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A "horn toot" is program #70
Mar. 19th, 2006 02:36 amSo, the way I lay down a rhythm track for a parody is this: I play the original song over and over, a measure or two at a time, listening very closely to what the drummer is doing. Then I open GarageBand and poke at the little keyboard they give me until I find something that approximates what I'm hearing. This involves a lot of trial and error, since the sounds aren't arranged in any logical fashion; a bongo is next to a cymbal is next to a "vibraslap" (whatever that is). And it's never clear, to my ears anyway, what the difference is between a bass drum and a "low floor tom," especially when several sounds are going at once.
I was engaged in this process for a couple of hours tonight before realizing I didn't actually know what I was doing; I was not so much reinventing the wheel as trying to make a square not have quite so many corners. So I Googled the drum tab for the song I'm working on, then looked up on another page what the little S and B and Hf symbols mean, then found a map that maps the keyboard keys to the drum sounds. (They have a high agogo and a low agogo, but no monster agogo or whiskey agogo. Alas.)
When I'd done all that, and translated all the markings on the drum tab into little dots in GarageBand, I discovered I'd gotten it exactly right in the first place. My work exactly matched the actual tab. In all my fumbling, I had in fact reinvented the wheel...and then spent a lot of time online searching for a detailed wheel blueprint. Apparently, I am a soooooper geeeeeenius, but not a very bright one. My time spent Googling was unnecessary, but not wasted—that chart will save me a lot of time in future, and now I know I've got it right. Still, I don't know whether to feel pleased with myself or very foolish indeed.
I was engaged in this process for a couple of hours tonight before realizing I didn't actually know what I was doing; I was not so much reinventing the wheel as trying to make a square not have quite so many corners. So I Googled the drum tab for the song I'm working on, then looked up on another page what the little S and B and Hf symbols mean, then found a map that maps the keyboard keys to the drum sounds. (They have a high agogo and a low agogo, but no monster agogo or whiskey agogo. Alas.)
When I'd done all that, and translated all the markings on the drum tab into little dots in GarageBand, I discovered I'd gotten it exactly right in the first place. My work exactly matched the actual tab. In all my fumbling, I had in fact reinvented the wheel...and then spent a lot of time online searching for a detailed wheel blueprint. Apparently, I am a soooooper geeeeeenius, but not a very bright one. My time spent Googling was unnecessary, but not wasted—that chart will save me a lot of time in future, and now I know I've got it right. Still, I don't know whether to feel pleased with myself or very foolish indeed.
