Interrobang Cartel: F*** The Bees!

[jwgh]

(I already posted about this to ARK, but here's more information about how the recordings came into being.)

As previously noted, I got Apple's new "Garage Band" program in the mail the other day, so I decided that the first major project I should attack on it was a recording of 'Fuck The Bees'. I wrote the lyrics a while ago for Interrobang Cartel, and the original idea was that it would be your basic crappy punk song. (I've determined since then that I have no idea how to approach recording a punk song, which probably says a lot about me.)

And there it lay for many a month, until someone (Daniel Buettner maybe?) brought a song called 'I Got Cash' by Brooklyn Funk Essentials?. This gave me an idea for a different approach to the lyrics. (Not that any blame should accrue to that band for the association!) I selected a bass line and drum beat on my PS02 and recorded the vocals, basically to see if it would work. It seemed like it would, but I wasn't all that close to the goal yet. (If anyone wants to compare this version to the final, I do have it online.)

Then Garage Band arrived. I imported the vocals and solo into it (I converted the track containing that into an MP3, then just dragged and dropped). I programmed in the basic bass line, which was basically the same as the one I used on the PS02, and found a drum line I liked. Then I went nutty and added fake horns and a cowbell and stuff, and put a filter on the solo I had recorded (which is supposed to be faux Theremin, but I'm not sure what it sounds like at this point).

Finally, I ended up with this recording of Fuck The Bees. It is dedicated to lots42.

Then I thought, "But wait! I say 'FUCK' about a million times in that song! Some people might want to listen to this at work, or they might have small children listening, and of course there's the radio play issue!"

So I put together Swat The Bees, which is rated G and probably isn't dedicated to lots42. In some ways I think it's funnier than the original version.

To make this toned-down (?) version, I used the PS02 to simultaneously listen to my previous recording of the vocal and record me saying the replacement words ('swat' for 'fuck' and so on). Then I imported the original vocal track into Audacity and blanked out all the naughty words. Then I created a new copy of the original 'Bees' project in Garage Band, deleted the old vocal track, and imported the two new ones.

Finally, I split the track containing the replacement words into little pieces and adjusted the timing on the bits so that they sounded OK. (I think it's still pretty obvious most of the time that the replacement words were recorded separately from the rest of the vocals, but I think that just makes it funnier.)

So after all this I have to say I like Garage Band a lot! There are certainly some rough edges here and there, the most annoying being that if you copy a segment of music you can't control where it will show up when you paste it and it may well appear over another recorded segment (which destroys it), but in general I found it both easy to use and very powerful. I've still got lots to learn, and it's exciting!

Whether the two resulting tracks should stand as a monument to what you can with Garage Band or as a warning about what you can do with it if you're not careful I leave to you all to decide. (It strikes me that 'Fuck The Bees' is probably one of the first thousand or so reasonably complex songs put together with Garage Band since its relief. Steve Jobs would be proud!)

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A year from now, all the standard Garage Band loops and instruments will be clichés and you will not be able to use them any more.

[jwgh]

I've decided to avoid the built-in loops as much as I can, partly for that reason and partly because it doesn't seem very creative and partly because if you rely on the loops too much it's pretty easy to end up with this bizarre melange of loops that I think will pretty quickly become instantly recognizable and mockable -- I think I ran into this trap when I was trying to put together a drum part (using Garage Band) for another song I'm working on.

It's difficult for me to avoid using the drum loops because I'm not a drummer and don't really know how to put together a nice-sounding line, but I tried to at least slightly disguise the drum loops as used through the judicious addition of cowbells and such (a phrase which has probably not been used much before). Once I get my MIDI adaptor I may beable to do a little more in this department.

I'm less concerned about the instruments, since they are mostly cliches already. I think a lot of them same to be the same old MIDI sounds that people have been using for the last bunch of years -- the saxophone sound sounds like a pretty standard fakety-fake sax sound that sounds nothing like an actual saxophone, for instance. I think the upright bass sound is pretty nice, though. (The built-in effects I would be more cocerned about on this front, but I'm not sure how much of a problem it will be if someone recognizes that you're using one of the standard Garage Band effects.)

I noticed in the Garage Band help file that there are ways to make your own MIDI instruments, but this frightens me.

Dude - get a drummer when you have the groove

[(Anonymous)]

Howdy.

Garage Band works great at letting you get a good idea for the groove you want. You still need to get it done by a pro when it is time to record, but this lets you express ideas that would be hard to do otherwise.

The built in loops are perfectly good at giving you a backing sound and for establishing a groove. You can then take the mp3 with you when you try to talk a real drummer into recording the drums. That will give him or her a far better idea of what you want than the usual non-drummer description of "well, I sorta want a whack sound on the up beat and a kinda snare thingie during the chorus".

Nothing beats having something to play for a musician, no matter how cheezy some of the loops may sound. A pro can take an idea and turn it into magic, but it sure helps if they know what you were thinking.

Scott

[jwgh]

The other thing I've learned from my initial messing around with Garage Band is that I have a deep-seated instinct to add cowbells to any song. This is a good thing to be aware of.

[elsibeth.livejournal.com]

That was great!
Really quite enjoyable.
We were dancing and everything!

[jwgh]

Yay! Thanks!