My Garage Band Experience – Baatein Teri …

Both, me and my wife, had long decided that whenever we buy a house, we’ll have a nice desktop computer in our den. When time arrived, I had my eyes set on a Mac and while my wife was not too excited about buying a Mac, as she loves touch screen monitors, I was still pretty determined on buying a Mac. It was apparent to her when I went on and on for hours about the one impressive thing that Mac had – the Garage Band – she immediately knew that the computer will end up in my yet to be built recording studio. Well, she gave in and agreed to purchase the COOL machine.

Now, this blog is not about my technology review of the Mac. But it is about my first hand experience with Garage Band. For those who may not know, Garage Band is the professionally comparable built-in music recording software that ships with the Apple computer. There are no extra fees and the sound quality is phenomenal.

In the past, I have recorded songs on my Yamaha MM6 synthesizer, transferred the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) file to the PC and reproduced it with Steinberg Cubase AI4. I followed the same sequence while compiling the song – “Is jahan se dur” from the last post using Garage Band. However, this time around, I thought of experimenting with it.

Garage Band has a neat feature called –Magic GarageBand. It lets you select from nine Genres. I chose Roots Rock. It lets you preview the track before making the choice. Once selected it displays the track sequence and lets you swap instruments. I changed a few instruments from the original soundtrack and the overall voicing changed dramatically. I chose to not add any new instruments or alter anything else within the original soundtrack. So the overall feel of the track was still the same.

Here’s a short video on You Tube, on how to do this –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfxZxY73E30

The challenge was to then add vocal melody to an existing soundtrack. Typically, a music composer would have thought through a song several days in advance before it goes on record. He / she would have an in 

depth idea of the song with each instrument it comprised of, etc, etc, etc . But in this case I spontaneously thought of a song (lyrics included) that had to match the background score. The whole experiment took about 2 to 3 hours. But it was challenging. The end result was a ready-made soundtrack with impromptu vocals.

I have tried this in the past with an existing pattern (Includes pre-made rhythm, drums, melody) on the synthesizer. But I controlled the sequence of chords then. This time around there was no such thing. So it was even tougher.

Considering what one can do with advanced technology these days, and the fact that I can barely play an instrument, I feel like a HACK when this was all set and done.

Regardless, I hope you like it. Let me know what you think.

Here are the lyrics –

Baatein teri, yaad aati hain

Kisse tere, yaad aate hain

Baatein teri, yaad aati hain

Kisse tere, yaad aate hain

Hum to chahat mein teri, marte rahe, marte rahe

Ab kya kare, Ab kya sune,

Hum to bujhte diye sa .. jalte rahe ….

Baatein teri, yaad aati hain

Kisse tere, yaad aate hain

Baatein teri, yaad aati hain

Kisse tere, yaad aate hain …