Garage Band is fun! One thing I've been doing is recording vocal music on it -- singing one piece of a track at a time, etc. The result is what you see here. The music isn't all composed; it's partly just improvised. Don't expect it to sound that good, since I don't have particularly good equipment or, for that matter, skill.
I named the album this is in (well, in the ID tag, not in real life) "Alkaline Jazz", because I suck. Basic Blues is just that. It won't take a proton, but it is basic. It's a 12-bar blues, because I figured that would be the easiest thing to put together. A couple of hours later, possibly less than one, actually, out came this piece of crap. I clearly wasn't listening too well to the metronome (Garage Band is cool like that and has a metronome) on the cymbal at the end there, but I figured that being totally off-tempo then rushing to catch up gives the piece, uh, authenticity. Consider this a demo of a cool thing you can do using a recording program and a microphone (my Mac is cool like that and comes with both). By the way, the bass is my voice down an octave, and the bass drum is my voice down two. Everything else is totally acoustic.
Listen to Basic Blues (right-click to download)Comment on this piece at The Harmony Note Book!
This was made as a present to someone wonderful. (: You can find more information on this song here, since I also made an arrangement of it for a flute quintet (where, following Classical convention, "flute quintet" denotes a clarinet quartet -- three soprano clarinets and a bass -- with an added flute). The present version, however, consists of me singing all of the parts, and I actually wrote notes on paper this time instead of just improvising it like Basic Blues, so it sounds much better. Also, it has words in Portuguese! It's a bit annoying that my singing range and my whistling range are incompatible in this song, but it doesn't actually hurt anything. All of it was sung (or whistled) directly as you hear it in the recording, except, like in Basic Jazz, for the bass notes, which were kicked down an octave, and the bass drum, which was kicked down two octaves. There is one run in the bass that kept getting really distorted when transposed, so that run was recorded a fourth higher than it ended up instead of an octave.
Listen to Carinhoso (right-click to download)