As Garage Band was mentioned in the recorder thread, I thought I’d share a little something I’ve done for learning new tunes by ear.
Go to the ABC tunefinder site (http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/tunefind) and search for whatever tune you want. Download the midi file. Then open Garage Band and import the midi file by dragging it onto the timeline. You can then assign a “flute” voice (or anything else, for that matter), set the tempo to a speed appropriate for learning, and voila! A flute tutor who will patiently play the tune over and over for you to learn. Obviously no good for ornamentation or style, and it is somewhat mechanical - but it helps you to get the notes in the right places. I suppose if you were keen you could add accompaniment as well.
Not a revolutionary idea by any means, but there might be someone out there who hasn’t thought of it. It helped me to learn The Flowers of Edinburgh.
Oh yeah, one more thing: you can then export your Garage Band file as an mp3 into iTunes…and then onto your iPod…
To download the midi file (or any file for that matter), hold down the “control” key and then click with your mouse. A little window will come up, and one of the options is “download linked file”. It will save the file in whatever location you have set in your preferences (preferences → general → save downloaded files to).
Holding down “control” didn’t give me the “download” option. Save as, send to, and stuff like that. Right clicking opened it in quicktime but with option to save as it was still in Firefox and not actually in quicktime.
since we are talking garage band-is there a way to play a flute or whistle -into the or a MIC and add effects that can be heard NOW real time as if a little amp is being used or is the only way effects can be used is after you record and then add the effects and then listen to it
I bought a package of additional voices for Garage Band that’s got some decent sounding bagpipes, not a bad whistle or two, and a particularly nice sounding “Celtic Accordion.”
I’m still fairly new to Garage Band, and the use of sampled real instruments is still fuzzy to me. The package I bought just supplied additional synthesized sounds.
If I was really bored I could check IE and see what they called it.