Garage Funk

Posted by Pierre Igot in: GarageBand, Music
April 12th, 2004 • 12:29 am

In case you are interested, here’s the product of my first experiments with GarageBand: “Organ Funk” (MP4 file, 2.1 MB, duration: 1:48).

It’s mostly cut-and-paste stuff, with a number of adjustments (transpositions, additional notes & beats, special effects), and a few twists. But the bass line is entirely mine :).

And no, don’t worry, I don’t sing on it…

On the whole, I am quite impressed with what can be achieved with Apple’s software. I am not sure I really like the very concept of building music from existing bits and samples, but, after all, it’s what all these hip hop artists have been doing all these years… GarageBand certainly is a fun application!


9 Responses to “Garage Funk”

  1. Pierre Igot says:

    Well, I’d better work on a few more tracks first! And on something that’s not too heavily based on an existing sample too… GarageBand is fun, but it’s easy to spend an inordinate amount of time fine-tuning stuff and experimenting without really creating anything new…

    Then there is the nagging issue: I do have musical ideas (at least I think I do), and I do have some past experience as an instrument player (2 years of piano and 5 years of flute), but does this make me a musician? a composer? I guess the idea is to let even non-specialists give it a try, but at the same time I don’t necessarily want to add to the cacophony… I know far too little about chords and harmony, for example. And it’d probably be much better to learn about them by learning how to play the guitar or getting back to the piano.

    I guess what I might do eventually is buy a keyboard and try practicing on that. You never know! Thanks for the encouragement anyway :).

  2. Matthew says:

    why not join macidol? you may be “discovered”

  3. Matthew says:

    i think the samples are there to add “accents” to your own stuff – atleast thats how i use it. but its fun to make a completely lego track too.

    Are you setting up an account on macidol.com

  4. Pierre Igot says:

    macidol.com? Good Lord, no :).

    “Lego track” is a pretty good analogy. But what I like about GarageBand is the level of fine-tuning that you can do. You cannot customize Lego blocks :).

  5. Pierre Igot says:

    Right… I think I’ve fixed it (by adding “AddType audio/mp4 m4a” to my .htaccess file). Working for me now. Working for you?

  6. peter royal says:

    yup, works for me now :)

  7. peter royal says:

    your webserver isn’t serving up the correct mime type to allow it to play directly in the browser :)

    (audio/mp4 -> m4a)

  8. Czar says:

    Hi,
    Can you please tell me specifically how to go about adding ?AddType audio/mp4 m4a? to my .htaccess file?
    I can’t seem to find a way to create a .htaccess file on my Mac OS X.
    I’d appreciate any help you can give me on this.

  9. Pierre Igot says:

    The .htaccess file is a plain text file that needs to be located at the root level in your public HTML folder. The use of a period as the first character makes managing it a bit tricky under Mac OS X, since such files are normally invisible. I use BBEdit to edit my file (called “htaccess” without the period) and then Transmit to change its name to “.htaccess” (with the period) and transfer it to my web server.

    All you need to put in the file is the following line:

    AddType audio/mp4 m4a

    But then you also need to check to make sure your web host will take your .htaccess file into account once it’s on your web server. The Apache web server needs to be configured so that it will recognize the file and take its contents into account, but only your web host can change that if it’s not already set up properly. (Normally it should.)

    Hope this helps.

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