That’s right, it’s not just us mere mortals who can’t get enough of Apple’s musical marvel – Some of the biggest names in the music industry love to use Garageband regularly.
Musicians and bands like Courtney Love, Panic! At The Disco, Limp Bizkit and Kate Nash frequently use Garageband as their go-to way to record song ideas and lay down demos.
The three musical icons below chose to use Garageband a little differently, whether using the built in loops to build multi million selling records or sharing entire albums with their fans in Garageband project format…..
Radiohead
Radiohead’s 2008 release ‘In Rainbows’ was ground breaking in a couple of ways.
Not only was it an excellent record musically, the band released it via a ‘pay what you want’ format. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal nowadays with the rise of Bandcamp.com and the like at the time, no-one had seen anything like it.
As If that wasn’t enough, Radiohead also released two of their tracks from the album to be remixed by fans.
First off they released the stem files for their single ‘Nude’ on the iTunes store, enabling fans to download the Bass, Drum, Guitar, String FX and Voice stems individually, each costing the same as a regular iTunes single track.
If you downloaded all of the stems before April 8 of that year, you gained access to a complete Garageband project file of ‘Nude’, allowing you even more control over your remix.
Remixes were then entered to an official Remix website and the winner was ultimately chosen by Radiohead’s fans.
Later that same year Radiohead ran an almost identical contest for another track from ‘In Rainbows’ – ‘Reckoner’. Again they publicly released the individual stem tracks that could then be imported to a Garageband project and remixed.
Needless to say, the response to these remix competitions was immense and helped give rise to a remix culture prevalent in ‘home-brew’ music today.
Want to give a remix contest a try?
Check out : http://www.remixcomps.com
Rihanna
You Remember ‘Umbrella’ right?
Rihanna’s massively popular single dominated music charts around the world for what seemed like forever, giving birth to countless cover versions by everyone from Biffy Clyro to The Baseballs.
Not only did the success of the track cement Rihanna’s place as an über bankable pop mega beast, ‘Umbrella’s’ producer – The Dream (possibly not his real name) – netted a reported $15 million dollars for engineering and putting together the track – that’s roughly $200,000 per word for a whole lot of ella’s ella’s….
What does all this have to do with Garageband?
Check out the official video for Umbrella in the video below – pay particular attention to the intro drum loop……..
Done?
Ok – If you were to open up Garageband, slow the tempo to 90BPM and fire up the Vintage Funk Kit 03 drum loop this is what you’d get…..
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/80126958″ params=”auto_play=false&show_artwork=true&color=0079ff” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
That’s right, one of the defining elements of Rihanna’s breakthrough hit is a Garageband loop…. crazy!
Trent Reznor
In 2005 Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor conducted an experiment.
He released the band’s latest single ‘The Hand That Feeds’ as a free 70MB DMG file containing the entire song in Garageband format and a .text file from the man himself.
In it he writes….
“For quite some time I’ve been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks – to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there. . . . What I’m giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for ‘the hand that feeds’ in GarageBand format. . . . Listen. Change the tempo. Add new loops. Chop up the vocals. Turn me into a woman. Replay the guitar. Anything you’d like.”
His experiment seems to have been a success – today you can download stems for pretty much every NIN record since 2005 and remix them til your heart’s content!
Have a play around with the NIN back catalogue over at: http://www.ninremixes.com
Here’s where you come in:
Do you know anyone else (music or otherwise) that uses Garageband in a new or awesome way?
Are there any remix contests you know of/ have taken part in?
Leave a comment and let me know!
