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Leveraging iLife, some cheap software, a funky cable, and some earbuds

This is a departure from the usual fare on the blog, but I was describing this workflow to a friend and they suggested that I share it here. It’s one of those things that is so obvious that it’s not really going to surprise anybody. But what really struck me was the fact that there was nothing like this around when I was growing up. Back then, I had to practice my instruments uphill both ways, through the snow…

I recently joined a new band for reasons that I won’t get into here. But what I will mention is that I had to learn some material that I wasn’t really all that familiar with in the first place. These were all tunes I’d never played before, or had heard a few times in some cases and not at all in others. It was going to be a challenge to quickly learn enough material for a few sets.

Years ago I would have had to copy LP’s or CD’s to tape, then wear it out on the Walkman while I figured things out, punching the start and stop buttons endlessly. For some tunes I could go down to the music store and plunk down some cash for a songbook or a fakebook. There were also these things available in magazines called “tab” books that showed you how to play things using tablature, which is a kind of notation that makes it easier for guitar players to learn how things were played. Tab is still around, although the music publishing industry has really cracked down on tab sharing websites, but that’s another story. If you were really lucky or had some cash, you could pay for lessons or go see a whole lot of shows to pickup licks from other players.

Now, of course, there are all kinds of resources available on the internet. And like everything else on the internet, the quality is all over the map, but it’s just stunning how much information is available to musicians. There are discussion forums covering all kinds of musical instruments, genres, and instruction as well as music-related time wasters. Thee are still some tab sites, and of course you can purchase a lot of these materials online. I probably don’t have to tell you that there are all kinds of ways to legally and illegally download songs and play them back on your computer, iPod, AppleTV, or other device.

But it seems the media of choice these days is YouTube. Just about any song you can think of is available (in low quality, of course) as a video feed, and a lot of them are clips from live performances. These are probably the most useful as you can see how they’re playing what you’re hearing. I tend to gravitate towards those if the quality of the audio is good enough to figure out what’s going on in the tune. There are also examples of players basically giving you a video lesson, showing you exactly how to play the tune and other performance tips. What’s nice about YouTube clips is that it’s easy to pass on the URL to others via e-mail, and some forums allow you to embed the videos directly in your posts. Between YouTube and the other resources online, I’m miles ahead of anything I would be able to do prior to the ‘net, and we could easily stop this post at that and be good to go.

Building a virtual Practice Room with iLife

One of the most underrated, underused, and under-appreciated applications in the iLife suite is GarageBand. Most people never even open it up, and those that do primarily use it as a demo recorder, similar to what we used to do with those finicky 4 track tape machines. It does a fine job with that to be sure, but it’s really a much more capable system than people give it credit for. I know of businesses use GarageBand as their audio editing application in various capacities, and it works like a champ.

Since GarageBand is part of the iLife suite, it’s very good at working with other applications in the suite. If you’ve done some podcasting, or done some audio for iMovie, you’re already up to speed with how it integrates. But it also is pretty slick with how it handles media from your iTunes library, including video and music files. I’ll describe how I’m using GarageBand and iTunes to build a virtual Practice Room – one that is self-contained on my Mac, and best of all is very quiet allowing me to practice with the headphones on late at night.

Start by acquiring the tune

If it’s already in your iTunes library, you can skip ahead to the next section. But let’s assume that your buddies send you a link to a YouTube video featuring a song that they want to learn for the next practice. How are you going to get that video into your iTunes Library and subsequently into GarageBand? There are some choices out there, but the one I use is called “TubeSock”. It’s very Mac-Friendly and integrates directly into your Safari bookmark toolbar so you can translate it and import it into iTunes with a single click without ever leaving your browser. Here’s a link to our friends at Stinkbot, developers of TubeSock.

You’ll probably need the beta of version 3.0 as previous versions don’t handle most of what’s on YouTube today. This is free, but I do encourage everybody that downloads it to pay the measly $15 it costs to go legit. Do it for Wilford…

Let’s start with an example. Below is a lesson on how to play Sugarloaf’s “Green Eyed Lady” on an acoustic guitar. I have no idea who this guy is or what “cred” he may have, but I like the tune and it sounds kinda interesting, so it will work for us here. I hope he doesn’t mind.
\”Green Eyed Lady\” video lesson example
If you look in the Bookmark bar in Safari, you’ll see a bookmark called “Save with Tubesock”. To save the file, just click on the link. You’ll get a box that looks like this:

The clip is in iTunes. Now what?

