► An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students by Ron Berger: https://amzn.to/37jge0e

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Transcript:

A really important concept to get with digital recording is that what we record isn't necessarily what we end up with because we can continue to manipulate after we’ve recorded. Students will often just hit record and walk away...done! But something that we encourage is the process of refining the first draft and emphasising that often what we hear on the record is a result of going through an extensive revision process. In the text below we’ve included a link to Ron Berger’s, ‘Ethic of Excellence’ that has shaped our practice tremendously. He details the process of refining through a series of drafts in a beautiful way and we highly recommend reading it.

Quantisation

An important part of the refinement process can be the quantize feature. As we double tap and go into piano roll mode by choosing edit it's not a piano roll again it's actually a bass fingerboard and we can have a look at our performance. So rather than pre-quantizing in the main settings, we can let the students play it in and then have a look at how they went with their timing.

Inspired by this piece then what we’re looking for is on the beat notes that are minims. I can now edit my recording by double tapping the instrument back in track view, tap settings, tap quantization. So the question is always “well what is quantization?” and the answer is it's the process of snapping everything to the grid. Here you've got a whole bunch of different options between straight triplet and swing grids. We don’t want any of that today so just quarter notes would lock all of my mistakes back onto the quarter note grid. It will also fix future recordings on this track as well. Now the important thing here is that if you are playing eighth notes and you're quantized to quarter notes that means that eighth notes don't exist so that'll pop all of your eighth notes on top of each other. Similarly if you're recording sixteenth notes and you choose eighth note quantization they'll stick all of the sixteenth notes on top of each other. This is a great conversation to have with students about subdivisions and choosing the smallest subdivision for your quantization.

Note Lengths

Now when you snap everything onto the grid it will naturally bring you to a conversation about note lengths. Like the great saying goes it's not where you start it's where you finish that’s important so let's jump back into our edit mode and let's have a look at where we finish each note. We touched on it with drums but when you select the note you've got these arrows on either side of the note which allow you to lengthen or shorten the duration. In this recording we are after pretty much tenuto. The other thing you can do is lasso a couple of notes together and drag them all out together which can be a neat feature but because i'm a human they're all different and sometimes when the midi notes overlap you don't get the attack that you're looking for on the front of the note so it's really important to make sure you've got your note lengths right. It's also something that often you just have to audition and check with your ear.

Crafting your own sound in solo mode

People who are into synthesis never use stock sounds. It's like an unwritten rule that if you want to be taken seriously as an electronic musician you have to craft the sound yourself. There's a couple of dials you could tweak so just up the top left you can see the little mixer icon and then the headphone button on each track will mean that you only hear that track upon playback. If we press the solo button then we can just hear the bass on its own and now we can play around with the cutoff resonance for example and hear the difference in finer detail.

Let’s stop here to refine your heat waves inspired bass line in GarageBand. Remember, you can come back to this video or any of our GarageBand Tutorials at any time and rewind and pause as often as you need to.

See you in the next one.