NVMUG eNews 2/19/2005
Last updated 2/24/2005
Macintosh Makes Music
Daniel Hollister presented a GarageBand with live music and the monitor on his PowerBook displayed on the screen to show how did it. Read about it in The Meeting News, and More About the Meeting.
1. The Meeting News - Macintosh Makes Music
Daniel Hollister plays his guitar with GarageBand
Daniel Hollister demonstrated how to create music using GarageBand at the Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group meeting in St. Johnsbury Saturday. GarageBand is used to create music using sound loops made by real and software instruments and placing the loops on musical tracks. Hollister said, If I had this when I was 13 or 14, I would never have left my room.
GarageBand is part of Apple Computer's iLife package that comes free with new Macintosh computers. Hollister had hoped that he would have the latest version, iLife 5 with GarageBand 2, but it did not arrive in time for the meeting.
Hollister began the demonstration using a basic keyboard he bought at Small Dog for $50. There is a $90 version which has more controls and is sensitive to the velocity with which the keys are struck.
When Hollister opened GarageBand the window showed standard defaults including a name,"My Song,
to save the file the most common tempo of 120 beats per minute, 4/4 time, and the key of C. The key of C is the most basic to start with because it has no sharps or flats. You can choose to use any key. You can also select other than 4/4 time.
A keyboard you can use appears on the screen if no keyboard is plugged in. With it you can play only one note at a time, and it is difficult to keep time with the beat.
Clicking on an eye icon near the bottom of the window reveals a panel of buttons for different kinds of loops. Clicking on one of buttons displays a column of options showing the name of the loop, the tempo, the key and the number of beats. Loops are bits of music that are played over and over again.
Hollister has thousands of loops that came with GarageBand and the first pack of loops he purchased from Apple. He has collected more free from the Internet. He warned that some of those from the Internet are pretty annoying.
Hollister clicked on some drum beat loops to preview them, then clicked and dragged one 16 beat loop he wanted to the space for tracks at top of the window.
He then clicked to sample different bass lines until he found one he liked and dragged it up to form a second track. He found an 8 beat loop and dragged it out to 16 beats.
He clicked on another loop symbol to audition different guitar sounds- an electric guitar, echo guitar, funky mandolin, and many more.
Hollister selected a guitar loop and created another track. Playing the drum, bass, and guitar together already sounded almost like real music.
With GarageBand you can spend many happy hours exploring different sounds, and you can make music very easily. One of the original classic piano sets was recorded with a $50,000 Baldwin piano.
You can add as many lines or tracks as you want, depending on how powerful your Macintosh is. His Macintosh does not work well after 4 tracks, but there is a work-around. Export the 4 tracks to iTunes. Then import the music back from itunes as one track, and then you can add more tracks to it.
The last thing you do, after you have finished the instrument loops, is to decide how loud you want each track to play and fade tracks in and out.
Hollister is not a piano player. He plays guitar. He uses a standard electric guitar cable, and a $2.00 adaptor from Radio Shack to connect his guitar to the line-in port on his Macintosh.
Playing his guitar through his Macintosh using GarageBand, Hollister can create any sound he wants. Hollister demonstrated with a clean jazz sound, and then adding chorus effects.
People have been buying amplifiers and effects for amplifiers for years, but now you can do it through your computer. GarageBand has made it more accessible than ever before, and at a small fraction of what it used to cost. For example, an electronic tuner used to cost $250.00. Now it is a minor feature in GarageBand.
There are some limits to what GarageBand can do. Logic Express and Logic Express Pro are available from Apple for those who need to go beyond those limits. They offer more editing capability, but they are also more complicated. Using one of these more advanced programs is like the jump from iMovie to Final Cut Pro.
For a final highlight demonstration, Hollister dragged a U2 song from iTunes into GarageBand. Then he played a guitar track along with U2.
NVMUG members said they hoped Hollister would come back after he gets GarageBand 2 to demonstrate the new features in it. GarageBand 2 can translate sounds into musical notes on a scale. You can then edit the sound by editing the notes on the scale.
2. More From The Meeting
While Daniel Hollister was setting up, Midge asked if there were any questions. There was just one: How to stop an application from starting up when he turns on his computer. Stephen suggested that he look at System Preferences -> Accounts > LogIn Items (called Startup Items in Mac OS X 10.3.8), and remove the application.
