I'll Take the Rain
Reveal | 2001
Listen Original Listen Final Mix

Building the Tracks

So far, I found it’s best to start with a recording of the original song on its own track. For “So Fast”, I was constantly going between Garageband and a differnt program to listen to the original song. Now, I take the time to put the original on its own track in the project. This lest me quickly see what the original did for any part of the song while I’m recording parts.

Weak Garageband

This exposed some of Garageband’s weaknesses. I love that its a free DAW that I can easily use on a lapto pand collaborate with tiewrh Garageband users. I hate that they strip so many useful tools away and overpredict how you want to set things up.

Tempo settings is a great example. I have to know the temp oif a song before I start with that first track. So my first step is finding the original tempo of the song. I know it will never perfectly fit, but I want it close as possible for reference. Grageband doesn’t let me import the track, then adjust the song tempo. Garageband “helpfully” changes all regions imported with the tempo. Hopefully I’ll find a setting to toggle this.

That also brings up the regions concept. Instead of visually manipulating the audio files, Garageband uses Regions that behave very similar to audio in Digital Performer and ProTools, but you can’t trim the audio the same way. In order to do a quick fade in and out, I have to use track autimation - which is overkill for this purpose.

You also can’t send signals through an aux track in the mix. I had to get creative to get a common effect on a guitar spread across multiple tracks.

Using the Original

So far, this will be the one that strays furthest from the original version. I already have bass, acoustic guitar and robot drums close to the original parts. But I added a piano and organ to the chorus. I also found a neat effect on the piano by putting it through a wah pedal set to one frequency. So I used that on the second and outro chorus.

Damn Robut

There was a bit of difficulty with Robo Drummer this time. The verses end with an extra 2 beats, which causes the downbeat to be two off where the measures in Garageband starts. Robot wasn’t having any of that. I had to get a decent robot take from abother part of the song that got back to the downbeat. That was copied to a midi track. So now I hae half audio drummer tracks and half midi, frankensteined into a composite drum track. Good times.