LoopyLou's Latest Album, Snippets!

As I promised in my last blog, I'm going to show you how I recorded the songs on my Snippets album solely using GarageBand. Now I recorded on my iMac so any pictures that I show you is based on how GarageBand looks like on a computer. You can download Garageband on your iPad and iPhone but I believe it's going to look a little differently. Okay so here goes. First step is double clicking on the Garageband icon on your computer. If its not directly showing on your dock it should be under the applications tab. Once you open the program you should see a screen like this: Choose either the hip-hop or electronic or songwriter options. All of these have a drummer track already there which makes it quicker to start composing your song. In my next blog GarageBand Part II I'll continue where I left off so until then...Peace out...

In my previous blogs, I mentioned that I had recorded my Snippets album using Apple's music recording program, GarageBand. Unfortunately, this program is only available with Apple products. However it's such a great program and so user-friendly that in my opinion, it's worth investing in an iMac, MacBook, iPad or even an iPhone to be able to record music with GarageBand. I actually invested in an old refurbished iMac that I found online for 300 bucks and used that to record all of my songs. Over the next few blogs I'm going to give you a short primer on how I record with Garageband. I'll start with the first track on my Snippets album which is the song titled 388replace. This album version is actually the third take of the song. Originally the song was called 38 but because it was too short (originally 38 seconds, hence the name), I did a couple of takes to make the song long enough so that it could be streamed and sold online (most stores won't accept tracks le...

I can't believe how the days go by so quickly. I thought that I had posted my last blog a couple of days ago but when I took a closer look I saw that a week and a half had passed by. Well in the last blog I mentioned that I used GarageBand to record my Snippets album. I also stated that I began all my songs with drum loops which served as the inspiration for the rest of the instrumentation (hey that's catchy..lol). Now in my good 'ole analog days when recording I would also start with drums first and then move on to bass guitar. However, when working digitally, after drums I would next find some keyboard loops and build on that. For the my next blog I'll focus on a step by step method of using Garageband to record.

Whenever I've recorded an album whether now or in the past I always began with laying down the drum tracks. In the past it would take me days to do this since I was recording live drums. However, since going all digital, I can usually lay down a drum track and tweak it in a matter of minutes. All the songs on Snippets started out with a drum loop. Life has been so much easier since I started using GarageBand to do all my recordings. People may argue that you lose a bit of rawness when you compare digital to analog recordings but even if this is true, the time that you save by using digital means more than compensates for what you lose when recording through analog methods.

The whole concept of recording an album where most of the songs are about a minute long came from a conversation that I had with my best friend. He had mentioned for me to check out this new fad of writing called flash fiction. Now for those of you that are not familiar with that term, flash fiction are stories that are about 1000 words or less. After reading a couple of flash fiction tales I thought to myself why not make music that's the equivalent to flash fiction literature. So that is how Snippets was born. I sat behind my iMac and using GarageBand I started with what would be the shortest track on the Snippets album, the song Midnight.

Hello to all, my name is LoopyLou. I am a musician, artist, and teacher. I am a creative person therefore, I am constantly creating. My latest creative musical endeavor is my album, Snippets. Now Snippets is like no other album out there. Reason being is that Snippets is only about 11 minutes long. Yes, you read correctly! The whole album is roughly the length of three and a half songs. The question that you may be asking yourself is "Why"? Well for my next post I'll explain meanwhile, click on the link below and enjoy some short but catchy music.