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Transcript:

What we're trying to model here is chunking up a composition. GarageBand is amazing at working in sections and so what we noticed over the years is when we start with students and say “go make something up” they end up making a five minute long piece of through-composed material. Genius but very difficult to fit it into the greater scheme of music. So moving from that through-composed five minute “oh my gosh there's a lot of information there” to - “can you just give us four bars please” but give us a well considered four bars that's been well developed and then we can move on from there as a strong foundation for a hot hit. We think that this is what GarageBand is really great at and so that's a key message out of this project - that once you've got your four bars you can turn those four bars into eight bars by dragging and dropping or looping it out. Once you've got eight bars you can double that to create 16 and that could be your verse. And then you can create a new four bars and call that your chorus etc. So it's learning how to build the song but in a really intelligent and time-saving way that utilises the technology and gets it to do what it's really good at rather than take lots and lots of time as we've seen creating the entire piece in real time from scratch.

So as we were choosing our exemplar piece that's what we were looking for. We were looking for a piece that had simple drums, simple bass, simple harmonies and melodies but also built out the piece in a way that we thought would make sense to students and would be a useful model to get started. We’re also keen to find a piece with lots of repetition to drive home the point that there’s no need to keep making up new material. You can take one idea and duplicate it, make minor tweaks and suddenly you have the beginnings of a great piece of music.

So for Pete and I, our key concept is “it's all about the gig” and trying to have an authentic outcome for the work, rather than saying to the students “go over there and fiddle around with the technology”. So the students go over there and “go on GarageBand” and that's usually the extent of the instruction. And then you often hear people say “oh GarageBand is so engaging” which is true but you can get to the end of the lesson and it looks like people have been mucking around, which is also wonderful. But today's all about once you’ve had a muck around and you’ve found that it's really intuitive and it's really engaging, then it’s time to dig deeper. It’s about giving the process of using GarageBand a shape and structure which drives towards some sort of authentic product. Now we have some structure in place to get us on the move, creating music that sounds really compelling much more quickly.

So this canvas course which we've created is also yours for free so you can access this for the rest of your life or until canvas changes their mind and says we can't have it anymore. As mentioned before, all the links we talk about are below each video, but they are also in the course notes so that you don’t lose access once you’ve completed our course.

Let’s get into it.