GarageBand ’09 is one of the three apps that received major updates in iLife ’09. This year, Apple has set its sights on music teachers with Learn to Play and the Lesson Store. Now with GarageBand’s help, you might finally learn how to play the guitar.
When you first launch GarageBand ’09, you’ll be greeted with a quick tutorial video. More are available on Apple’s site, but chances are that you just want to dig in and see what’s different. I agree.
The first difference you’ll notice is the New Project Window. Here you can choose to start a new project like normal, use Magic GarageBand, open an existing project, or one of the three new options. The new options are Learn to Play, Lesson Store or iPhone Ringtone.
Learn to Play is basically a set of musical lessons produced by Apple. By default, you’ll have one Piano and Guitar lesson each. Just select one of the them and you’re on your way to learning an instrument.
Since I’m already fluent in guitar, I chose the Piano lesson. While you don’t need one, you’ll definitely want to have a USB keyboard for this and the rest of GarageBand. A number of companies make USB keyboards in different sizes, usually 25 to 88 keys. Currently, I have a 25 key keyboard which I never properly learned how to play. The lessons say this will be sufficient to use throughout all of the lessons. I tend to doubt that, but we’ll see.
The lesson is decent, though if you have previous musical experience, you might get bored quickly. Even still, I think this could prove to be an effective way to at least get yourself started with either the piano or guitar.
More lessons are available through the Music Store. Best of all, there are nine lessons for both instruments that don’t cost a penny. You can also purchase less generic lessons from artists who will teach you to play their own songs. This isn’t brimming with content quite yet, but it’s a start.
If you choose the iPhone Ringtone project starter then you’ll be presented with a project for making, what else, ringtones. Apple is basically encouraging you to use sound effects and loops to create ringtones, but you’re certainly welcome to get your hands dirty and create some truly original work as well. To be honest, this preset seems a little pointless.
The interface of GarageBand ’09 has been tweaked as well. The loop browser is now, more comfortably, on the right side instead of the bottom. It also is clothed in shades of gray, the way I think it ought to be. The whole interface seems more clean now. They’ve tidied things up and made it prettier. I’m actually a little bit surprised that those wooden bars on the sides of the window are still there. Maybe in ’10.
When adding tracks to your project, you now you have a new third choice, Guitar. This is just like adding a real instrument, but it gives you access to a whole bunch of new guitar amps and effects that are fully tweakable. The amp and pedals are represented with pictures, making them delicious. This won’t be replacing anyone’s half stack and pedal board anytime soon; but just like the lessons, it’s a great place to start. Now, all you need is an interface with which to record your guitar (or other instrument).
One quick tip. If you try out the new guitar mode and can’t figure out how to actually hear yourself playing through it without recording first, just do this. Select the picture of the amp before hitting the edit button, and now you can set your preference for monitoring.
Overall, these are all very welcome additions to GarageBand. Basically, the news here is Learn to Play. The extra guitar effects are nice, but we already had effects in previous versions, and these aren’t that much better. They just didn’t look this pretty before. I think a lot of people will enjoy the musical lessons, myself included. And while GarageBand may be able to teach you to play guitar, it won’t teach you how to act like a Rock Star. I’ll save that lesson for a different day.
Product [iLife '09]
I just tried the first two piano lessons.. and.. I cannot put into words how disappointing it was. Sure you've got a high quality video of a cute guy patiently telling you all about the little black and white keys, but actually learning this way, at least for me personally, was close to impossible.
I played piano years back, using the 'miracle' piano learning software. This featured a mode where you could select (from a huge library, I might add) a song, and it showed you the notes, and a little indicator moved along the notes if you played them correctly, and refused to move along if you messed up. This resulted in instant comprehension and instant learning of the song and notes.
As far as I can tell, garageband has no such feature, and what's more it does not indicate where you are in the song or what keys you are pressing. This makes it extremely hard to learn from your mistakes.
A song that literally took me all of ten minutes to learn on the miracle system back when I was like 12, took me an hour of frustration to learn on garageband, due to the lack of feedback. In the end, I learned it simply by pausing the lesson and *looking* at the notes and practising them with the lesson on pause the whole time…
And for that, I could've just bought a book of piano notes instead; it would have had the same effect. It renders garageband just as unresponsive and unhelpful as a piece of paper with ink on it. Which is supremely frustrating, because it has so much potential and it really just needs that one feature of viewing notes that light up when played correctly. Frankly, it is such an obvious feature that i'm worried I might have simply missed it, so if I am wrong, somebody do please enlighten me.
It's also a shame that in the 'play' mode, it seems that you can't turn off tim's playing at the same time, at least not without also muting the metronome and the orchestra, which sadly means you cannot hear yourself play with the orchestra in 'play' mode. Read that sentence again to realise what an utter failure that really is: in 'play' mode you cannot set it up to hear only yourself and the orchestra. epic fail. C'mon Apple, am I missing something here??? I feel like I must be, because otherwise it looks like this is another apple product which falls down on the first version and only becomes truly brilliant a few major updates down the line.
I understand your frustration with the system. Surely it is not perfect. I'd really like to see Garageband incorporate a "Keyboard Hero" mode. It actually would be incredibly easy for them to do, but I doubt they would do it the way I would. MIDI is a file format that stores note information so a computer can play back the song with virtual instruments. MIDI songs are extremely easy to find online. It's too bad you can't import them and have their Main parts be played by you on the keyboard. Then the keys could fall from the sky Guitar Hero style. This, of course, wouldn't teach you how to read music, but it would be fun. It also wouldn't make Apple money in their lessons store. I do hope they update Garageband to address at least some of your issues though.
heh, "keyboard hero"..! yes, that would be ideal. You could import any midi files and possibly even display them as notes or in the guitar hero way. In fact, after a quick macupdate search I found one mac app which already does exactly that, including a practice mode which only moves on if you play correctly.
I see your point about apple wanting to sell the lessons.. but then, lessons still have their place and can show you a lot about technique and so on. Plus hey it's got celebrities. I haven't tried the celebrity lessons but I assume that the celebs might even sing along? I mean, that in itself is a pretty cool idea. I don't think having the 'keyboard hero' feature would take away from it, quite the contrary. In the end people are going to get the software that is fun.. and garageband really should be about having fun while learning.
I know from past experience with the miracle system that I can learn reasonably complicated songs with the right software, so I feel no need to spend an hour practising a few notes from 'ode to joy', thus I think I'll just use the 'keyboard hero' style software instead.. but I do hope apple is reading this.
Just a question for anyone who might know–I am strongly considering purchasing a new imac and was looking forward to the garageband application. I have a digital piano with a USB and MIDI ports and want to be able to easily play on my piano, record, notate and print what I'm playing. Is this doable? Is it fairly easy to do? Is the quality of the recording good–i.e., does it pretty much sound the same as playing live or?? Thanks for your response.