It was a lot of fun, although I couldn’t use Garage Band’s loops in most cases since she had guitar, drums, harmonica, and vocals pre-recorded and mixed together already, and I couldn’t get Garage Band to really lock onto the beat. So I had to play a lot of it myself — I did keyboards (midi keyboard), bass lines (midi keyboard), flutes (midi keyboard), and some goofy sound effects through garage band. I also recorded vocal harmonies. Overall it was a lot of fun, and it came out sounding pretty good. The songs were very amusing, and educational! They cover arthropods, echinoderms, phloem, and more… And they’re very very catchy so John winds up singing them all day after I work on them.

I had thought about posting a song or two here, but they’re Robin’s songs that she intends to sell, and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to post a snippet of it. So instead, I recorded a Melinda Weathers original song, “Good Morning, Mr. Fish”. (And yes, I seriously sing the chorus of this to my fish when I feed him in the morning. And yes, I’m insane. I had to write the verse and the rest of the words this morning when I decided to record it.)

(Click the play button to hear it…)

All the instruments are coming from Garage Band. There’s drums, a bass line, piano, and some synth stuff, and I didn’t record any of it. Well, I did have to play the synth melody, but I used Garage Band’s built in musical typing (where the keys on the mac keyboard represent keys on a musical keyboard) instead of hooking up my midi cable to my midi keyboard. And I transposed the piano and bass lines to go along with my chord changes.

I gave back the condensing mic I was borrowing already, so I recorded this with my Karaoke Revolution USB headset. I’m currently pricing condensing mics since I already have a USB pre-amp and phantom power supply that Robin bought for me as a gift for helping her out, but I havent’ picked one yet so for now the USB headset did pretty well. Also I didn’t really want to spend that long on it, so I only did a couple takes and left the out-of-tune bits alone. I figure when the record companies call, they will want me to re-record in a studio anyways

So anyways, Garage Band is a lot of fun. Everyone who has a mac should try it out (It’s part of the iLife suite that comes with every new mac). I recommend the on-line iLife tutorial. It’s very easy to put pieces together and make fun little songs even if you aren’t genius, super-incredible, awesome like I hear that I am from my mom’s friends

Yes, that’s right, it doesn’t even get any hits on Google! That means no one ever thought of it before! John said there was a reason no one ever thought of it before… Clearly he means because I am an innovator. Honestly, people should hire me to come up with names for their companies.

So I always thought that my having a blog would be kind of a dumb idea, because who would read it? And also I’m not really into journaling about stuff I’m doing. But I was inspired by The Mendicant Bug that you can just post cool stuff that you find interesting. Because right now I resort to emailing it to people, and I think it causes them to start deleting my emails by rote. You know who you are ::cough:: Josh ::cough::. Or at least I imagine people are deleting my emails because I’m paranoid like that.

Also, I thought this would be a cool way to familiarize myself a little with the latest web technologies that all the cool kidz are doing these days. This blog is proudly powered by WordPress and hosted on the Weathers and Humphries SliceHost Slice. I thought I would start out easy and pick a pre-made WordPress theme, but I looked at (literally) about a hundred of them before deciding to go with the default theme and just mess with the colors a little. So I’ll probably play with it some more at some point. But for now I guess it will do.

And the underlying reason for wanting a blog — it gives me more of an excuse to play with my new MacBook I heart my MacBook.

So, Hello World, and I hope you enjoy Melinthropy! (And if you don’t, I don’t care. Ha. Okay, yes I do. Just don’t tell me.)