Part 2: December 2009 – January 2010
This section of songs were more finished, many reaching that magical three-minute pop song length. Unfortunately, these were created on a computer that crashed at some point and the original build files were never backed up (due to the fact that they were stored somewhere that i wasn’t paying attention to) and were lost forever. Fortunately, the audio mixdowns were saved in a different place and i still have them.
The main feature of this set of songs is that they were all put together using guitar loops that i created myself. I recorded myself playing for fifteen or twenty minutes at a sitting, then went through the audio and pulled out little loopable bits, which i imported into Garage Band.
December 13, 2009
First one. What i found interesting was the pieces that i put together were not recorded near each other in time, but seemed to work together once i listened to everything. This song also features a trick that i seemed to like—the complete stoppage of sound for a second or two before continuing on with the song.
December 18, 2009
On this one, you can hear the obvious loop at the beginning. Once again, i paired different loops for a cohesive whole. The shifts in pitch were done in Garage Band.
December 20, 2009
This is a Pink Floyd-inspired echo riff that i came up with in the mid 80s when i got a digital delay. Putting into Garage Band let me add the stacatto guitar and synthesizer sounds on top of it, which paired nicely. What surprised me was adding the bridge, which came from an entirely different guitar loop that i’d made and which i had no idea would work so effectively with the original idea.
December 27, 2009
This piece is a hard-rockin’ number which joined a few effects-heavy guitar tracks with a selection of drum loops to get the fills in the right place. I can’t remember if i played the bass line separately beforehand or recorded it for this song.
January 10, 2010
This piece was pretty new to me at the time i recorded it. It took a lot of drum loop splicing to get the beats to fit in with the odd and changing time signatures of the song (most of it is in 5, some in 8). I always though that this would make a good Mission of Burma song.
January 11, 2010
This is another old riff that i came up with sometime in the 90s. It never had a bass part to it, so that got composed and added for this piece. I’m pretty sure the bass part was programmed digitally in Garage Band. It gets pretty repetitive and would probably seem less so if it had some clever vocals on top of it, or maybe a horn section.
January 31, 2010
I like how this song came out. I played the piano parts on the computer keyboard, then adjusted them a bit to fit what i wanted to hear. I also recorded myself playing harmonica for this, although i adjust the timing of where it is in the song compared to when i recorded it.
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