TubeSock automatically downloaded, converted, and imported that YouTube video into your iTunes movie library. Now you can play it on your computer, put it on your iPod to look at later, or put it on your AppleTV. Pretty cool. Here is the video in my iTunes library:

Into GarageBand, plus a Play Along Track

Here’s the really cool part. You’ve already got iTunes open, so adjust the size of the window so that easily pick up the file and drop it into Garageband. You just need enough room to be able to click and drag on the video image. Now, open up GarageBand from your Applications folder in Finder if you don’t already have it on the dock. You’ll get the startup screen below – just choose “Create New Music Project”.

Don’t worry about the key or tempo, just where you’re going to save this project and what you’re going to call it. I leave it in the demo songs folder for now, but it’s easy enough to move it. I like to add something to the file name to indicate what its’ for, and for practice sessions I add the word “track”. It doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t have to.

By default, GarageBand will startup with a Grand Piano as track 1 and a keyboard on the screen. I don’t need that, so I delete that track by using the command in the menu bar. The screen is shown below:

This part is cool – just drag in the video from iTunes and drop it anywhere in the GarageBand window. It will start importing the video file, and you’ll end up with a video track and an audio track like this:

We’re done with iTunes for now, so you can go ahead and close it. Go ahead and click the Play button in GarageBand and it will start playing the video with the audio, and it will start showing you the waveform for the audio in the editing windows. Sometimes the audio is a bit too loud, so I turn it down a bit by pulling the slider to the left. Now the project is ready for us to add our instrument to it so that we can practice along with the video. To do that, go to the menu bar in GarageBand marked “Track” and select “New Track”. A dialogue box will come up asking if you’d like a Software Instrument Track or a Real Instrument Track. For guitars, basses, keyboards, microphones, etc., select “Real Instrument Track” then click the “Create” button. In my case, I’m going to be playing a bass along with the track, however as it is it’s not going to make any sound. We need to do a couple things first.

The most important thing is to create an actual physical connection between the instrument (in my case a bass) and the computer (my MacBook Pro). I’ve got a nifty cable that has a 1/4″ plug on one end for the bass and a 1/8″ plug on the other end that goes into my MacBook Pro. These are fairly cheap, and there are also other cables you can get for handling microphones. Of course, if you have a nice microphone and/or an audio interface with a pre-amp, those will work nicely. This is the cheap and easy version of the workflow, though!

Once I’m plugged in, I’m going to make some changes in the instrument settings in GarageBand. The first is to go over to the Track Info window, select Real Instruments, and in this case get a preset for a bass. There are a bunch to choose from, and you can create your own presets here to match up with your tone preferences. I created one that works especially well for practicing, at least in my opinion. Feel free to experiment with the various presets, add or remove effects, etc. Here’s a shot of that window where you can make the selections. Also, be sure to turn on “monitoring”, otherwise you won’t be able to hear your instrument in your headphones.

Start Practicing!
Now it’s just a matter of starting up the project in GarageBand and playing along with it. You’ll probably need to adjust the volume for each track. Also, it’s a good idea to set “markers” at various places along the tune so that you can quickly go to specific spots in the song without having to do a lot of scrubbing. You can also split tracks at the play head, shorten them up, splice other things in, and all that other good audio editing stuff. To move around in the project, just use the VCR -type buttons to go back to the beginning, to the end, or to the next marker, etc.

If you like, you can easily record yourself during these practice sessions, but I tend not to. I do save everything so that I can quickly bring up this track if when it’s time to practice that particular tune.

Summary

This is a slightly unusual, but overall very simple and powerful use of the software that’s already on your Mac, with the addition of a $15 piece of software that handles the YouTube files for iTunes. Again, this is something that wasn’t even remotely possible years ago. It’s saved me a ton of time and money, and it’s helped me get up to speed on more tunes quicker than I could otherwise. This same type of iLife integrated workflow could be applied to other tasks in business with just a bit of experimentation. I’d be interested in hearing what other things people come up with using iLife.