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

🎧 Our Choice for Cheap and Nasty Spare Wired Headphones: https://amzn.to/2WNKu1f

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Transcript:

Now that you're a beat maker let’s have a look at the other ways you can create a beat. So if we go back to the Canvas instructions and click on “Create a drum groove with touch drums” this will give us more granular control. If you don't like a recording but you’d like to hold onto it just in case we can go to track view and hit the plus button and then swipe to find the drums card. On the drum card you've got a few different options, lets tap acoustic drums. It’s important to note that it says acoustic drums but it essentially means drum pads because we can still find electronic kits in this section. The default kit is nice but if you tap it it will give you options that may suit this piece better, for example electronic - modern 808. So just a couple of quick things to help us speed this process up is that it's all in the’ how to play the touch drums tutorial’ but let’s highlight some features that we like.

Firstly, the electronic drum pads work the same as the acoustic pads where you can tap and hold and spread your fingers out to get the different subdivisions. It’s just really helpful because it's really hard to play in time on an iPad. This is great for your finger drummers in the class because you can take care of the subdivisions on the hi-hat. By spreading your fingers with your non-dominant hand it moves from between quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes and then you can use your dominant hand for the kick and snare. Another important thing there is that when we're in this mode GarageBand records in what's called cycle mode. So each time the recording cycles back around it doesn't replace, but rather adds to what you've done. This is one of the affordances of working with midi instruments.

You must be careful here as with bluetooth there is a lag between when you tap and when you hear it and there's also a lag between when the iPad plays back and when you hear it. This lag is what we call latency and can make even the seasoned professional look quite bad. Over the last couple of years this has become more of a problem as students have increasingly acquired bluetooth headphones. We would encourage our students to have wired headphones but ended up buying for $1.97 each a whole bunch of office-works earphones. We would gift these to the students and would teach them about latency in the process. A link to these headphones is in the description below.