An article about writing and recording music while on vacation with minimal digital set up.
Recently a friend of mine and myself decided to take some time out and head up to the mountains for some rest and recuperation. The pressures of city life are only too obvious these days and the desire to get away from the office and computers were main motivating factors. We planned to do some hill walking, relaxing, eating and drinking. Both being musicians it only seemed right that we take a few instruments with us to help us wile away the nights. It had to be on an acoustic basis so I took my flamenco guitar and my friend took his little Ukulele. Just before setting out on what would be a five hour journey we pondered on whether we should take my friends Apple laptop. After thirty seconds of weak resistance we caved in and decided to take it. As my friend picked up his Apple laptop I noticed his little USB audio/midi interface sat next to the laptop. He looked at me and smiled “well there’s plenty of room in the car might as well take the C1000 and the SM58, just in case we record anything, we can improvise some stands if needed …..oh this little slim line two octave midi keyboard might be good too.” He did not even mention the headphones; they just went straight in the bag. So there it was; a small sports bag with a portable recording studio inside it.
“What music software do you have on there?” I asked as we drove away from the seemingly unending urban sprawl that is London. “Not much really, Garage Band is on there though…. Not really checked it out yet. We can always have a bit of a play with that, let’s try not to get too geeky …….” My friend replied.
We did not even bother plugging in the laptop for the first couple of days and really enjoyed just jamming with the guitar and uke. If you have not got a Ukulele then I can heartily recommend that you buy one. They are such great fun, easy to play, cheap to buy, and easy to carry around with you. I think it was the third night when we decided to try to record an idea that we had been playing around with. Setting everything up was a breeze as the USB audio/midi interface and USB midi keyboard needed no external power units to make them work so we just plugged them straight into the Apple laptop. We used the USB audio/midi interface as the Garage Band audio inputs and the laptops internal sound card for the Garage Band audio output. Normally we would not have needed to use the onboard sound but we had forgotten our quarter inch mono jacks to phono leads. Luckily we did have a 3.5mm stereo jack to phono lead (very useful cable to have lying around!!). To record without using the stereo hifi’s speakers we just plugged the head phones into the hifi’s headphone socket.
At first we had a quick dabble to see how it all worked and we soon found that Garage Band has some very usable midi instruments available. We were getting maybe 8-10 milliseconds of latency using the midi keyboard and one of Garage Bands on board piano sounds. This was more than acceptable. Using the phantom power on the USB audio/midi interface enabled us to record the flamenco guitar and ukulele with the C1000 and we were both surprised by the quality of the recorded sound. Another massive bonus was that the apple laptop was so quiet.
We found Garage Band to be a very useful piece of software. It is great for throwing ideas together and if you really went at it you could probably create something of note using just garage band and live instruments. You have to be careful as there are some very tired sounding drum loops in there but they are useful to sketch ideas with and the time stretch facility works quite well. If you want to piece together a John Bonhamesque drum track it should not take you long in Garage Band. All the built in midi sounds are a little too manicured for my liking but having said that they fit in well and I particularly like the electric piano sounds. My only real gripes are the transport and locator features; after using Cubase for years it feels quite restricting in how you drop in and out and navigate around your little project….. They need to sort this out.
In the end we used Garage Band to record a kind of Eastern European polka type instrumental which featured just the flamenco guitar and ukulele. We obviously used a click track to record and did play around with several midi instruments to experiment with the piece. In the end, though, it seemed quite apt that the piece that became known as Boris the Red should remain a simple instrumental duo of guitar and ukulele. I was that pleased with the piece that I put it on my Royalty Free Music website, Whitebeetle.com. I like the fact that you can hear the acoustics of the room, while it does not have a polished sound it does have character and I find it, ultimately, a believable piece. The simple recording set up we used helped us concentrate on just the music as we wiled away our evenings. Top marks to Garage Band and the little set up we used. It now really fascinates me that one can get away from it all, travelling relatively light, and still have all the marvels of the digital age at one’s finger tips to help the creative process. I am already dreaming of stating in a cottage in the Tuscan Hills…… with my guitar and laptop.
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