Instant Air and Avalanches
This post done at the risk of sounding like some late-to-the-show geezer telling you about these crazy new inventions called "computers" and "the internet"
Last night, I was feeling a little overwhelmed by Adult Responsibilities And Decisions™, and so I decided to open up GarageBand, which I've had on my machine for a while, and always meant to open it up and play around, but like everything else I've ever meant to do in my life, never got around to.
At the very least, it always amazed me that, until a few years ago, getting into hard disc recording was something that took a decent investment, usually at least $100, and that was on a stripped-down version of some pro studio software. Then Apple, doing what they do, puts out this software that is not only head and shoulders above any other entry recording software I've seen, is not only incredibly easy to use, but sells for $80 as part of a suite of other multimedia tools.
And in typical Apple fashion, it's incredibly easy to use. It comes with a bundle of sound loops that I wrote off as being for the 15-year-olds and 56-year-olds who just want to make some background music for their student movie project and/or trip to Florida, but here I was, mired in crises of responsibility, and in no mood to do any creating (read: effort) of my own, so I just start throwing loops onto the tracks, mostly choosing the loops by the time-proven method of Whichever Comes First and it actually sounded good. I was going all Jackson Pollack on these loops, throwing them out without looking, and the pile that they landed in was pretty nice. Granted, I like the dissonance that the loops create, but still...it's nothing professional, but it's respectable, and this is saying absolutely nothing about me, and everything about the software.
It's in the jukebox (or download) if you want to hear what half an hour with Garageband sounds like. It's called "Nova 1", not because I thought I was being all space age, but because I had intended to create a bossa nova song, but just didn't feel like changing the file name.
And now the discussion becomes whether the Avalanches and the Go Team are rendered obsolete if it's this easy, or if they've been lifted to the mantle of Godfathers Of The New Sound.
1 comment:
None of it would an insult to me at all. I just moved the mouse around, grabbing little sound snippets and putting them in a row.
The comparison (answering a not-really-serious comment) is that Avalanches and the Go Team are going away from traditional song structure and piecing together samples and other found sound into new songs (okay, okay...so Go Team supposedly records all their sounds).
It's not that it's not good...all that matters with music is if you like to listen to it. I'm just saying that, if its this easy for a beginning user who's bought a Mac just because they want a computer, and then they realize that they can create stuff like this incredibly easily and quickly...will it become this new form of all-inclusive, anyone-can-do-it form of music, or will the vastness of it eventually cheapen what the Avalanches and Go Team have done?
I guess it could be argued that it's no different than sampling, but I think it is. With rap, you still had a new creation (the vocals) on top of hand-picked existing recordings. But with the Avalanches, it's just a musical quilt, with the only creativity coming from structure choices.
I hate always having to explain myself, but I'm in absolutely no way comparing the *quality* of this the Go Team or the Avalanches. The only thing I'm comparing is the way it's created.
I just chose Air because those strings sounded like something Air would do, but mostly because it worked in the title of the post.
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