Garage Band Has Effects Pedal Simulations!

Since I have a lot of grading to do and my wife is out of town and thus can't keep me on track, I decided I'd practice my guitar tonight. During my work from my last blog posting, I realized that I couldn't play the two parts to Little Martha well enough to record them, so I practiced for a while. The song is played in open E tuning, which means that unlike how a guitar is normally tuned, when you strum all of the strings without fretting them, you get a nice pretty chord.

After playing the song three or four times along with the album, I got bored and started playing around with the different sounds that come out naturally with an open E tuning. I then realized that although the noise I was making didn't sound like anything I, or anyone else, would ever want to listen to, it was somewhat creative in the sense that it wasn't me playing someone else's music. I fired up GarageBand and hit record, but lo and behold, I noticed something that I hadn't recognized before... and option to select guitar effects!

For those of you that don't realize the importance of this discovery, guitar effects serve primarily to mask a guitarist's lack of talent. You can crank up the distortion and no one ever knows that 50% of the notes you hit are the wrong notes. You can turn up echo and distortion, and it makes your scratchy mis-frettings sound like part of the rhythm. So I recorded myself playing with one of the effects settings on GarageBand in open E, and if you really have no life, you can listen to it here.

Pulling my Hair Out

In my first post, I mentioned that I was going to try to write instrumental bluegrass songs, but the muses aren't helping me with that. Perhaps that idea boxed me in too much. Maybe it makes more sense for me to just sit down with my guitar and see what comes out. The only problem is that I'm so rusty from not having played much since graduation from high school that I don't feel I have the skills to create yet. So maybe I need to lower the bar a bit and just work on getting better.

At the school I teach at, it seems like every other student plays the guitar. Despite these students having played for only a few years, most of them play much better than me. One of them asked if I'd sponsor a guitar club, and I realized that this would amount to free guitar lessons for me, so I said yes. God knows, I need some help with my guitar playing. We've started meeting every Tuesday morning at 7:30, and after two meetings I have some good material to practice.

Currently, I'm working on learning Little Martha by the Allman Brothers. It's a nice two guitar instrumental that isn't supposed to be too difficult. I thought I had learned both parts well enough to record myself on Garage Band, but there's something about seeing the red record button on my computer and hearing my guitar through the headphones that makes me mess up every time. Hence the picture of me pulling my hair out. I'd like to have some product to show from this effort, so I'm going to keep plugging away at getting a recording of the final song. After far too many takes, I finally have 46 seconds of audio, although the final 18 seconds only have the second guitar part. With Spring Break in a week, maybe I'll have time to finish learning this song. If you want to hear a poorly played and unfinished version of Little Martha, click here.

My Wife, the Idea Murderer

We spent a good bit of time in our first two weeks of class talking about what teachers can do to establish learning environments that are conducive to creativity. Teachers must make sure that students feel psychologically safe enough to express their thoughts, otherwise the potentially creative ideas are stifled.

When I heard the term "idea murderer" in class and thought about it in the context of this creative skill blog, I instantly thought of my wife. I love her, but when I'm playing my guitar she's the Son of Sam and my musical ideas are like helpless women walking the back alleys of New York at night in the Summer of '76. She's a well-trained musician, and I think she expects my creative ideas to be more advanced than the chopsticks-sounding stuff that comes out of my guitar when I try to create.

So I've got a new practice schedule... Monday nights when she's off at class!