Each holiday season I get time to play with Garageband and add slightly to my musical skills. This year's creation is called Faraway Home (2m 30s, 192kbps AAC):


[You should be able to see a Quicktime controller above and play it straight from the blog. If you don't, see the iCompositions link at the bottom of this entry.]

It is loop-free and made of nine tracks: two lead, two bass, two percussion, two rhythm, and one atmospheric. To hear it well you need some good bass to reproduce the very low notes. I'm using Garageband 3 on Tiger, a 24" iMac and a 49-key M-Audio keyboard.

This time around I set out to create all my instruments, and find a way of getting some emotion into the piece. This is tricky because my musical skills are limited and I don't have a lot of experience with synths. Along the way I discovered how useful the track echo can be.

I started out experimenting with track echo and had two instruments derived from a synth pad, one in each ear:


The track echo takes into consideration the beat of the music, so it can be used to create extra notes, especially with tremolo and auto-panning. That experimentation led to a version that made the left ear lead the right ear by a very short time interval, letting the echo do most of the work.


I needed an atmosphere, so toned down the pinging sound of the other two tracks and created a background from another synth pad instrument. That had some very nice resonances in it.


Then I modified a synth texture to create a "thump" note and used them in pairs for a heartbeat. That went into one ear and a drum from the rock kit in the other ear. At this point some sort of a start to the piece came together:


To add some bass and melody I modified a bass guitar to make a muted twangy sound and used the track echo to create extra notes for me.


I needed more bass than that for more of a punch, so I used a different bass combined with a bass amplifier and some heavy filtering to get really deep pure notes. The lower of the two is actually two notes an octave apart:


Now I'm getting somewhere musical. But there is no lead and no emotion. After a lot of experimentation I got the sound I wanted: a twangy guitar sound from a synth. The lead is a modified synth lead that responded very well to the pitch blend wheel on my keyboard. The final trick was to add reverb to just that track.

I created two tracks separately, expecting to make one from parts of the two, but once I played them both together, realized that I could have a duet. Finally I created an end, worked on the beginning some more, adjusted the levels and panning, and tweaked everything.

I'm not sure how it stands up on its own. It would be good as part of a movie, an atmospheric background to a car journey in the rain or something like that. I will put it up on iCompositions with my other music.

Tags: Music