Apple's GarageBand keeps the beat, but can't guarantee originality
This year, Apple's new GarageBand software promises musicians of all stripes the same kind of revolutionary approach. Without becoming a studio wizard, the average guitar strummer could record, combine and enrich his or her music.
I spent some time with GarageBand and determined that while it's not all Apple promises, it has a big wallop for its price, and it's more than enough to turn dabblers into more serious players and arrangers.
GarageBand provides a set of artificial parts and instruments that could help a nascent player or composer take skills they practice in private and develop them further. It could provide the encouragement to practice that solo playing does not.
While there are plenty of musical packages that offer some or all of what GarageBand contains, none is as affordable and varied. Some focus on being a practice tool and others are intended for serious professional music mixing or recording. Both cost a lot more even for basic packages.
GarageBand could be seen as the natural extension of iTunes into more of an analog of iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD: iTunes lets you play back while GarageBand lets you create.
The fundamentals: GarageBand is part of the $49 iLife '04 suite, and requires Mac OS X 10.2.6 or later and at least a 600 MHz G3 processor; you need a G4 for some features. (You can also purchase a five-user home edition of iLife '04 for $79.)
The main screen of GarageBand is a stripped-down mixing board to which you add tracks. A track can contain music that's recorded live (audio waveforms) or made from software instruments (synthesized sounds).
To start, you add a track, and then assign or record music into it. You can record analog sound through a digital interface, like playing a saxophone into a microphone attached to the computer; record notes played on a keyboard or other instrument through a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) adapter; or combine the musical loops that ship with GarageBand into new songs.
(GarageBand comes with 50 software instruments and 1,000 loops; a $99 Jam Pack add-on provides an 100 more instruments and 2,000 loops.)
I sat down to make music with my friend and officemate Jeff Tolbert, a graphic designer and illustrator who happens to play guitar, bass and keyboards, and who has spent time working with higher-end music recording and mixing tools.
Live music: GarageBand works quite well in recording sound from a live instrument. Some Macs (old and new) include an audio input jack and, with the right adapters, you can plug your guitar directly into your Mac.
In most cases, though, you also need a "pre-amp" (pre-amplifier), which boosts the signal coming out of a live instrument to a level GarageBand can use without excessive noise.
Because GarageBand records the raw audio as digital waveforms, it can apply transformations to those waveforms as you play or later. Jeff played some riffs in using a plain guitar setting, and then we played back what was recorded with different amplification simulations, which include country, British invasion and funk styles.
You can also apply a huge range of effects, each of which typically has several preset values and several sliders for manual override. This includes simulating the classic wah-wah pedal, flanging and other analog and digital stylings.
Playing notes: Next, we turned to playing music through a keyboard. GarageBand records the notes played, as well as extra parameters, like velocity: how fast a piano key was depressed. These subtleties allow a playback to retain much of the sound of a live performance.
The MIDI standard dates back decades, and to use a keyboard or other instruments that have a MIDI interface, you can plug in any of a number of USB-to-MIDI adapters. I purchased the M-Audio Uno, which retails for under $50 and supports a single MIDI device. More expensive adapters can handle several at once.
Apple sells the M-Audio Keystation 49e, a 49-note (black and white keys) USB keyboard that requires no separate adapter for $99. (Apple also offers a host of adapters and accessories of all kinds at www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/accessories.html.)
Once you've recorded electronic notes through a MIDI device, you can reshape them. For example, you can take a song you've played at an erratic speed with missed notes and smooth out the beats while fixing the errors. (Jeff has found beat-fixing is not always available and not well explained when it is.) You can rearrange and replace notes on a scale or transpose the notes into a different key through a menu choice.
You can also play back the recorded notes using any of the included software instruments. Even if you started playing a piece as a grand piano, you can wind up sounding like you strummed a sultry guitar.
Play that again ... and again: Loops may be the most significant, confusing and exciting part of GarageBand. All loops repeat perfectly, so they can be used as constant elements in any song.
Apple ships guitar riffs, drum beats and even Indonesian gamelans, a personal favorite. Some loops are actually prerecorded audio; others are digital instruments.
Working with loops is a lot of fun at first. Jeff has already made compositions that use loops as the starting point. He lays down a certain kind of bass track, for instance, that you might ask a session musician or a band member to play.
You can't get loops to take the solo, but you can use them for a solid foundation on which to build a composition by ear. Since you can change the timing, key and duration of loops, they're perfect for practicing against or trying out ideas.
The great danger of loops is that even with the 2,000 additional ones supplied in Jam Pack, it's inevitable that much music produced with them will sound oddly familiar.
Putting it together: When you're done creating a song, you can select Export to iTunes, and the program creates an uncompressed AIFF audio file, which is copied to your iTunes library.
Although GarageBand is designed to allow you to mix up to 64 software instrument tracks and 255 recorded tracks, the real-world results are quite poor.
On Jeff's recent vintage G4 iBook with plenty of memory and storage space, a song he was working on with just three software instruments, two recorded loops and a live recorded bass would often sputter to a stop.
A copy of DigiDesign's Pro Tools running on the same machine with a substantially more complex set of options and mixes showed that it was taking up less than 40 percent of the machine's processing power.
Apple needs to optimize GarageBand to make sure it can work reliably on a greater range of machines, even though its cost is so low that it's hard to complain too much.
Apple has shipped a 1.0.1 upgrade to GarageBand, but it appears to have changed the error messages, and not the program's function. Worse, a new error message pointed to us to a section of the help files that simply doesn't exist.
Times Roman, repeated backbeat? The early stages of the desktop-publishing revolution were dominated by an outpouring of creativity by people who hadn't yet trained their eyes the way that designers and production people had through a formal design education or apprenticeship. It meant the majority of early PageMaker-produced posters, books and documents used the same (limited) fonts, made the same mistakes and didn't achieve the goals of improved communication.
Likewise, GarageBand's built-in tools can help anyone produce music, but the odds are that in the initial stages, a lot of this music will sound very similar.
Apple's key advantage with GarageBand is that it's hard to create songs that sound terrible — you have to work very hard to make bad music. But you have to work equally hard to make music that's unique.
Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column in Personal Technology.