So the iPad 2 is some­thing I bought last week, solely for the pur­pose of GarageBand. It’s pow­er­ful enough to be a sketch­pad where you can cre­ate musi­cal ideas, and because the instru­ments are touch-sensitive, it’s really fun to doo­dle and exper­i­ment. I don’t actu­ally have a bass or piano or drums, so the extra instru­men­ta­tion is pretty handy too.

Over the week­end I made this sketch of Shaded By Your Shadow as I was fig­ur­ing my way around the soft­ware. It’s always been one of my favourite songs by Shane; the title alone evokes this image of lying in the grass on a warm day, with someone’s hair drift­ing in the haze of their out­line above you.

I haven’t lost myself this much in a project (small as it was) in a long time. I had to fig­ure out the roles of instru­ments I’ve never played before, per­cus­sion being a par­tic­u­larly weak point of mine cause I rarely pay atten­tion to it when I’m lis­ten­ing to music. There are a lot of synth instru­ments included with GarageBand, so I tried to give it an 80s synth-pop sound. Everything was done right on the iPad, includ­ing vocals which were recorded using the built-in microphone.

I still have to learn about mix­ing and pro­duc­tion and what­not (and since I don’t have any mon­i­tors, I’m com­pletely blind when set­ting the var­i­ous lev­els), but I was happy as punch just to be able to fig­ure out the soft­ware and process. It really is it’s own cre­ative process when mak­ing a full band arrange­ment for a song, a puz­zle in it’s own right, because you can start with an idea or motif on any instru­ment and there are so many direc­tions you can go from there.