Ode to Oryx

Hello everyone! Today I had a breakthrough (breakdown?) and decided to use GarageBand to make a theme song for my novel. I chose this assignment because I wanted to learn how to make music (finally).

Below is my final product.

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Behind the Process

Before I entered GarageBand, I decided what themes my music should have. I decided to focus on Snowman’s love for Oryx. I wanted to make this theme very obvious so I went to Looperman and found this loop with someone saying “Love”.  I also wanted the song to be more intense because I imagine Snowman listening to this and trekking through the woods.

So I created a new project in GarageBand and imported the loop. I then added a drum backing called “New Soul Curtis”. I made the drum Loud and adjusted some of the kick and snare. I decided that the song needed to be filled out more. Thus, I added to some sound effects namely Electro Clap Topper, Lockstep Beat, and Formidable Future Bass. I then made all these effects match pitch and tempo to the original loop. I then easily added a fade out.

After I uploaded my track to SoundCloud, I needed to create a image for the track. I decided to use an image of my friend West Virginia. He looked somewhat “Snowmany” to me. I adjusted the exposure and added a grainy filter to give it a vibe. I did this on Snapseed on my phone, because I had already suffered and did not want to mess with Photoshop.

There really was not a difficult thing as the entire process was difficult. I have never used GarageBand so I was constantly Googling “how to change tempo?” or “how to use GarageBand.” However, I am an independent learner so the struggle taught me how to use GarageBand. I think that teaching myself software is something I do well. I am proud of this song as it sounds pretty good (at least to me). I want to improve the beat matching. I feel like it’s just a little off, but because I’m not a music producer or as experienced in GarageBand, I couldn’t figure out the issue. If I could do this assignment again, I would learn more about beat matching and fix this in GarageBand.

I really did like this assignment and would do it again. It was fun to create music as I haven’t really done it digitally before. Hopefully, you guys liked the first song I’ve ever produced.

That’s it folks, I’ll catch you on the flipside.