Hey peeps, long time no see I know. But I've been pretty busy lately trying to learn a few things. And I am. I'm to the point now that I can lay down some basic guitar tracks and then double them as I've always tended to do back in my tape machine days. I'm starting to get the hang of things in Garageband and the more you play around with it the more you learn, like anything else. I've also got Ableton Lite but haven't messed with it much. Garageband has built in drummers, and they used several studio drummers to put down drum tracks. Its unbelievable what you can do with it and I'm sure I don't even know anywhere close to half of it yet. So yeah, you basically pick out a drummer, I think there's 7 or maybe even 12 drummers on mine, and pick what kit you want him to play on. There's a ton of different drum kits on there. Set the timing to 4/4 or whatever and how many beats per minute and bam!! You can adjust the beats per minute along with a lot of other things "on the fly".
I have been neglecting my recording though for the past 5 weeks with a songwriters class at Berklee via Coursera, where you can take free college courses on tons of things! Seriously for someone like myself, who didn't go to college and took the trade route instead am able to take some of those college classes online and best of all, for Free. I'm actually just taking a break between lectures as I type, letting the next one buffer and load. To say I've been a little busy is an understatement. We played a gig a few weeks ago at a country clubhouse birthday party. It was our newest bass players first gig with us and he did pretty good considering the massive pressure lol. I have to say, the dude kinda won me over that night just because he played solid and the few bad notes didn't stick out like a sore thumb, which WAS something our last bass player didn't mind doing. He played it loud and proud. Which kinda sucks for the rest of the band because those loud and proud bad notes can really throw you all off kilter as a functioning unit.
I'm not even sure we have much of a band right now. Our singer doesn't seem to be into it lately. He never wants to practice anymore or even really do gigs. I think the only reason we played the last one was because it was family of his that was putting on the party. He's got a lot on his plate though in real life. New house, new daddy, fireman, and taking a college class in hopes of becoming a Game Warden. We hate to see it happening but its sure looking like he's about done with the band thing. I sure can't say I blame him, I was in the same type of spot when I was young and I chose a day job over being in a band. Even a part time band. Anyone who's in a band and is married can relate to how hard it is to just deal with that AND be able to keep up with what it takes to be in a serious working band. I'm not sure what's going on right now ...
All I know is that I'm going to keep plugging along and learning this songwriting craft as best I can and trying to write some songs while the band is on hold or whatever. I play guitar and write pretty much every day right now and that suits me just fine right now.
Gotta get to class folks ... later
