Making Music the Mac Way -- Part II: Hands-On with GarageBand

Versatile? Yes. Pricey? Nope.
Apple's GarageBand is a great entry-level electronic music application. It's also a fairly versatile loop-based sequencer with built-in effects, MIDI soft-synth capabilities, and a mixer featuring direct-to-stereo 2 channel recording. GarageBand costs $49 as part of the iLife '04 application suite, which also comes free with new Macs.

Can't beat that.

As a life long music enthusiast and techno-geek who has a penchant for doing things the hard way, I have to admit that upon first look I scoffed at GarageBand in much the same way as I once scoffed at iMovie. I mean, I may be a drummer, but I'm the guy who records my band's rehersals on my PowerBook and is listening to them on my iPod the next morning. I'm the guy who's "recorded" about 3 CD's worth of weird electronic music and bad "Revenge of the Nerds"-esque disco music using sophisticated programs like Reason and Live. Heck, I'm the guy whose holy grail really seems to be an iPod that supports full 24-bit recording via an external microphone.

In other words, I'm that nerdy, and I'm not the guy who Apple had in mind when they got John Mayer onstage to help launch GarageBand at MacWorld earlier this year. But I really dig what they've done, nonetheless.

Cut and Paste, Record, Mix, Cut and Paste Some More

GarageBand combines the basic elements of the Sequencer, Soft Synth, and Recording Studio applications as described in Part I of this series and wraps them up in Apple's trademark easy to use graphical interface. This makes the program easy to dive into and fun to swim around in for quite some time.

Packaged with over 1,000 "Apple Loops" of pre-recorded riffs played in different genres and tempos on various instruments, GarageBand makes it easy for the novice to make professional-sounding music by using those basic computer skills honed in Microsoft Word and Safari: Cutting and Pasting. Whether or not your "custom assembled" loop-based music will actually be interesting to listen to is an aesthetic matter, but Apple makes it easy to crank out polished-sounding tunes high on production values.

Apple Loops can be stretched, shrunk, cropped, and layered to fit whatever song lengths and tempos your muse wants you to adhere to. The Loops Browser makes it easy to traverse all of these options by category (instrument, mood, tempo, etc), and if you actually find you're running out of samples to paste and layer together, Apple has been kind enough to also bring to market the GarageBand Jam Pack, "a collection of more than 2,000 additional Apple Loops in a variety of instruments, moods and genres." Of course, the Jam Pack will run you an additional $99. (And it comes with more than just loops ... read on)

Effects, Instruments, and More Effects
Apple Loops are the easiest way to build a song, but by no means are they the most fun or effective. Once you've got your creative juices flowing, take a risk and leave the safe confines of cutting and pasting for the wild world of software instruments, live recording, and effects/mixing. GarageBand ships with about 50 software instruments, which are digitally sampled takes on real-life sounds you can make with pianos, guitars, drums, organs, keyboards and the like. The instruments can be played with your mouse on a graphical keyboard, but the fun really starts when you add a MIDI or USB keyboard controller to your setup. Now you're experiencing the full-on virtual realm of playing a Steinway Baby Grand, Fender Jazz Bass, or Gretsch Drumkit by way of tapping on some plastic keys.

Actually, I don't know what instruments Apple sampled to get their source files for GarageBand, but they did a really good job. The acoustic instruments are clearly rendered, and the electronic synth sounds are great fun. I actually brought my PowerBook and Oxygen 8 USB keyboard to a rehearsal and set it up for my band's singer to play while we jammed. She particularly liked the various organ sounds available, and they sounded pretty good routed straight from my computer's headphone jack to the PA.

You can play software instruments by themselves or over the top of your Apple Loops (or recorded audio, which we'll get to in a second). You can re-record your instrument parts until you get them right, or just fix them by hand using the track editor.

What's really cool (and this applies to any soft synth, and not just GarageBand) is that once you've recorded a part, you can see what it sounds like on a completely different instrument with the swipe of your mouse. Don't like that flute part? Try it on an electric guitar, instead? Don't like that? How about a jazz organ? Or back to the flute again? This is why computer music making is so fun and addictive ... When you start changing all of your violin parts to hip-hop drumkit sounds, you know you're in deep.

You can also record live audio using a built-in microphone or external audio interface. We'll get more into external hardware later in this series, but suffice it to say that this is where spending some extra money on gadgets and microphones will really make a difference in the quality of your finished recording.

GarageBand also includes some cool modelled amplifier presets for use with an electric guitar. Plug your guitar into your PowerBook (by way of an optional adapter) and with a click of a button you can change your sound from vintage fuzz to 21st Century metal. That's huge. Digital modelling will never pass for the real thing under the scrutiny of an audiophile's ears, but imagine what a cool practice tool this is for the aspiring musician!

Kids, convince Mom and Dad to get you an iBook for your schoolwork and you can spend hours making your pawn shop guitar sound just like Hendrix!

Of course, you can also apply the guitar amp settings to any recorded music, which can make for some very interesting (read: "unintended") applications of the effects. I wonder what my dog's barking would sound like if I recorded it and ran it through that "British Invasion" effect?

In addition to Apple Loops, the add-on Jam Pack also includes a hundred or so Software Instruments, a hundred or audio effects presets, and 15 new guitar amp settings to enhance your GarageBand experience. Which means that for 99 bucks you'll have enough toys so you'll never, ever have to leave your room again. Ever!"

The Verdict? Listen For Yourself

I made a short song using some loops, a software instrument that I played and looped, and a live snare drum that I recorded and looped into the mix. The snare was recorded at close range using a cheap mic run through a Griffin iMic USB interface. I didn't spend much time tweaking the mic placement in an attempt to get a good sound. Hence, I got a lousy sound. I'm not saying that you can get a pro-quality recording of a live band using GarageBand, but I am saying you can do a lot better than I did here. So I ran the snare through a guitar amp setting so it would at least sound a little weird, if not good.

Here's what I came up with: Listen

GarageBand is great fun. It's a very inexpensive and yet very versatile tool for creating music on your Mac. If you're serious about multi-track recording, precisely definable synth sounds, or creating your own loops from sampled sounds, you're going to need a little more horsepower than what's under GarageBand's roof. But as a cheap (free with a new Mac) introduction to computer-based music, it's hard to ask for much more than what Apple's given us. And it's rare that I'd say such a thing.

About five years ago I taught a high school course on Computers and Music. My lab was all Macintosh (I think we'd just gotten a few rev. A iMacs, which were the cream of our crop), and I used every freeware tool I could find to augment the school-supplied Overture notation software I was given to teach on. Most of my students knew a lot more about music theory than I did, so I wanted to get them started in dabbling with finding and creating their own sounds and exploring the unique tools offered by electronic production programs.

My students turned out some great, great stuff that year. But I can only imagine what they could have done had GarageBand been available to us then. Seriously -- this is a great combination of power, flexibility, and usability aimed square at the beginning electronic musician. Apple, my hat's off to you for this one

Want to add some live music to the mix? Or make your new music sound a little sweeter? Add a digital audio interface to the mix...

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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.