I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid. I’m not very good, but I am fairly passable. In recent years most of my playing is just me playing along with iTunes, using Garageband, and just listening with headphones.
While I still enjoy doing that, my new favorite thing is to find backing tracks on Youtube, and play along so that my guitar is the only guitar I hear….Which forces me to only hear me – and it ain’t always pretty.
One of the backing tracks I found was for the Foo Fighters “My Hero.” The track is only the drums. I knew I could play the song on guitar and bass, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to recreate the drum sound with my keyboard and GarageBand – luckily i didn’t have to. I exported the Youtube video as an mp3, imported into GarageBand, and started recording. Started with my 22 year old bass (have only changed one string in all that time). It sounds muddy, the pickups barely work, but if you don’t move once you get sound working – it actually works.
Then I added a few layers of guitar. Got my latest guitar a couple years ago as payment for doing a web design job. A friend asked me if I could code one of his designs and we’d each get a guitar…Um, okay – considering it’s a nicer guitar than I could ever afford on my own.
The final piece was laying down the vocals. I love singing, but not always huge fan of hearing my voice afterwards. There was a “Rock Vocals” filter on that has an echo, but with all the guitars sounds pretty cool.
I didn’t do much “mixing” just some minor tweaks – then I uploaded it to my SoundCloud page…And here it is. Enjoy!
