Working with Garage Band
I am not a naturally talented musician. In fact I don't claim to be a musician at all. I once passed grade 3 piano and I can play a few chords on a guitar but like many beginners I avoid B and F. No, it's my wife who is the musician. This means that I struggle more than she does when I try to play marimba tunes and I certainly struggle more than she does when I try to teach tunes to students at school!
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Fortunately Apple have provided Garage Band on their computers and even though this is a 2012 MacBook I am writing on, it still has enough capacity to use Garage Band and to down load the accessory instruments that include the marimba. I can make arrangements using several marimbas to build up the layers.
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Having mastered the basics of Garage Band I now write all my tunes on it first to work out the arrangement of the parts I intend to teach. The clever thing about this is that I can share the parts individually with my players via social media, enabling them to listen to their individual parts on their phones. I anticipate that this will really help me as I cannot remember everyones part all the time, much less switch between two players at a moment's notice.
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I'd love to share a tutorial from YouTube on how use Garage Band but there are none out there that are tailored to the way I use it to write marimba arrangements. You can try following some of the tutorials out there but you may well get frustrated. The best thing is to start playing around with it yourself. I give you tips on how to start using it in the way I use it in this very brief starter tutorial....
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Anyway, here are a couple of hand held manual recordings using my phone. They are recordings of my computer playing an arrangement I wrote using Garage Band of the South African song 'Malaika'. The first is all the three marimba parts together while the second is the same song but with me toggling between the different parts that make up the layers of the song. They are not great recordings and you can hear m clicking on the mouse in the second one, but hey, they give an insight into the concept!