Note: This is a repeat of a pre­vi­ous post. Why? Because I’m on a sub-​tropical island and may not have the time to make any posts. With any luck, I’ll bring back some sto­ries and pic­tures for the future.

Last Fri­day, a lot of peo­ple bought a new iPad 2. I wasn’t one of them. How­ever, I was happy to upgrade to the next ver­sion of iOS and to down­load Garage­Band for the iPad. It’s a pretty clever inter­face and some­what dif­fer­ent from Garage­Band on the Mac. How­ever, it also reminded me just how use­ful Garage­Band can be, even if you’re not a musician.

Day­tona Bike Week

The pre­vi­ous week and a half was Bike Week a lit­tle north of me in Day­tona Beach. I’ve been going to this event since I was a kid. My father used to race motor­cy­cles when the Day­tona race was half on the beach and half on A1A, so it was a fam­ily trip to the race­track each year; Dad with our fam­ily and his old mechanic with his. In turn, they’d catch up with peo­ple from the local area who had gone on to big­ger things, like Dick O’Brien — he was the race direc­tor for Harley-​Davidson. It’s a shame I was too young to be into pho­tog­ra­phy back then, because you saw a lit­tle bit of every­thing in the Day­tona infield and the race pits.

Get­ting into Video

Over the years, I’ve gone on to visit Bike Week with friends and con­tin­ued to do so this year. Mostly, its been a mat­ter of tak­ing snap­shots while I was there, since I was going more as a par­tic­i­pant than a pho­tog­ra­pher. This year, I started play­ing with cap­tur­ing some video. When I started think­ing of how to put it together, I quickly real­ized that I needed a soundtrack.

Now this is where it gets tricky. You can’t right­fully plop down any of the music that you have, unless you have a license to use that music. Basi­cally, that means most of the rec­og­niz­able music you hear on the radio is out the win­dow. So where do you find music that you can use?

There are some ven­dors that sell royalty-​free music for pho­tog­ra­phers and video pro­duc­tions. I can’t say that I’m impressed with much of it. Either the pro­duc­tion val­ues aren’t as strong as I’d like (e.g., sounds cheesy) or it’s for a dif­fer­ent type of video (e.g., wed­dings). You can visit iStock­Photo for audio and find a col­lec­tion of music that’s ready to pur­chase for your license. How­ever, I found it’s pretty tedious to search for and lis­ten to the var­i­ous clips. They don’t seem to be tagged with key­words as well as the pho­tographs. You may find some­thing tagged well that doesn’t suit you, or miss out on some­thing great for your use because it’s not tagged with the same keys you expected.

Roll Your Own with GarageBand

After play­ing with Garage­Band for the iPad, it dawned on me that there was another tool in the Mac ver­sion that could suit my needs — Magic Garage­Band. Essen­tially, you can cre­ate your own song by chang­ing the genre, and then the instru­ments within that genre. With­out hav­ing to do any per­for­mance of your own, you can quickly roll some­thing that may fit the mood of your project.

Magic Garage­Band Genre’s

As you can see in the image above, Garage­Band ’11 has enough gen­res to give you some flex­i­bil­ity for a num­ber of projects. Pick the style that suits you and then you get to “audi­tion” the band.

Magic Garage­Band Audition

For each of the posi­tions in the band, you get to choose which instru­ment fills the role. For exam­ple, the Melody posi­tion cur­rently has a Vibra­phone selected for this song. How­ever, you can see the replace­ment options in the bar below the stage giv­ing alter­na­tive voices for the melody. You get the same song in each genre, but you can mod­ify it with a lot of com­bi­na­tions by chang­ing up the instru­ments used in the performance.

Within Magic Garage­Band, you can adjust the vol­ume of each instru­ment, bring­ing it up or down to suit your taste. Once you’re done, you can open the project into Garage­Band and con­tinue to tweak it with addi­tional loops, or just export it as you cre­ated it. Once you’re done, you have a song that you can use in your own projects. I’ve also dis­cov­ered that I can change some of the instru­ments in Garage­Band beyond the vari­ety offered in the Magic Garage­Band inter­face, so that expands your flex­i­bil­ity to cre­ate some­thing unique.

Things You See at Day­tona Bike Week

I haven’t even down­loaded all of my video yet, much less processed it. Still, I was anx­ious to see how this worked in prac­tice. I cre­ated a slideshow in Aper­ture 3, dragged my sound­track from Garage­Band and this is the result. Happy motor­ing.