Category Archives: Music Composing

Friday Faves 02-15-13

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Firstly, some sad news for sewing and knitting folks in the Boston area: the venerable Windsor Button shop is closing its last remaining store, on Temple Pl. in downtown Boston, due to lease non-renewal. Read about it here, and stop by to pick up sale items as they liquidate their inventory.

Secondly, some more sad news that can be helped: the “fiercely independent” bookstore Longfellow Books in Portland ME suffered massive water damage during last week’s storm due to frozen pipes in the building over their store. You can help them out by buying ebooks from their website, gift certificates (which give them cash now and you/your giftees books later), and/or donating directly. See this letter from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance for more information.

Thirdly, you may recall that I recently recommended a Kickstarter project by ThinkMusicTechnology for an iPad app with musical note handwriting recognition for creating scores. They’ve now canceled the KS project as it wasn’t going to reach their (very ambitious) goal despite much interest. But they are looking for other funding resources and still plan to develop the app – so if you are interested, sign up for their mailing list at their website.

Create Your Own GarageBand Loops

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Today’s post is rather geeky! Since for this year’s RPM Challenge I am working with a musical partner for the first time we decided to do our recording projects using Apple’s GarageBand. GB is fairly easy to use and at this point has been improved and cross-pollinated from Apple’s pro Logic app sufficiently to get decent results.

One of the functions that makes GB easy is Apple Loops. GB comes with a large collection of pre-recorded/programmed live and electronic (MIDI) snippets that can be dropped into your song project and then “dragged” with your mouse to duplicate as many times as you wish.In the screen shot below (click to enlarge) I have dragged the loop “club beat 001” from the list of loops at the bottom right into the track area in the middle, and when this was captured I was using my mouse to drag from left to right on the loop to cause it to start copying itself:

Gb loop

 

But suppose you want to create your own loops? First, a legal caveat: do NOT use music you did not create yourself unless you have obtained the rights to sample it! (Apple’s built-in loops are royalty-free for commercial use).

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Friday Faves 01-11-13

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This week’s faves include free online courses, some Kickstarter projects, and a kitten in need:

You can take online courses from some major colleges and universities for free at Coursera. I just found that they are offering four courses this spring from Berklee College of Music:

– Starting March 1st: Songwriting and Intro to Music Production

– Starting April 22: Intro to Guitar and Intro to Improvisation

Maybe I’ll ‘see’ you in the Improv course :-)

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Posting Your Music Samples

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I’ve shown you how to share files with individuals via YouSendIt. I’ve also talked about using Dropbox and Carbonite to share files among your own devices. But suppose you want to share (legal original) music or sound files to a group of people, e.g., your band, or with the general public?

If you have your own website you can stream MP3s from there – but that could quickly use up your monthly data transfer allotment if the tracks are popular or large. If you are selling the tracks you could set up a Bandcamp account and post them there.

But if these are files like band practice recordings, rough drafts, non-music audio samples, etc. you may prefer to use SoundCloud.

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