Let a smile be your medicated umbrella

Garage Band is to music what Photoshop is to photography, namely a lot of people have it but few know how to really use it. I can think of a few other things we don’t use to their full capacity: the remote, microwave ovens, democracy.

I’ve been playing around with Garage Band a bit on my iPad but more in an exploratory way than in any serious, project-minded way. If Garage Band were a music store, I’d be playing “Smoke on the Water.”

My goal is to be able to create a blues instrumental for a song I’m writing called “Tea Drinkin’ Man.” And by “goal” I mean “thinking about without doing much work.” To achieve anything, I’d actually have to learn the program, and who has time for that? Reading the manual is for chumps!

But I did manage to create some doodly-doodly ambient music, which ended up serving just fine as background to the above bit of audio, a fake advertisement that originally aired on CBC Radio’s “Breakaway.”

As I’ve said before, I enjoy the things I can do with audio that I simply can’t pull off in print, like nudity. Just kidding, there’s no nudity. But if you want to hear what I mean, click the play button. No manual required.