Garage Band: Pagemaker for a New Generation?



Amateur and professional musicians and Mac devotees alike have long known that their computers possessed a wealth of utility when it comes to making music. Putting Steve Jobs, Jon Mayer, a Mac, and some MIDI boxes and Analog-to-Digital converters on a stage in San Francisco invented electronic music about as much as Al Gore fathered the Internet. Not even thinking about the global legions of shareware authors, sonic hackers, and avant garde tinkers who've been turning circuits into crescendos since they first got their hands on consumer electronics, innovative companies like Sweden's Propellerhead and Germany's Ableton have been turning out synthesizer emulators, virtual drum machines, and other musical goodies for years now, and Avid-owned Digidesign's ProTools has long been the industry standard when it comes to hard-disk based recording studio systems.

The introduction of Apple's Garage Band as part of iLife '04, however, does promise to do for computer music making what Pagemaker and Quark did for desktop publishing in the 1980's and 90's: Bring it to the mainstream. Garage Band may not be the most powerful music creation software available right now, but as one-fifth of a $49 application suite, it may well pack the most bang for your buck of any "soft synth" out there.

This first article of a multi-part series on Making Music With Your Mac will take a quick look at the rapidly growing world of computer-based music creation. Subsequent articles will review individual pieces of software and hardware, starting with Apple's Garage Band. Garage Band is an entry-level application that brings a feature set to the masses that would have been entirely inthinkable just a decade ago. Part loop-based music production environment, part stripped-down recording studio, and part MIDI-compatible soft synth, Garage Band is the perfect way to get a taste of what you may or may not enjoy when it comes to computer music without breaking the bank.

Loops, Beats, and "Soft Synths"

Later articles in the series will focus on more advanced hardware and software that delves deeper into the three aforementioned areas of music production. Sequencers and loop-based production applications let the amateur DJ in all of us pull together beats and samples from varying source material to create a sonic collage without skipping a beat. Where Garage Band leaves off, more sophisticated applications like Ableton's Live 3 step in to provide the more advanced -- or simply ambitious -- artist greater control over variables such as tempo changing and key transposition of samples, more and more controllable effects like reverb and distortion, and fully automated production environments.

Recording studio software like Digidesign's ProTools combines with advanced audio hardware such as the same company's M Box to turn your Mac into a multi-track tape recorder that lets you record, overdub, and mix live audio using your computer's hard drive for storage. Live 3 also includes a fairly sophisticated recording environment. As technical advances like the Firewire data transfer protocol make bandwidth cheaper and cheaper, more companies are bringing professional-quality recording studio features to the home user at an affordable price. For less than $500 (not including your Mac, instrumnents, and microphones) you can create your very own CD-quality recordings without leaving your bedroom. Well, if you've got some talent and knowhow to go with that $500 you can...

"Soft synth" applications are virtual electronic studios "in a box." Propellerhead's Reason 2.5 is one of the most popular soft synths available right now, combining multiple synthesizers, samplers, effects units, and a drum machine in a graphical interface that resembles a real studio rack, right down to the user-controllable patch cords on the back side. Programs like Reason are designed to stand alone and work with other software via common protocols such as ReWire, a system which allows these applications to seamlessly communicate with one another. For instance, a user running Live and Reason together via ReWire can use Live as a recording and mixing environment from within which individual parts can be played (often using a MIDI keyboard or other controller) through Reason, and then looped, mixed, and otherwised tweaked using Live. The final composition can then be "bounced to disk" as an .aiff file which, of course, can be imported into iTunes and converted to .mp3 or .aac.

Sounds pretty complicated, huh? That's why Garage Band is the perfect place to start...

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Noah Kravitz is an educator, musician, and writer who calls Brooklyn, NY home and takes his iPod with him everyday on the commute to work at a school in Spanish Harlem. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Teaching and Learning with Technology and the drummer for Automat, who can be found rocking various clubs in the five boroughs and beyond.