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...
* * * *
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.
