► Hottest 101 GarageBand for iPad Template: https://bit.ly/gblcgbip101t

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Video Transcript:

The basics of recording is something that is easily glossed over with students because they're in a rush to get into it straight away, but we always talk about having good hygiene when using any sort of recording software and just like starting a song you need to think about the basics like tempo, metre, and key before getting yourself into a knot. And so just by going through the concepts of music in our guided listening we get a perfect scaffold for starting to compose an original piece. Again, rather than going “Alright everyone let's talk about tempo and key” in an abstract sense we now have a context and can tie it all together in a more integrated fashion. What’s super exciting is that we are getting all our performance, composition, listening and technology learning experiences all in this one project.

So we’ve created a tutorial called ‘start a project’ that goes through some track settings. Let’s take a moment and do some housekeeping by pausing this video and completing the tutorial and we’ll see you on the other side.

So most of what we're talking about is in that gear icon. You can set a tempo but you can also play the song in the classroom and get them to tap along. This is really exciting too because we can listen to the song and we don't have to know tempo off by heart. If you’re on the iPad you can use slide over to play the song as well. In our experience almost every GarageBand piece we've ever heard from a student has been at 110 beats per minute because they've never been encouraged to open that up.

As we’re focused on duration for now we’ve also got a time ruler versus bars for which we want bars and beats for now and a nice fade out is always good depending on which era you're born or for the student who just can't come up with an ending. The run in background setting is useful if you're switching between apps. This project will just stay on but it will chew up a lot of battery if you're not careful. It’s a big one for when students say “i can't hear it” that's because you've got an app open in front of it essentially and so it won't play when it's in the background.

The next thing we have to decide as part of the guided listening task, would be to work out how many bars we are dealing with. Here we need to base it around the chord progression that we just heard, which is a four bar chord progression and so we need to adjust our ruler. It’s important to note that students love it when they can set it to automatic as it allows you to do five minutes of through-composing mistake making. We're emphasising groove based music today so we just need those four bars. On the right hand side of the ruler there's a plus button and this is where we say just give us four bars thank you.

We’ve actually prepared a Template that you can download which has a pre-built arrangement track with the correct number of bars for each section. We won’t use it today as it’s good for us to learn how to create our own sections, but we thought it may be useful for you as you go and potentially use this project in your classroom. You can access the download link in the description below. To save time on the aural analysis we have also pre-filled the guided listening template. You can access the completed version in the description below.