Episode Two: Arvin and Ben Write a Song

It’s time for episode two of the second season and this is article is being written after enjoying an Old Fashion mixed using the recipe from our last episode. This time we’re trying our hand at the music. Specifically we’re trying to write a song. Our expert on this journey is Ben’s own brother Jake.

This one ended up being just a first attempt, since it turns out writing a song is really hard work. It did give us a chance to learn the ropes and test out some of the concepts Jake taught us.

Jake was nice enough to let us use a song from his band Inoke Errati as the theme song for Wii Like To Podcast back in the day. Inoke Errati is currently inactive, but they got to open for Third Eye Blind twice at the Filmore in Detroit. (Ben wrote a blog post about it way back if you are interested at all). Lately, along with being a member in Dave Russell and the Precious Stones and the cover band Fake Low, Jake has been spending his time writing and recording with a bluegrass/jazz band Salesman of the Year.

Episode Two is out now on the website, iTunes, and Google Play. Sign up for the Newsletter to get the latest scoop and check out our Facebook Page for up to the minute announcements, Instagram for possibly unrelated images, and Twitter because why not.

Equipment

Even though most of our equipment was meant for Podcasting it turned out that it was all useful for music production as well. While none of this stuff is required it was what we had and helped drive our approach.

Ben’s Equipment

• 13" Macbook Pro 2015
• Behringer Audio Interface
• Cheap Condenser Microphone
• Cheap XLR Cables

Arvin’s Equipment

• 15" Macbook Pro 2017
• Yeti Blue USB Microphone

Software

Since both of us use Apple laptops it made collaboration easy. Even easier was defaulting to GarageBand as our software of choice since it came with our laptops and provided us with everything we needed to compose our song.

In order to work collaboratively at distance we used Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback to ensure our audio from GarageBand could easily be routed through a Skype call. This allowed us to hear what the other person was working on. It’s an imperfect system that caused us to loose most of a session while Arvin had to help Ben troubleshoot his sound issues, but we got it to work.

For the first attempt was really just us messing around with Garageband, seeing what the program can do. We used the keyboard interface to mash out some beats and rhythms and just got to the point of playing with a melody before we ran out of time. A month is a small window with so much else going on. If anything it turned out to be sort of a proof of concept. We learned that we could bang out something that sounded like a song (or had parts of a song) kind of like a money at a typewriter.

Next time we are going at it a little more scientifically. Using the parts of a song that Jake taught us to actually compose something. Who knows how it will turn out, but that’s the fun of it.

Thanks for listening and for taking the time to check out this bonus article. Hopefully it was informative and interesting. For more articles check out Arvin’s medium publication. He writes about his tech exploits, projects, and studies. For blog posts about me and my writing, there are five years worth of weekly posts on BenVanDongen.com. Plus, you can get info about his books.