depeche Mode's 1981 debut album, Yazoo in 1982-83 and later Erasure from 1987 to present. Many consider him to be a god of synthesizer programming, others simply adore his musical flair. For me, because most of the loops on the CD were actually recorded in around 1993 (some have apparently been added for the new "Apple Loops" version of the CD) I am very interested, as that was my favorite era for Erasure music. There are also some sites which offer free monthly loops to download. Importing these into GarageBand is as easy as dragging them from the Finder (the MacOS equivalent of Windows Explorer or OS/2's WorkPlace Shell) into the Loops Browser at the bottom of the GarageBand window. From that moment forth, you can use your new loops in your own creations.
Now the really cool thing about the MIDI (or SoftSynth) loops is that you can assign any available "voice" to them (such as Grand Piano, Rock Drum Kit, Electric Slap Bass, etc) to give them unique sounds. You can further tweak them by moving, adding or deleting individual notes -- something which cannot be done with pre-recorded (or "real instrument") tracks since these are essentially just CD audio files. Add to this that if you change the key of your song, or you can change the key of just a section of the song, such softsynth pieces change automatically and play perfectly in the new key.
Can you tell yet that I'm having great fun with GarageBand? :)
Another very cool aspect of GarageBand's easy loop import and multi-track display is the concept of remixing, especially to add new musical pieces and effects to existing songs. I've been an amateur remixer since the late 80s. I used to do what I called "cut and paste mixes" using a CD player and a tape deck (I hear you say "tape deck?! What the heck is that?!") and I would find bits of existing songs, most often taken from various existing (professional) remixes of the same song, which sounded good when spliced together. I'd try to find easy transition points between one remix and another and give my own simple interpretation of how they could sound even better together. Well now I can do a bit of this with GarageBand and it will be a lot more precise than my old method and will allow me to layer on two, three, five, eight or a dozen other tracks for more effect. Anyone who plans on becoming the next Razormaid or Mark Saunders (ahh, Mark Saunders, where is he today?) should be very interested in this; I know I am!