Aaron Bell

Despite my best intentions, it seems updating this once a day has proved difficult. Not for lack of content or things to discuss, but more because I underestimated the amount of time my job and hobbies would take up and my general state of tiredness at the end of the day! In any case, I will continue to update as much as possible, just may not be the once a day I hoped for.

I decided to do something a little different today, and spent some time in Garageband, making a song. It was something I used to do more in the past, but haven’t done enough of recently. In fact, this was the first time I’ve opened the program since I got this machine in the early summer, last year!

Garageband is useful in that it provides musical loops, small sample bits of music, that can be meshed together to create a full song. The only problem is that because Garageband is included on every Mac and since music loops are so easy to use, you will hear them used over and over in more indie video and audio creations. In any case, if one is feeling musical, but doesn’t have the time to spend on creating a song from totally original elements or if one just wants to play around for a bit!

I started creating this piece in a different direction, but when I found the dog barking loop, I had to figure out something with it. Hearing it, I was reminded of the track “Bad Dog, No Biscuit” from Cowboy Bebop. It has a really funky and wacky sound to it and that feeling was what I wanted to capture with the sounds in this song. Overall, the song came out a bit stranger than I anticipated, but I like it overall!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I downloaded the additional music loops available from Apple, so maybe next time I will have more variety to work with!

In other news, I tried a new experiment with my geometric squares. Normally, when I make designs that have the rhombuses on the outside, the square on the inside end up parallel to the outer frame. This time, I thought I would try to create one in which the inner square is rotated 45 degrees from the outer frame, creating a diamond look.

The most fascinating part of this design was that it resulted in a diamond square in the middle of the design. It appears that all the extra space that was present in the other designs I’ve done, which usually shows up at one edge of the design, was pushed into the middle as a little square. Seems pretty cool that there is enough space to fit another square into the whole layout! I would have never guessed from my previous designs.

Interestingly, the fact that this is possible makes me think a bit about the design process. Even if one sets up a box of limitations and has a limited type of tool to work with, there are always options and possibilities to create solutions that are special and unique. This design in particular is special because it was unexpected. The best designs are the ones that surprise you and show options that were inconceivable, but inherently awesome.