Finally recorded something

February 10, 2007

It’s been much too long since I hooked up my NT1 condenser mic to my UA-5 to my mixer to my monitors to my computer and actually recorded some music. The running excuse for some time has been that Tracktion, my all-time favourite sequencer, is not compatible with my MacBook. Version 3 will be, and is “coming soon”, but so far nothing.

So instead, I used Apple GarageBand. Since this is a demo for my friend Alice who may sing this with me (and I’m not a very good producer… I only know what I need to know to put some of my ideas down, and I play keyboards like my father types - with two fingers) it’s pretty rough. There are a lot of presets in play. The drums are Funky Drums 5 or something like that. :)

However, the experience was very pleasant. GarageBand has just enough features to be useful, and generally doesn’t get in the way. It’s nowhere near as powerful or fast (in the UI sense) as Tracktion, but it didn’t hinder me in any way, and the range of presets, effects and instruments covers all the basic needs. When it comes to recording, I am the kind of person who thinks less is more. Most tools suffer from knob overload.

Well… I had hoped to upload it here, but it seems WordPress doesn’t like .m4a files. Oh well. Rest assured it would’ve been moderately decent sounding. :)