Garage Band

I fired up Garage Band and tried recording Make Me Sad again, an original we wrote in Spare Change around 1984-5. Mainly because I wanted to try new features in the '09 version and because the song is fairly simple for my poor guitar skills. The new Arrangement track at the top is where you can specify verse 1, chorus 2, etc—finally! And you can drag each region around to reorder the song, and it will move that section of every track to the new location. Pretty slick.

But I have to say that they made it really hard to turn on the Monitor for Guitar tracks and it's now impossible to turn it on for some if not all Real Instrument tracks. I managed to get it turned on for the guitar and bass tracks, but could not find it anywhere for the drum track, even if I picked other types of instrument settings, like vocal or basic. That's fucking stupid. How else can I hear the drums other than monitoring them externally? With Apple, it's usually 3 steps forward, 1 clumsy step back into a pit filled with burning crocodiles holding swords.

Got the basic tracks done, including the little guitar lick, but I don't think I'll be able to do Nick's solo that he horked and reworked from Talk to Ya Later. I could probably pick out the notes, but there's no way I can play cleanly enough to execute it. I might start adding vocal tracks tomorrow. I almost forgot that later on we added some ah's over the solo section. I don't have a recording of that version. Anybody remember if we put that on the demo version or just started doing it live?

Had band practice again today. Andy sure is a hoot to play with. But he's having trouble with his Firebird—it keeps going out of tune. It even goes sharp sometimes. If it had a bolt–on neck I'd say maybe it was loose and was going from side to side, but it's a neck–through–body. Maybe the bridge is moving around.