You can do covers with GB only loops!

[ChrisH3677]

I've been working on a cover for a week. One of the hard things is chord patterns. For this song, I had to cut loops up, and on a couple of occassions, had to transpose the cutout. I will post more track info detail in the song info in the next couple of days.

I did it because someone told me it was difficult and to stick to originals. :D And they were right!!

Am happy to answer any questions about it. It's not easy and is time consuming - especially iwht my limited musical talent

But of course, that's what makes GB soooo good - almost anyone can turn out music that sounds half decent.

It's a cover of U2's "I still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". EVERY single note in it is from stock standard GarageBand loops. No JamPack and no recorded music. The only recording is that voice!

Hope you enjoy the song - well - the music anyway (I don't sing very well at all!) and that it inspires you all to greater things with GB.

GB is one of Apple's best ever software. I hope it sells more than a few Macs to switchers. I know I got an IT guy at work really interested when I showed him GB today.

Anyway, here's the link http://www.macidol.com/jamroom/bands/193/music.php

[SilentPanda]

Excellent job! It sounds fairly close to the song (except for the singing of course ;) :p ). Congrats! I'm impressed!

[ExoticFish]

ha, the music is really good. good job!

[neut]

i bet that took a long time.

a little hard to hear the change ups, but i bet you learned a lot about GB in the process. keep creating... maybe try some originals.



peace.

[bennetsaysargh]

awesome! minus the vocals (no offense).
keep the good work up.

[pgwalsh]

Great job! Ya need to let loose on the vocals a bit.. maybe process them a bit, but good regardless.

[mrsebastian]

that's pretty [bleep] amazing. gives me hope that when i get off my lazy ass, i may actually be able to make something with gb myself. good job!

[johnnyjibbs]

Wow! That's really good. Vocals have potential if you just turn the volume up a little and be more confident! Not bad for a non-musician! And you proved me wrong :p

[mclosers]

turn the darn echo down... That sounds terrible with that much echo and raise the volume of the voice. other wise fairly good.. now add your own variations to the U2 song

[snowdog]

We are not worthy;)

EXCELLENT!!!

But you should also mention your other tracks.
"Heavy Mandolin" is very cool.

When's the album out?

[Sabenth]

nothing that a few hours in a pro studio wont don lol.. very impressve that it sounds more or less the same yes vochals again but what the hell.. at least you sang..

[Xero]

i dont mean to crash the party here, but although you did do very well on replicating the sounds of the song, the singing and timing was WAYYYYYY off buddy. :) im not talking about how you sang it, but where and when you sang it. just listen to the original once, youve added way too many extra measures... somehow. its sounds like you added extra measures to make up for the fact that you werent singing the song fast enough to keep up with normal length of each progression. just some healthy criticism.

other than that it sounds like you got the right combination of samples and loops to best replicate the original. good job.

[nagromme]

You can also make remixes of songs--at least you can with SoundTrack (which has a master tempo envelope to help your piece match tempo changes without losing beats). Just drag the original song in as one big sound clip, match the tempo, and start cutting, pasting, processing, and adding.

Matching the tempo of your project to the beats of the piece is the hardest step--but do it first and get it right: after that, everything you drag and drop will synch! (Matching the key may take some trial and error, too.)

It's fun--anyone tried this with GB? (Soundtrack behaved a little oddly at the end of a single really long clip, if you started playing your project in the middle--but I think the latest update may have improved handling of very-long clips.)

[TwitchOSX]

I didnt hear any lyrics. It sounds pretty good.. but without the vocals, the song is moot. The vocals are a huge part of this song that give it that extra bang.

[ChrisH3677]

Thanks for all your kind words. :D

I actually recorded the vocals using the original song (imported it to GB, lined it up, muted other tracks and recorded), which might explain why it's a little out of alignment.

I never expected this song to be so popular - I would never have tortured so many folks with my singing if I had've known. It's all a bit embarrassing really.

