► Heat Waves Guided Listening Template (Completed): https://bit.ly/gblcgbpultc

► Glass Animals - Heat Waves (Lyric video): https://bit.ly/gblchwlv

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Transcript:

So it's going to be a very similar workflow to what we just did with the drums. We’ve created a tutorial called ‘Create a bass line with smart bass’’ that goes through the specifics but let’s take a moment to do some upskilling by looking at some highlights.

Smart Bass is great because you can see the chords and you can set up the chords in advance or get the students to do that, more on this later. If you want the students to understand the fretboard then you can toggle it on and off and then you can set up your tonic scale or whatever scale you wanted and lock people into that. First of all though, we've got different types of bass that we can choose from. In more sounds we can jump straight into electronic bass - retro bass. I can audition the bass with the drum track as well by pressing play and then I can tap the chord/note to see what it sounds like with the drums, without printing anything to tape.

Seeing as we are inspired by that bass part we could use some chords that feel good but we do have the original progression in the completed listening template to use. The important part here though would be to have the students make a note of their note choices because that's going to be important when we come to adding our harmony and melody if they aren’t using the original chord progression. For the sake of simplicity though, let’s record in the original bass line but for that to happen we need to edit the chord strips.

If we go into chord strip mode and go back to the gear it's got an extra option in it - edit chords - which is a very sneaky thing for GarageBand to do to add these extra options because we were in settings before and unless you're in chord strip mode that option doesn't appear. So let's now have a look at that and see what we can do.

This is a game changer because you can select each one of those chords and make it whatever you like. This can be really fun just as a class exercise. Say if you wanted to play a song with a particular chord progression you could program the chord progression in and play from left to right and hey presto you have instant song and also a stimulus to dissect a piece's harmony. You can also hide chords, which is great as it's quite overwhelming when all we need is a couple notes really. It's a great example of how the technology becomes the instrument and even the sheet music as well. So it ticks that syllabus outcome of experiments with different forms of notation. In fact if you think about how many different forms of notation we've dealt with on our iPad screen today we've seen about half a dozen different notation types. All of these things are building new neural pathways in the students minds, different ways of understanding music, and so we can see that there's some pretty good pedagogy behind what we're doing. Let’s go ahead now and take the time to edit the chord strips to have the chords we need for this piece.

And there we go we are ready to lay down the root notes but before that let’s just take note of some features that are often overlooked.

Nobody knows about this but you can get variations of the variations in autoplay by tapping the chord strip with one, two or three fingers. So when we choose autoplay number one and then we tap the chord strip with one finger we get a particular variation. Two fingers we get a different one and three fingers another. That gets us 12 variations instead of four.

As we are inspired by heat waves we would be encouraging two minims or half notes per bar and to use a low register. This is also a great opportunity to talk about how thin strings make higher sounds and fatter strings make lower sounds and as we are after the lowest sound possible we choose the fattest string and then off we go. To me it has a moody and broody feel as well, which is going to affect my choice of bass, so let’s pause here to record a heat waves inspired bass line into GarageBand.