OS X readers: if you haven’t already done so, pop on over to the Nine Inch Nails website and pick up the GarageBand version of The Hand That Feeds. It’s a fairly typical track; but for that reason it’s pretty interesting.
It’s a great guide to pop song construction. A relatively short track, but with a fair amount of variety. I find it particularly interesting as a study in the careful reuse of riffs and motives.
I have fooled around with the tracks a bit – nothing major yet – and I find GarageBand actually very good at its job. I think this track was probably made with the newest version of GB, leading to a number of warnings and error -61 messages while the file is loading, but if you stick to it, it will load fine in GB 1.0.
I may play around with reprocessing some of the sounds to see if I can construct something completely different out of it, just for practice in this medium.
