My Home on the Web

It’s not much of a secret that since receiving my iMac last fall, I have been extremely happy with my re-acquaintance with Apple.

I have started using Garageband a fair bit, building a small, one-man recording station at my desk, which I have dubbed “Finn Street Studio”. After a decade-long hiatus, I have rediscovered the joy and frustration of recording tracked music again. This time, however, it’s not on a small 4-track Tascam Cassette recorder, but a slick visual tool that includes a host of tools to help you produce demo tracks easily. I still have trouble putting nice-sounding drum tracks together, but with the hundreds of drum loops, I don’t have to work too hard at it.

While not a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails, they have recently released their latest single, Survivalism, in Garageband format. I downloaded and launched the files to find the completed song separated into individual tracks. I immediately started adding echo, flange, delay and guitar effects to the various tracks. I even hooked up my guitar and added a few notes of my own.

This is a fantastic way to release music. Turning listeners into users by allowing them creative expression and exploration over someone else’s creation. Already there are a considerable number of people who have shared their own interpretations of Survivalism at Echoing the Sound, a NIN fan site.

I would have liked to find that each of the tracks contained raw material that had been tweaked by effects in Garageband, but I appears that many of them were simply cut and pasted from the post-produced work.

After a little digging around, I discovered that NIN have released a couple more songs: The Hand that Feeds in Garageband format, and Only in multiple formats such as Ableton Live, Protools and Acid. The latter has a myspace site that keeps a ranking of all the remixes that have been done - 110 different have been posted.

For anyone exploring music production, this is a great study guide that gives you a view into what it’s like to produce a fully-tracked song from end to end.

Posted on March 15th, 2007 by Alistair
Filed under: Apple, Music