Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

You can do covers with GB only loops!

C

ChrisH3677

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 6, 2003
772
99
Victoria, Australia
I've been working on a cover for a week. One of the hard things is chord patterns. For this song, I had to cut loops up, and on a couple of occassions, had to transpose the cutout. I will post more track info detail in the song info in the next couple of days.

I did it because someone told me it was difficult and to stick to originals. :D And they were right!!

Am happy to answer any questions about it. It's not easy and is time consuming - especially iwht my limited musical talent

But of course, that's what makes GB soooo good - almost anyone can turn out music that sounds half decent.

It's a cover of U2's "I still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". EVERY single note in it is from stock standard GarageBand loops. No JamPack and no recorded music. The only recording is that voice!

Hope you enjoy the song - well - the music anyway (I don't sing very well at all!) and that it inspires you all to greater things with GB.

GB is one of Apple's best ever software. I hope it sells more than a few Macs to switchers. I know I got an IT guy at work really interested when I showed him GB today.

Anyway, here's the link http://www.macidol.com/jamroom/bands/193/music.php
 
i bet that took a long time.

a little hard to hear the change ups, but i bet you learned a lot about GB in the process. keep creating... maybe try some originals.



peace.
 
that's pretty [bleep] amazing. gives me hope that when i get off my lazy ass, i may actually be able to make something with gb myself. good job!
 
Wow! That's really good. Vocals have potential if you just turn the volume up a little and be more confident! Not bad for a non-musician! And you proved me wrong :p
 
NO echo

turn the darn echo down... That sounds terrible with that much echo and raise the volume of the voice. other wise fairly good.. now add your own variations to the U2 song
 
We are not worthy;)

EXCELLENT!!!

But you should also mention your other tracks.
"Heavy Mandolin" is very cool.

When's the album out?
 
nothing that a few hours in a pro studio wont don lol.. very impressve that it sounds more or less the same yes vochals again but what the hell.. at least you sang..
 
i dont mean to crash the party here, but although you did do very well on replicating the sounds of the song, the singing and timing was WAYYYYYY off buddy. :) im not talking about how you sang it, but where and when you sang it. just listen to the original once, youve added way too many extra measures... somehow. its sounds like you added extra measures to make up for the fact that you werent singing the song fast enough to keep up with normal length of each progression. just some healthy criticism.

other than that it sounds like you got the right combination of samples and loops to best replicate the original. good job.
 
You can also make remixes of songs--at least you can with SoundTrack (which has a master tempo envelope to help your piece match tempo changes without losing beats). Just drag the original song in as one big sound clip, match the tempo, and start cutting, pasting, processing, and adding.

Matching the tempo of your project to the beats of the piece is the hardest step--but do it first and get it right: after that, everything you drag and drop will synch! (Matching the key may take some trial and error, too.)

It's fun--anyone tried this with GB? (Soundtrack behaved a little oddly at the end of a single really long clip, if you started playing your project in the middle--but I think the latest update may have improved handling of very-long clips.)
 
Uh..

I didnt hear any lyrics. It sounds pretty good.. but without the vocals, the song is moot. The vocals are a huge part of this song that give it that extra bang.
 
I have REMOVED vocals

Thanks for all your kind words. :D

I actually recorded the vocals using the original song (imported it to GB, lined it up, muted other tracks and recorded), which might explain why it's a little out of alignment.

I never expected this song to be so popular - I would never have tortured so many folks with my singing if I had've known. It's all a bit embarrassing really.

I just wanted to do it to show off GarageBand - who some before its release, said was a toy.

Hey thanks Johnny - but you were right - it's damn hard!

PS Twitch - be grateful you didn't hear the vocals!! I will try to find someone who can sing to do a vocal track for it.
 
Just like to say that Heavy Mandolin is a very nice piece of work, well done. Its certainly made me look at GB in a more positive light.
Vanilla
 
Originally posted by dieterd
the bass is completely wrong.
Click to expand...

YES!! Absolutely!! That drove me nuts for a while. And I still may try to fix it.

But do you know - EVERY line is wrong!

The dukketer-dukketer guitar line is wrong
The tambourine line is wrong
The drums lines is wrong
The keyboard line is wrong
The noodling guitar line is wrong
The lead guitar line is wrong

And yet, people hear it and even before the vocals say "That's that U2 song!" And most people say the music sounds great.

So, with my aim to show off GB, I think I succeeded.

But I knew that the bass line was the first thing someone who really did know the song would pick up. You're a U2 fan? - my apologies and I'm glad you didn't hear the vocals!!

I will try to fix it, but that will probably mean building it note by note from the existing bass line which then gets to the point I may as well just step-enter it in a software instrument which gets away from my whole aim to do it with inbuilt loops with the least amount of cutting and transposing.
 
