i've been so busy that i didn't have a chance to write about my musical activities. last week i got back into songwriting, though very brief and not for myself. i read one of olive's status updates on a social networking site and i just felt like they were song lyrics so i had to make a song out of it. any song, anything will do, so it was crappy. i fired up garageband for the first time in a long while. it was boring with just the guitar so i searched around the loops to enhance it with some drums. then i did it again. i read some of her writings and made another song. then i did it again. so i made three songs last week, each time getting slightly more complex, though they're all crappy.

for song ideas, sometimes the riffs you come up with don't quite match the drum loops so you modify it to the beat. i did that before when i tried to come up with a theme song for my podcast and i think i did that again for these songs though it was more about modifying the tempo of my riff. what was cool was that for one song i was actually jamming and did my shitty attempt at a solo for the outro. it just flowed.

for vocals, well i'm just awful and what makes it worse is that olive can sing so she'll just have to put up with my crap efforts. it's the thought that counts, right? anyway, recording instruments is just fine. i plug in my guitar or bass via the usb cable i have for them and can jam right on top of what's going on in garageband. i use the effects in the program to get the tone i want. i can crank up the speakers because it's recording from usb so i don't have to worry about the program recording its output. however, with vocals comes up all sorts of sticky issues. first of all, i don't have a microphone. i went through the microphone issue when getting together my podcast. i just didn't like the cheap usb mics and didn't want to have to go through many of them or spends lots of money to find my podcast solution. (line noise issues, argh!) so i got a digital recorder and that's worked fine. for the song vocals, i just record enough instrument parts and then put on my headphones and sing into the digital recorder. i usually fuckup a few times so i have to do a couple takes. i throw that into a sound editor to extract the best take. then i line it up in garageband to fit. this is all quite primitive but it works. i'm not creating stuff to enter into pop charts. i'm just having fun.

what's great about garageband versus when i used to make stuff with acid pro is that garageband is geared to recording your own material while still incorporating loops. this is a bit freeing although i still find drums frustrating. the loops available are just not what i envision. there's not much choice for fills or variety. i suppose i'd have to buy one of those instrument add-on packs to have more choice. or learn how to play the drums but my brain can't think that much in terms of hearing the song fully realized with all instruments. i really respect multi-instrumentalists who can envision the entire song and they lay it all out themselves. i salute you!