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!

The really cool thing is you can actually go to the website here and interact with the machines playing the music!  You type in your melody (which I did horribly, because I thought I was in “practice” mode, but apparently I wasn’t — I guess you only get a second to “practice”), then you see the thing playing your melody (and its own variations) live, and then they send you a video of it.  How cool is that!

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

Weird Al’s White and Nerdy video

(This is higher res than the youtube version. I got it off Weird Al’s official site.)