Richard Smith provided the projector. As an experiment, Stephen Farber (Woody) connected a small FM transmitter to Daniel's 17 inch PowerBook, and the first half of the program played through Stephen's receiver/amplifier and speakers. Daniel had brought speakers which also worked fine.
Daniel Hollister works with Washington County Mental Health and the after school program at Doty Memorial School, Worcester, working with students in music, skate boarding, and other programs.
Warren Walker gave copies of his calendar to members because he printed more than he sold. At our house we normally only use electronic calendars, but Warren's makes a beautiful decoration with his flower pictures.
Warren will be leading a free program on digital photography at the Cabot library on Wednesday, March 9, at 7 p.m. Warren will start with an introduction to the technology and terminology and then discuss answers to questions.
Daniel Hollister said that all the loops in GarageBand are individual instruments. In the new GarageBand you can create your own loops which could have a combination of instruments.
Daniel has the loops that came with GarageBand, and the first $99 Jam Pack 1 with over 2,000 loops released by Apple. When asked, he said that he was satisfied and did not need the other Jam Pack packages, but he was tempted by the new Jam Pack 4 Symphony Orchestra loops.
If you have a .Mac account, you can download three sets of loops, but if you do not have a broadband connection, downloading a set would definitely be an all-night operation.
Once you have chosen a drum beat, GarageBand automatically changes other loops to fit. You can add different loops in sequence to change it, such adding a different drum beat to the drum track to change the beat for part of the tune.
Once you have the sound you want, you can add distortion effects such as an echo.
If you have the more expensive keyboard which recognizes velocity, you can get the slides sounds like you can from a guitar.
There are left and right audio meters. Keep them our of the red to make sure the sound is not too loud to export to a CD. There is a nob on each track which can put the sounds to the left, right, or center, but they are hard to control with the mouse.
Instead of dragging a loop to create a new track, Daniel clicked on a plus symbol + to add a new track. A dialog window asked if he wanted a new instrument. There were columns in the dialog window for selecting a Software Instrument or a Real Instrument. He selected voices in a choir, and he used the keyboard to play the sounds he wanted in the choir voices.
Daniel said that it is not all Pop. That is just what he is used to creating. He said that pop songs are all loops, and most of the beats are all loops.
Daniel does a radio show at Goddard College sometimes. He found the "Dead scream" on the Internet and brought it in when Dean was his guest. Daniel demonstrated how he could use the Dean scream as a loop within a music creation.
Daniel had created different guitar sounds in his other computer. He said you can use an equalizer in GarageBand to get a Rock guitar sound with high bass and treble and low mid-tones. He added Amp Simulation and chose British Clean Amp. He could have used Reverb which makes it sound like the kind of room you are in, or the Echo effect which he said is easy to overdo. He experimented until he had created a sound like the Beatles which he saved as Beatles - Not Really.
Daniel opened a new GarageBand and a new track. He selected Real Instruments and his recording of Beatles - Not Really. Then he played the new sound for us on his guitar.
Daniel has a peddle board that cost $600 about eight years ago, he said it was a cheap one. An amplifier could cost from $100 to several thousands. Just a tape to record multi-track cost around $500. All this comes with your Macintosh and GarageBand. He said CakeWalk for Windows costs $300 and does not do nearly as much.
You want to have a fast Macintosh, and lots of RAM helps. The more hard drive space the better, but GarageBand tunes do not use much hard drive space because they consist of links to the loops.
When you export to iTunes, it is saved as an AIF file which is pretty huge. You will want to convert to compress it. You can put a blank CD in and burn to the disk, and have a CD recording of your work.
With the new GarageBand 2, as demonstrated at Macworld, if you sing into GarageBand, you can correct your voice to make it on key. If you still do not like it, you can change it from male to female or vice versa.
When you close the window in GarageBand, it quits the program.
I have always had too many other things to do to play games on my computer, but despite my lack of musical talent, after Daniel's presentation, I will probably spend more time than I should exploring and playing with GarageBand. I hope we can have Daniel back to demonstrate the new features of GarageBand 2 after he has played with it.
