GarageBand ’09: What to expect

I use Garageband 08′ quite a bit, as a casual guitarist. Garageband is not professional recording software but is excellent for people like me who don’t necessarily need to record more than 24 tracks simultaneously or need to adjust the audio on each of those tracks. Garageband is perfect for people who record on the weekends with their buddies in, well, the garage.

Classic Rock

My experience with Garageband has had its good points and has had some bad points. Let’s take multitrack recording for instance. This is a feature that was new to the 08′ version of Garageband. The idea behind it is that you can rerecord a portion of your track until you feel you have gotten it right. In theory, that is a really cool feature that a lot of people could use. The problem is how they implemented it. In order to to avoid a mistake or a pause in the recording where you don’t want one, you have to use the multitrack in an area between to pause. What I mean is that once you have the multitrack recording area set and you hit record, it will continue to make passes until you stop it manually. In the time it takes you to manually stop the recording you have a space of time with nothing recorded, and unless this is what you are trying to do, it can be very frustrating. There should be a pause after each pass to give the musician time to stop the recording if they want to. Beyond that, I wish there were more “metal” like drum loops, but I can’t fault Apple for that, and there are plenty available on the net.

Modern Rock

Now, let’s get to Garageband ’09, which was announced this week in the Macworld Expo Keynote. The first thing I would like to talk about are the new Basic Lessons. Every musician can learn. No one is perfect. What I like about this idea is there are people out there like my niece who just picked up a guitar about a year ago, and could really use some lessons. I live 600 miles away and am not able to provide her with lessons, and I am hoping that Garageband 09′ will be good enough to help out. I, myself, would like to learn more about the piano, and the fact that you can speed up or slow down the lessons is something that can come in handy for people to who already know a little bit about guitar and piano. I really hope that Lessons turns out to be as good in implementation as it sounds in theory. There is also a twist. Some of Americas favorite artist have created custom lessons from themselves. Should be interesting to see who participates is lessons along with already announced artists such as Sting, Fall Out Boy, and John Fogerty.

Alt Rock

Let’s talk about guitar effects. Currently I use Gear Box from Line 6 to do all of my amp modeling. It works pretty, well minus a bit of delay when using it with Garageband. It is not bad enough that I can’t use it though. Gear Box offers hundreds of amp and cabinet combinations and also has models for bass and voice. Garageband 09′ is going to throw its hat into the amp modeling arena. I don’t have a list or anything that tells me what all of the models will be, so this is going to be a wait-and-see for me as to wether or not they did it right. I hope they did it right; if I can get rid of the minor delay with Gear Box, that would be totally cool with me. The Apple website claims to have over 30 rigs to choose from, which is kind of a small number compared to other software, but if they sound good you only need a few to write good music.

Jam Sessions

I love to jam. It is a very “free” feeling to pick up an instrument and just start playing; no worries about how well you’re doing, no worries about being perfect for the recording, no worries about being better than the people you’re jamming with. It’s just playing for the love of music. Enter Magic Garageband. Most of the time, when I sit down and pick up my electric guitar or bass, I fire up Magic Garageband and just jam out for a couple of hours. If I come up with something decent, I will record it. There are, however, a finite amount of combinations, and you will run out of new material at some point. Well, new in Garageband ’09, “Jams” has been added to Magic Garageband. This offers more control over your backing band. You can change instruments, styles, and volume all from the full screen stage that will be in front of you. I, for one, am very excited about these new features.

All in all, I think this version of Garageband is going to be a major improvement to an already good product. I can wait to get my hands on it.

Product [GarageBand '09]