Originally posted by Vanilla
Just like to say that Heavy Mandolin is a very nice piece of work, well done. Its certainly made me look at GB in a more positive light.
Vanilla
Click to expand...

Cool!! Thanks. I like that one too altho, I gotta cut out more of that riff.

Glad it inspired you, that's exactly what I've tried to achieve with all three songs.

btw - did you check the song info for Heavy Mandolin?

I will get info up for the other two tomorrow night.
 
Acid?

i'm sure Garage Band is cool, but Sonic Foundry's Acid has been doing the same thing on the PC for about 7 years now. i don't think it will go very far in selling any new Macs (see first post), at least not to people who have any knowledge about the audio software that's out there. Acid is not even a really high-end app, it's on the shelves at places like Best Buy. maybe the Apple version works better, as is sometimes the case, but i would stop short of saying that the concepts behind Garage Band are new, and i have to admit that it's not very exciting if you know that such an application has existed on the Dark Side for so long.

that said, as far as authenticity goes, it's more of a Muzak version of the song. (the fact that you removed the vocals don't help in that respect.) no offense meant at all, it's just my opinion. for the sake of fairness, i ripped the track from CD and removed the vocals using a wave editor. it's mixed like most old-school rock tracks, with vocals in the middle, so eliminating the middle of the stereo field effectively makes it an instrumental. with the vocals gone, it's even easier to tell how dissimilar the two are. you're absolutely right that in the beginning it sounds like the U2 song, and that people will recognize it - but that's because it's the beginning and there are only a couple of loops. once you get into the track it becomes more obvious that something isn't quite right. you did a pretty good job, i think.

as for the creator's comments about re-building the bassline note-for-note: that would essentially be cutting the loop down to just a bass sample... sure, with just one bass note, you could do about any remix or melody properly. if you were to do that, there would be no difference in having Garage Band, Sonar, Acid, an Akai S6000, or a real bass playing the notes... the more you pare the loops down to their individual elements, the less impressive the application would seem... i mean, if you get a few single bass notes, slice up the drum kit, etc, you could do the whole thing in Fruity Loops if you wanted to. not a real credit to Garage Band.

i really wish Sonic Foundry would port their apps to the Mac - they really suck for staying with the PC, but i have to give them credit for beating every other music software company to this "everyone is a musician" idea a long time ago. one thing that Sonic Foundry does through the website www.acidplanet.com is to invite pro musicians to contribute the loops that make up their songs for remix competitions. of course, they're just WAV files, and nothing should stop you from checking out the site, looking for some bands that you like, and downloading loops that can be used in Garage Band, Soundtrack, or any loop-based application. in the future, it will be really cool if Apple could offer a similar service to their customers, and i'm sure they could attract some big names who would want to contribute their loops for remixing by the masses.

for anyone who is criticizing the fact that the original thread author should add his own elements in, i think he explained sufficiently that it was supposed to be a demo of Garage Band, not the Aphex Twin remix of Devil's Haircut.
 
Re: Acid?

Originally posted by 603
for anyone who is criticizing the fact that the original thread author should add his own elements in, i think he explained sufficiently that it was supposed to be a demo of Garage Band, not the Aphex Twin remix of Devil's Haircut.
Click to expand...

true (sans the PC propaganda).

Sony owns Acid (and the Sonic Foundry family). Most likely it won't be ported (along with FL). Go try Live and Reason if you want a more creative audio program for the Mac. Then go buy Logic (apples pro-audio app).


peace.
 
Re: Acid?

Originally posted by 603
i'm sure Garage Band is cool, but Sonic Foundry's Acid has been doing the same thing on the PC for about 7 years now.
Click to expand...

I looked at Acid a few times in my Windows days but it just confused the crap out of me. I found it very difficult to learn ditto Fruity Loops. I could never get anything decent out of any Windows music app.

With GarageBand I didn't even need a manual. And I'm creating better music than I've ever been able to.
 
Re: Acid?

Originally posted by 603
i'm sure Garage Band is cool, but Sonic Foundry's Acid has been doing the same thing on the PC for about 7 years now. i don't think it will go very far in selling any new Macs (see first post), at least not to people who have any knowledge about the audio software that's out there.
Click to expand...

i own Acid Pro and i love it to death, that why i was so excited to hear about Soundtrack and now GB, because they are being done by the guy who invented Acid from what i hear. the thing about GB that is so nice is that it's much more user friendly than Acid.

Originally posted by ChrisH3677
I looked at Acid a few times in my Windows days but it just confused the crap out of me.
Click to expand...

he just proved the point that GB has a great market. I love Acid because I've been making music for a few years now but for someone who would never thought they could ever create music, all of a sudden a new world opens up to them with the ease of GB.

GB is simple enough that anyone can do it but complicated enough that a long time musican can make something really nice.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back