The human is thinking way ahead here and trying to learn Karma Police before we record it. He finds that learning parts on piano first helps get the feeling right before he records it on the iPad. It’s not cheating though since we can assume that Thom Yorke knows how to play his own song well before committing it to digital bits.
After working tirelessly to finish up the tracking for Subterranean Homesick Alien, I was looking forward do settling down with a simpler track, Exit Music (For a Film). Here’s sketch of the main guitar line and some scratch vocals. Love these guitar chords and the challenge of getting the guitar phrasing right.
This will be a difficult challenge due to the fact that the guitar is played well up by the neck, lending to the breathy sound of the strumming which is difficult to replicate in GarageBand. Still, I have a ways to go but it’s starting to sound great.
Again, you can see we’re using track replication to get around the lack of AUX sends in GarageBand.
GarageBand has very limited guitar effects. Johnny Greenwood, Radiohead’s main guitarist, uses an assortment of pitch shifters, flangers, and phasers on many of the tracks of this record. I knew in advance that pitch shifting would be necessary.
GarageBand does not have a built in pitch shifter, but there’s nothing to stop you from replicating the track and moving all of the guitar notes up on octave. This was the approach I took to the ride side guitar that features in the intro.
Simply copy and paste the original performance to the second track and shift the notes up an octave in the editor. You will also have to bring down the volume of both tracks slightly. Learn more in the video below.