Posted on 08.19.11

Lunch-n-Learn 7: Tomato Basil Toast w/Melted Garlic Cheddar Cheese, Side of Guacamole & Garageband

by Jeff Livorsi

Mightybytes’ seventh Lunch-n-Learn jammed together good old fashioned comfort food with songwriting on the side, and a dollop of guacamole on top.

Joy prepared Tomato Basil Toast as an open-faced grilled cheese and added a side of guacamole, while James continued his presentation on how to use the GarageBand digital music-making software to combine instrumental, rhythm and vocal tracks to make a complete song.

As always we purchased almost all of the ingredients from the Andersonville Farmer’s Market: cherry tomatoes, tomato-basil bread, garlic-cheddar cheese, blueberries, and a variety of organic cookies.

Learn: GarageBand, Part 2

James quickly reviewed material he covered two weeks ago in his GarageBand tutorial, and this time, he walked us through composing a song using GarageBand’s looping features. After sorting through different sound loops and tagging our favorites we were ready to begin the songwriting process.

There are various ways to approach the open-ended process of songwriting, and James is a great teacher when it comes to showing a roomful of novices how to put together a song:

James helped us get started by selecting a drum loop that we all liked. He explained that though Apple’s royalty-free loops are recorded at a particular tempo, GarageBand can adjust their key and tempo to fit any song.
James also showed us how easy it is to record sound into a GarageBand project, by demonstrating how the built-in microphone works in conjunction with a Mac Mini. He also showed more sophisticated tools, such as a USB pre-amp, in which you can plug a higher quality microphone.
He provided tips on how to monitor vocals while recording in an existing project. That’s when headphones come in handy, he said.
Using the library of loops, James found a basic synth melody that worked over the drums.
We chose a bass synth loop to hold it all together and give it a groove.
James then showed us the versatility of GarageBand. In a matter of minutes, we learned how to pan one of the synth lines from left to right speaker channels and back again. We then learned how a composer can use the simple cut and paste technique to position synth lines, drums or vocals in the right places in a song to create the desired effects.
Our final instrumental track, consisting of drums and some fuzzy synths, pulsed with a gritty vibe that James called “pimp,” Everyone enjoyed the groove as we played back our creation.
But the best part of the project came when we added a vocal to our track. James crooned the word “Guacamole” into the mic, causing the track to really spring to life. After adding different filters to the vocal track, we realized the guttural version in the original was best.

By now you’re probably wondering how a song with a chorus of “Guacamole” might sound. Stay tuned. We’ll post a clip once we finish up the track in the next few weeks.

We all had a lot of fun with this learning portion of our series and realized that we each could enjoy spending hours using GarageBand to craft the perfect song.

Lunch: Grilled Cheese with Guacamole

Guacamole

4 avocados
4 cartons of cherry tomatoes
Salt (to taste)

Peel the avocados and mash them up in a bowl. Quarter the tomatoes. Mash together, and add salt to taste.

Tomato Basil Toast w/ Melted Garlic Cheddar Cheese

2 loaves of tomato-basil bread
Garlic-Cheddar Cheese
Chihuahua Cheese
Olive Oil

Slice up the bread in inch-thick slices. Drizzle olive oil over both sides and turn on the broiler. Once all the slices of bread are oiled up place in broiler for 4 minutes. Turn them over, put the garlic-cheddar & Chihuahua cheese on the other side and back into the broiler. Broil for 6 minutes so the cheese melts and browns.