Yes I can still play piano and sing.. but is it really music? :)

I hadn't played around with Garage Band (or any musical stuff) on the Mac for quite some time. It's all I can do as of late to sit down and play a few songs on the grand piano downstairs.

The other night after a back and forth on Facebook with Gretchen (high school friends, neighbors back in Rose Hill KS) the subject of that old standard "Perfect Country and Western" song came up.. yeah the one by David Allan Coe? In a fit of desperation.. after I got the song stuck in my head, I plugged in the mic to the Tascam US122 interface and layed down this quick vocal Sometimes singing makes it go away for me :)

Now that your ears have recovered that horrible beating.. prepare yourself for what is to come!

A week or so ago, I noticed that one of my followers on Twitter.. (yes I can say that snoopdogg is one of my followers ;-) was doing an online remix contest.

In the past, Trent Reznor of NIN (nine inch) has done these. The *really* cool thing about what Trent does, is that he makes the original digital datasets available in several different forms. These are the raw tracks in Apple Logic, Garage Band, or Avid's ProTools. You pull the whole shebang down and fire up the application and it's as if you were sitting in the recording studio as the console engineer! Pretty neat learning tool, even if you dont produce anything useful. It is also really cool to see what other people come up with. Sometimes the best part is just hearing the other ideas that people/artists have when given the same starting point.


Snoop had released a track on his new disc called 'That Tree' and he posted the individual audio tracks for download.

I'm such the music nerd from my band and keyboard/synth days that I pulled down the .zip file a few weeks ago, figuring that I'd just have the tracks to play around with.. not really time to edit anything useful.

After hooking up the condensor mic and the Tascam XLR/Midi interface to the Mac, I got fired up to dive back into at least Garage Band. It was a newer version that I'd not ran since I installed iLife 08 several months back.

Garage Band (although lots of pro musicians like to poo poo it) is really an amazing program for what it does, and for how easy it is to use. I wish *any* musical instrument mfg. Yamaha, Roland, and the like, would come up with as intuitive of an interface. That is really why I play my keyboards so little these days. I have to scour the manual of my Yamaha Motif ES88 to remember how to do even the simplest thing. The UI's on most synths leave a *lot* to be desired!

Well I missed the memo on the key signature of the song *and* the beats per minute (tempo) so I just took a guess at it.. besides it's RAP.. how hard is that to pitch bend/time shift etc? We'll.. I was slightly off, not too bad I suppose for a few hours of messing around.

See if I improved the original or not? Frankly I dont really like this song that much, and I tried to at least add some intro music/tracks with organ, and a bit of old school funk and I cut several minutes out of it.. just goes on too long IMHO

Check it out.. you can click on the original and my version on the embed. below :)

-tim

ps: That DAC song is still in my head.. and I keep thinking of a twisted.. 'skapunk' reggae version (with appropriate lyrics ;-) look out.. it just might happen!?



I give you the 'ThathonemasterTreeMix' Peace out G's!

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