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.