I recorded a couple of jams in GarageBand

Jun 29

Jun 29 I recorded a couple of jams in GarageBand

This was maybe the one pandemic-era project I didn’t fully get to during the covid era. I unwittingly devOps’ed myself into a corner by buying a maxed out gaming PC and then installing a bunch of complicated software on it for playing with virtual instruments and using my keyboard rack as a MIDI controller. And then I had no idea how to actually use any of that effectively and mostly just got frustrated, despite having a surplus of 16-character strings other people sent me to keep installing more software.

But eventually I hit a point with 3D printing and electronics projects where I had something useful after putting together the first Oskitone synth kit that I ordered (the “Scout”) and I didn’t want it to just become, like so many similar hobby projects, a thing that just sat in my office on a shelf somewhere without ever being used.

The 3D printed synth board I created. This is sort of unpleasant.

So I wanted to create a simple song that at least sampled the sound from that project. When I went to do that the natural starting point wasn’t booting up the gaming PC and trying to get all the complicated software tooling I had installed during the pandemic up and running again and make it cooperate effectively just to do this one thing. I ended up using GarageBand because I could just install it on my Mac for free and get going with actually creating music almost instantly.

That worked really well for the initial project here, which was just trying to find a way, any way to use the samples from the 3D printed synth (even creating an annoying song full of animal noises).

When I tried to get beyond that and just record a regular song and make it into exactly what I wanted I did eventually hit a wall and sort of realized, the complexity of those software programs exists for a reason - a program like GarageBand is basically fine for the first task but it fell pretty short when I wanted to actually edit the second composition into something better than just a recording of me jamming out on a bunch of synths. I ended up posting a pretty raw cut that lacked any of the editing finesse I wanted to get out of it because even after a lot of searching, it seemed like GarageBand simply doesn’t do a lot of the things I would have needed to do to take the more complicated composition any further. Sometimes software complexity is just plain necessary, unfortunately.

—

The more pleasant of the two songs - probably one of my favorite things I have created so far:

Where this project started, with trying to record samples of the 3D printed synth. This is much more EDM/dubstep and might be pretty painful if you don’t already like those genres.