I just wanted to do it to show off GarageBand - who some before its release, said was a toy.

Hey thanks Johnny - but you were right - it's damn hard!

PS Twitch - be grateful you didn't hear the vocals!! I will try to find someone who can sing to do a vocal track for it.

[dieterd]

the bass is completely wrong.

[Vanilla]

Just like to say that Heavy Mandolin is a very nice piece of work, well done. Its certainly made me look at GB in a more positive light.
Vanilla

[nagromme]

Sounds great. I'd be interested to hear it with vocals.

[RandomDeadHead]

Yea man, I wanna hear the vocals too!

[ChrisH3677]

Originally posted by dieterd
the bass is completely wrong.

YES!! Absolutely!! That drove me nuts for a while. And I still may try to fix it.

But do you know - EVERY line is wrong!

The dukketer-dukketer guitar line is wrong
The tambourine line is wrong
The drums lines is wrong
The keyboard line is wrong
The noodling guitar line is wrong
The lead guitar line is wrong

And yet, people hear it and even before the vocals say "That's that U2 song!" And most people say the music sounds great.

So, with my aim to show off GB, I think I succeeded.

But I knew that the bass line was the first thing someone who really did know the song would pick up. You're a U2 fan? - my apologies and I'm glad you didn't hear the vocals!!

I will try to fix it, but that will probably mean building it note by note from the existing bass line which then gets to the point I may as well just step-enter it in a software instrument which gets away from my whole aim to do it with inbuilt loops with the least amount of cutting and transposing.

[ChrisH3677]

Originally posted by Vanilla
Just like to say that Heavy Mandolin is a very nice piece of work, well done. Its certainly made me look at GB in a more positive light.
Vanilla

Cool!! Thanks. I like that one too altho, I gotta cut out more of that riff.

Glad it inspired you, that's exactly what I've tried to achieve with all three songs.

btw - did you check the song info for Heavy Mandolin?

I will get info up for the other two tomorrow night.

[603]

i'm sure Garage Band is cool, but Sonic Foundry's Acid has been doing the same thing on the PC for about 7 years now. i don't think it will go very far in selling any new Macs (see first post), at least not to people who have any knowledge about the audio software that's out there. Acid is not even a really high-end app, it's on the shelves at places like Best Buy. maybe the Apple version works better, as is sometimes the case, but i would stop short of saying that the concepts behind Garage Band are new, and i have to admit that it's not very exciting if you know that such an application has existed on the Dark Side for so long.

that said, as far as authenticity goes, it's more of a Muzak version of the song. (the fact that you removed the vocals don't help in that respect.) no offense meant at all, it's just my opinion. for the sake of fairness, i ripped the track from CD and removed the vocals using a wave editor. it's mixed like most old-school rock tracks, with vocals in the middle, so eliminating the middle of the stereo field effectively makes it an instrumental. with the vocals gone, it's even easier to tell how dissimilar the two are. you're absolutely right that in the beginning it sounds like the U2 song, and that people will recognize it - but that's because it's the beginning and there are only a couple of loops. once you get into the track it becomes more obvious that something isn't quite right. you did a pretty good job, i think.

as for the creator's comments about re-building the bassline note-for-note: that would essentially be cutting the loop down to just a bass sample... sure, with just one bass note, you could do about any remix or melody properly. if you were to do that, there would be no difference in having Garage Band, Sonar, Acid, an Akai S6000, or a real bass playing the notes... the more you pare the loops down to their individual elements, the less impressive the application would seem... i mean, if you get a few single bass notes, slice up the drum kit, etc, you could do the whole thing in Fruity Loops if you wanted to. not a real credit to Garage Band.

i really wish Sonic Foundry would port their apps to the Mac - they really suck for staying with the PC, but i have to give them credit for beating every other music software company to this "everyone is a musician" idea a long time ago. one thing that Sonic Foundry does through the website www.acidplanet.com is to invite pro musicians to contribute the loops that make up their songs for remix competitions. of course, they're just WAV files, and nothing should stop you from checking out the site, looking for some bands that you like, and downloading loops that can be used in Garage Band, Soundtrack, or any loop-based application. in the future, it will be really cool if Apple could offer a similar service to their customers, and i'm sure they could attract some big names who would want to contribute their loops for remixing by the masses.

for anyone who is criticizing the fact that the original thread author should add his own elements in, i think he explained sufficiently that it was supposed to be a demo of Garage Band, not the Aphex Twin remix of Devil's Haircut.

