Shin the Musician
Last update: March 5, 2026
The John Shinnick Web Site
The recording, lyrics, and back story to "My Brain Is Too Small", a song I wrote and recorded in 1990.
The New Toys
Last month I left y’all with a bit of a teaser. I’d just purchased a copy of Pro Tools, pretty much the industry standard for DAWs. That’s the acronym for Digital Audio Workstations. A DAW basically puts a professional quality music studio on a home computer. Long story short (or at least as short as I’m capable of making a long story) Pro Tools, for all its power and prestige, was simply too much for me.
Along the way, I found out that a free application called GarageBand (I’ll just call it GB – I’m lazy) that came with my home computer was actually a DAW which, though not considered as powerful as Pro Tools, or even its big brother Logic Pro (the higher-level Apple DAW) it seemed to offer what I needed, and was billed as being very simple to get up and running. In the world of finance, there is what’s known as the “principle of sunk costs” which states that in making an investment decision, one should ignore costs which have already been paid when making a decision about a future investment. Yeah, I’d already paid for Pro Tools, but GB was free and likely less frustrating.
I had written a couple of songs that I wanted to record like I had on my old reel-to-reel and later on a dedicated recording device back in the stone age. But I dreaded trying to re-learn my old toys and the memory of the amount of work required to do simple things was just too painful.
I found myself getting the Dummies book for GB and I went through much of it looking for the specific things I wanted to find. I knew exactly what I wanted to do for my songs and it all seemed do-able. The problem was that one of the songs required a piano part that was beyond my ability to play. I could write the notes, but wouldn’t be able to play them. It turned out that I had already used software (Crescendo) that enabled me to write the music and play it back, but didn’t realize that the same package would enable to export the playback as a file easily convertible to a format GB would recognize. While I struggled with some of the technical limitations, I was able to create my drum part and my piano part. I’ve already imported some test versions into GB and it seems to be working fine.
So this is my big music project for the time being. The two songs that I wrote and want to record are Wake Me Up and Center of Town. Wake Me Up requires Drums, piano, two guitars, bass and at least three vocal tracks. One great advantage of this kind of recording is that I have two versions of the song. They can (and should) be identical except for the lead vocal. I’ll simply record the different versions on different tracks and…
Of course, learning new toys (Garage Band, my Scarlet 2i2 recording audio interface) and Vertopal (an on-line file converter) and old toys used in new ways (Crescendo and my Korg keyboard) takes time. And learning how to make them work together takes time on steroids. Then there’s the investigation of alternatives and work-arounds… somewhere lost in all this are a couple of songs that desperately want to be recorded. Where’s my George Martin (who was so outstanding producing nearly all the Beatles’ music) now that I need him? I really do need some kind of guru. I’d guess that at least 90% of my time spent on this project has been dealing with things that with a little more experience, I won’t have to do.
But at least I’m at a point where I’ve done most of the component parts and can continue toward finishing my project. In the best of all worlds, it will inspire me to move on to write and record more music.
Or perhaps it will inspire me to just move on.
The video, lyrics, and back story of the song I wrote and performed for my retirement party in 2006.
My new Scarlet 2i2. Just one more thing to figure out.
My 10 favorites of all time
