33 Klassics: Gauss

Note later - most all of this is long past its expiration date but Gauss found a new home at Bandcamp, where it will maybe stick a while.




Consider this interlude a preview on the next coming article on the transformation of music in society, as well as an early review, to be amended in greater depth at a later time, of Apple's music creation software GarageBand. Being a somewhat haphazard musician and technician, I took a chance on the new version of iLife primarily to get this software. It promised to convert the mac into a reasonable multitrack recorder with minimal fuss and to be full of clicky-buttons to play with. Naturally I had to start playing right out of the box, without digging up headphones and mics and plug adaptors, so I set right to building something catchy by stacking up one tightly looped pop cliche after another from the Apple GarageBand Loop Library. Then I threw down a vocal track, backed it with some further ambient-echoey harmony, let the program squeeze it through whatever passses for a basic remix, burned it to a CD, converted it to an MP3 and put it online.

I have to wonder how many of SONG FORMERLY HOSTED ON MPERIA, NOW DEFUNCT sort of pointy clicky amalgam is getting produced by Apple's happy army. Certainly it's awfully easy to throw one together. Though if so I doubt many of them are backing a weird little lyric about the unit of magnetic flux density.

Gauss:

The measurement of action at a distance
Extension mass and time
the rhyme of resistance
The unbearable burden of being
Of singing, writing, breathing and seeing
Give me an inch an ounce and a second
a centimeter or gram'll do I reckon
Give me a magnet, give me a gauss
There's a chemist rocking the acid house.

(lyric copyright Jonathan Mark Hamlow 2000)

Still, the software delivers in the sense that it integrates music creation to the whole iTunes playlist and CD creation process. I like the interface. I dislike that things like effects are given names like "spacey acoustic echo" instead of "chorus." Gauss is muddy from being overloaded with tracks and noisy vocal tracks: on the other hand, I didn't take much time trying to make something clean. My in-depth review will examine how well it behaves when I stop playing erector set with the poppy little loops and standard settings and record something from scratch. Still, I gotta admit that I like "Gauss" and I'm enjoying GarageBand so far.

this is what is up with this.