[neut]

Originally posted by 603
for anyone who is criticizing the fact that the original thread author should add his own elements in, i think he explained sufficiently that it was supposed to be a demo of Garage Band, not the Aphex Twin remix of Devil's Haircut.

true (sans the PC propaganda).

Sony owns Acid (and the Sonic Foundry family). Most likely it won't be ported (along with FL). Go try Live and Reason if you want a more creative audio program for the Mac. Then go buy Logic (apples pro-audio app).


peace.

[ChrisH3677]

Originally posted by 603
i'm sure Garage Band is cool, but Sonic Foundry's Acid has been doing the same thing on the PC for about 7 years now.

I looked at Acid a few times in my Windows days but it just confused the crap out of me. I found it very difficult to learn ditto Fruity Loops. I could never get anything decent out of any Windows music app.

With GarageBand I didn't even need a manual. And I'm creating better music than I've ever been able to.

[ExoticFish]

Originally posted by 603
i'm sure Garage Band is cool, but Sonic Foundry's Acid has been doing the same thing on the PC for about 7 years now. i don't think it will go very far in selling any new Macs (see first post), at least not to people who have any knowledge about the audio software that's out there.

i own Acid Pro and i love it to death, that why i was so excited to hear about Soundtrack and now GB, because they are being done by the guy who invented Acid from what i hear. the thing about GB that is so nice is that it's much more user friendly than Acid.

Originally posted by ChrisH3677
I looked at Acid a few times in my Windows days but it just confused the crap out of me.

he just proved the point that GB has a great market. I love Acid because I've been making music for a few years now but for someone who would never thought they could ever create music, all of a sudden a new world opens up to them with the ease of GB.

GB is simple enough that anyone can do it but complicated enough that a long time musican can make something really nice.

[603]

Originally posted by ChrisH3677
I looked at Acid a few times in my Windows days but it just confused the crap out of me. I found it very difficult to learn ditto Fruity Loops. I could never get anything decent out of any Windows music app.

personally, i think Acid is very simple and easy to use (except for the MIDI sequencer, which is awful and not worth bothering with). it pretty much does one thing, though they're starting down the slippery slope that Cakewalk (RIP) followed, wanting to be an end-all one-stop music app.

on the other hand, Fruity Loops is very complex and can be difficult to understand, but i never feel that it has a case of featuritis. and it does manage to be everything and the kitchen sink when it comes to making music under Windows, and it's really annoying that there's not a true FL alternative on the Mac. Reason is not an alternative to FL. you can't use VST synths or your own effects in Reason, for example. i've been using FL for a long time on the PC and still don't know everything about it. it gets a lot of flack, maybe because it only costs $99, but there's no difference in using Reaktor in FL and using Reaktor in Logic, except for elitism amongst Logic users.

i would even suggest that FL is a lot more complex than Live or Reason, which i also own and use. it takes a lot of audio apps to get things done, on either platform.

if anyone here is a Nine Inch Nails fan, just keep in mind that Trent Reznor (die-hard Mac user) and some of his bandmates bought PCs during the recording of The Fragile to run applications that don't exist on the Mac.

http://www.9inchnails.net/remix-files/keyboard_mag.htm

platform loyalty is no different from political loyalty, really, it just takes away options that might actually work pretty well for you. that's not "PC propaganda."

