I Been Cooking In The Stu

An important part of filmmaking is music, and what better music to use than your very own! This is why in Maker we have been working on getting better at using GarageBand to understand music and to practice making our own. I have never really learned how to use GarageBand, I tried teaching myself in grade 8, but I haven’t had a thorough lesson on how it works. There’s definitely so many possibilities I have yet to learn about, and the goal of this unit is to help us learn to use it to it’s full extent.

Our first assignment was to compose our own short song – under a minute long – using the Live Loops feature in GarageBand. I have used Live Loops before, so I knew how it worked, but it had been a while, so I was happy to get back to it. Using Live Loops is super easy, a simple swipe of the finger across the screen and you basically already have a song. I started thinking of some music I like, and tried to take inspiration and sort of replicate it using the Loops. I quickly found out that this was not a good idea, I was definitely overthinking the assignment. I ended up settling on the ‘Chill’ Live Loops category, and got to work composing something that sounded good enough. It didn’t take long to make something I was okay with handing in, it had a beginning, a middle, and an abrupt end due to the fact I had to cut it off to fit the 1 minute time limit. 

I was away from school on the day we were to begin reading and following an iBook to learn about GarageBand. The interactive book was created by Apple with Justin Timberlake as the ‘ambassador’ and teaches people the basics of a song, and how to create their own using GarageBand. There were a few little tasks that I didn’t get around to doing as a result of my absence, all leading up to the assignment of remixing Justin’s ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’. 

After finding out about this book I downloaded it and skimmed through the little tasks, picking up the information I felt was necessary. I then got to work on my remix. At first I started playing around with the different loops. I found it super cool how they broke down all the different vocals and instruments of the song in to their own loops. I was expecting that it was just a song file that we would have to add sounds to or morph, but I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the freedom we had. After the best part of an hour, I had come up with a remixed version of the song that I was quite proud of. I made sure it had enough of a beginning, middle, and end, while still being different from the original. My favourite thing I have learned from the course so far is the FX tab, with features such as repeater and filter. Even in the week or so I’ve been working with GarageBand again, I’ve learned more than I ever have in the past.

Unfortunately I can’t post the remix to SoundCloud as it includes copyrighted material.