Here’s a quick screencast on how to create a song sketch by developing instrumental loops in GarageBand. For some show notes, along with the copies of the piano loop score and chord progression, scroll down once you’ve watched the video.
Anyway, as I hope the screencast shows, it’s really easy to use GarageBand to quickly sketch out songwriting ideas, especially if you’ve already got a few fragments of chord progression in your head. As I’ve said previously, you can create really great songs with short chord loops.
I know that not everyone has a Mac, but of all the entry-level DAWs GarageBand is by far and away the best for this sort of thing, because it’s got such a range of drag-and-drop loops and preset instruments, both live and MIDI. When inspiration strikes, you don’t have to faff about loading instruments into tracks and setting basic levels - the basics are all done for you, and you can fiddle about adding effects and editing your tracks after you’ve got your precious ideas down.
If you’re particularly interested in how I’ve created this (admittedly very rough and ready) mix, it’s probably worth listening through headphones or a decent set of speakers. Even if you’re just using laptop speakers you should be able to pick up the very wide panning of the synth ‘pings’ on tracks 4 and 5, but good quality audio will help you pick out some of the sounds really clearly.
Having listened a few times, I’m coming to the conclusion that I was maybe a bit harsh on GarageBand’s built-in orchestral strings software. Considering the whole thing costs about seventy quid as part of the iLife suite, they really are quite good. Perhaps the default setting doesn’t add quite enough reverb to make them sound realistically live.
Here’s the score for the piano loop referenced in the screencast:
And the chord progression looks like this:
Am | Am | Fsus, F | F, Fsus |
C/E | C/E | G | E (7) |
Comments and questions all welcome!
