melinthropy

I bought the new iLife when it came out, mainly so that I could try out the new GarageBand.  Sure, it has some other cool features, such as the auto face recognition in iPhoto, but I don’t take that many pictures, so I haven’t played with it much.  Anyways, one of the things in the new GarageBand that I was excited about was the Artist Lessons you can purchase for $5 each.  The Artist Lesson is where a well-known artist teaches you to play one of their songs on piano or guitar.  (There are also basic lessons for piano and guitar that are free with the new GarageBand, but I haven’t looked at those yet.)  I picked the Norah Jones “Thinking About You” advanced piano lesson.  Here’s what it looks like:

As you can kind of see, Norah walks you through each part of the song, playing and explaining the basic chords. The verse is cut into three different pieces, each with 3 or 4 different chords.  The next section goes through the chorus, and the last few sections talk (briefly) about soloing and embellishment.  

(More after the jump…)

At first, I was a little disappointed, since I can already read music well, so there wasn’t much advantage to watching the video over just buying the sheet music. However, I’d like to get better at playing from chord notation in order to more easily memorize/improvise pieces, rather than just reading the notes.  I took some improvisational jazz piano in college, but I haven’t really done it since then — it’s so much easier to just read the notes.  So anyways, once I dug around in the settings and found the option to turn on the chords, the lesson got more fun and challenging for me.  Thankfully, you can slow the music down all the way to half speed, and still play along with the lesson. The band also still plays along with you at the slower tempos, but of course the vocals are only on when you are playing at full tempo.  Here’s a screenshot with just the chord notation:

One thing I was wondering was would I want to go through the lessons more than once, and I think the answer is “yes”.  When I solo over the chords right now, it sounds like me playing — it does not sound like Norah Jones. But I am definitely interested in watching the improvisational pieces of the lesson a few times to try to incorporate a little more Norah Jones grooviness into it.  Also, you don’t have to do the lesson part again — you can just play the whole song all the way through with the band, vocals, and piano, or you could mute any of the tracks so that, for instance, it’s just you and the band, as if you had a drum and brass section in your living room grooving along with you.

So the verdict is it was definitely worth the $5, and I’ll probably try another one in a few weeks.  I’m also interested in trying the guitar lessons.  Maybe “Roxanne” by Sting.  Hopefully Apple will continue to add artist lessons to their list.  Right now, I only see eight of them.  But at any rate, the whole concept of music lessons right in GarageBand is very cool and exciting, as if GarageBand wasn’t great enough before!

Tags: garage_band, music, norah_jones

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.