With GarageBand I didn't even need a manual. And I'm creating better music than I've ever been able to.

but but but... you're not really creating music, you're just picking loops that sound good together. it's sort of like clip art. the people at Apple, Sonic Foundry/Sony, or wherever have gone to great lengths to make sure that you can pretty much put together any combination of loops and have it sound good. when i got Acid 2 back in like, 1998, i told my roommate that i wanted to show him this new software... he sat down, with no prior musical experience besides a huge CD collection, and put together a pretty decent track (as far as clip art goes) in about five minutes.

this is not a criticism of Garage Band (or a criticism of the thread's author, who actually did a pretty cool thing with the built-in loops). i'm sure Garage Band it can be a great tool for people who are making their own music and want to quickly mock up certain loop-based compositions... but to download Garage Band and click around on the screen and put A + B + C together doesn't mean you're any more of a musician than someone who uses stock photos and calls herself a photographer. would you spend $15 on a CD if you knew that the "creator" had put it all together with sample CDs and loops from the internet? you might, because it might be something you enjoy. and i'm sure a lot of the music out there draws from such commodity sources. but it doesn't have very much credibility, nor is it what i would call "creating music."

[ChrisH3677]

Originally posted by 603
but but but... you're not really creating music, you're just picking loops that sound good together. it's sort of like clip art.

Yes, yes, absolutely. I'd been trying to avoid using that word (creating). I should have said I'm making better music. Although - if you listened to some of my stuff it does take some creativity to cut the loops up right.

But the next step for GB for me is using it more creatively - recording my own stuff and just using GB to color it a bit, and add drums tracks.

[603]

Originally posted by ChrisH3677
Yes, yes, absolutely. I'd been trying to avoid using that word (creating). I should have said I'm making better music. Although - if you listened to some of my stuff it does take some creativity to cut the loops up right.

But the next step for GB for me is using it more creatively - recording my own stuff and just using GB to color it a bit, and add drums tracks.

i did listen to your stuff and thought it was pretty good. (i'm downloading "The First Time" right now, it wasn't there the other day when i posted.) i'm glad you didn't come back with a flame, because i meant no disrespect, and it was possible to take my comments as an ad hominem argument. i'm just wondering what Apple's got up its sleeve with this... and i'm concerned that it will turn music into even more of a commodity, just like cheap digicams have made it harder for photographers to earn a living.

doing what you're doing is actually a really excellent way to start making music. it's easy to get bogged down in the minor complexities when you're starting out - and besides, it's a lot of fun to play around with stock loops. you will know what sounds good to start with, so that when you start making tracks that only contain your own material later, you will have the ability to pick out what sounds bad. and you're absolutely correct that there is some skill involved in the pacing and cutting up the loops - i've heard some insane remixes on AcidPlanet that only used the original loops provided by a band. so, good luck with GB, and with making your own all-original stuff in the future.

[sethypoo]

Nice. Very nice.

I need to get onto Mac Idols soon, I have some neat songs too.

[Macophile]

Originally posted by 603
i'm just wondering what Apple's got up its sleeve with this... and i'm concerned that it will turn music into even more of a commodity, just like cheap digicams have made it harder for photographers to earn a living.

Sorry, but I don't think I understand your analogy. How have cheap digital cameras made it more difficult for professional photographers to make a living? It seems that their proliferation has opened up photography to huge numbers of people for whom it would have been an expensive hobby just a few years ago. That doesn't exactly infringe upon the realm of the professional, even though he or she may be tired of hobbyists beaming over their so-so snapshots as though they were all the second coming of Ansel Adams. But that's nothing new. An optimistic view may be that the ability to take dozens of pictures, pick just the perfect one, and delete the rest increases the appreciation of the amateur for the work of the professional, understanding just how difficult it is to get that single outstanding shot.

It seems to me that Garage Band is going to do something similar. People are going to fiddle around with it, combine some loops, be very pleased with themselves, and the professional musicians and composers will roll their eyes and offer faint praise through clenched teeth. But few Garage Band users will be under the illusion that they are real musicians, or that they're really creating something more than a collage of sound, and many more will gain a greater understanding of music and composition and learn just how difficult it is to create something out of nothing.

Unless you're arguing that cheap(er) cameras have created more photographers and increased competition among those who've chosen it as a profession. More people taking more pictures, but without an increase in the number of markets buying them. Which is just a hazard of any job, really. It's lousy if you're caught in it, but I don't know if it's all bad. I guess it's like saying that increased literacy is a bad thing because more people knowing how to write makes it more difficult for writers to make a living. Inexpensive software like Garage Band might do the same thing, but having a word processor doesn't make anyone a writer, iPhoto doesn't make anyone a photographer, and Garage Band doesn't make anyone a musician. All of them take talent, practice, and dedication, and the quality of the output make them stand out from any amateur efforts.

I didn't mean to rip on you or anything, it's just that your statement made me start thinking about all of this. It stood out from all of the other encouraging things you were saying and seemed a little peculiar just standing there. That, and the fact that I can't imagine music becoming any more of a commodity than it already is, or seems to be.

[neut]

Originally posted by 603
if anyone here is a Nine Inch Nails fan, just keep in mind that Trent Reznor (die-hard Mac user) and some of his bandmates bought PCs during the recording of The Fragile to run applications that don't exist on the Mac.

http://www.9inchnails.net/remix-files/keyboard_mag.htm

platform loyalty is no different from political loyalty, really, it just takes away options that might actually work pretty well for you. that's not "PC propaganda."

here's the section if anyone is to lazy to find it:

"Trent's studio complex has no shortage of Macintosh computers, but PCs were integrated into the studio setups along the way. "About halfway through the album, a couple of us bit the bullet and got Windows machines," Charlie says, "because there is a lot of shareware-level audio software for PCs that we wanted to try. Programs like AudioMulch and, on the professional side, [Native Instruments] Reaktor, Generator, and Transformator, which are modular synthesizer-type situations in software that offer a different set of module choices that what you get in a Nord Modular. We also got the Pulssar audio card from Creamware, and I believe on one song we actually used the simulated Minimoog that comes with the Pulsar. We mostly used the PCs for audio processing and drone creation. Basically it was a whole new world. I mean, we didn't learn most of these programs from top to bottom; it was more like, plug it in, bring it up on the console, and see if anything interesting comes out. You know, you're putting in a vocal, and what's coming out is a small crackling sound. The PC< with all these strange shareware programs, provided just another color to the spectrum. But we still did all our sequencing and audio recording on the Macs. The Logic Audio/Pro Tools combo is a lot more evolved on the Mac, and many more plugins exist. Plus, we kept breaking our PCs' operating systems by installing audio drivers and shareware stuff, so we didn't rely on them too much."

two sides to every coin:

Nailed to their Macs
“Everybody in our camp is Mac and that’s it,” stresses Reznor, “We’ve adopted a pretty purist attitude. There have been some software companies who develop PC-only software who’ve approached us — the people who make Acid, Sonic Foundry, for one.

“It may be a nice program, but I’m not going to endorse it if it doesn’t run on a Mac, and I told them that,” he adds.

“Even if it does run on Virtual PC, I tell them, ‘Wake up and do the right thing.’” he says “With Web integration stuff, there have been companies that are like ‘use our player’ but it only runs on a Windows machine, and I’m like, ‘No, I’m not going to help the enemy.’”

“I’ve just always had a soft spot in my heart for Macs.” admits Reznor.

“Someone bought me an iMac for Christmas, and it’s just something as simple as plug-in the DV and the first time ‘Oh wow! it works.’ I mean, here I was expecting to have to hunt down a cable, but ‘Woah, it’s in the box.’ That’s what I think a lot of the PC people don’t understand,” Reznor concludes, “the pleasure of not having to worry about compatibility issues.”

from this excellent audio page:
audiohead (http://www.audiohead.net/interviews/trentreznor/index4.html#)


peace.