Chapter One
In the Beginning: Introducing GarageBand In This Chapter
* Finding out what GarageBand is
* Checking out what you can do with GarageBand
* Discovering what you can't do with GarageBand
* Checking the system requirements for GarageBand
* Taking a sneak peek at the recording sequence and GarageBand
When GarageBand was introduced at Macworld Expo in January 2004, Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs informed the audience that one out of two adults play a musical instrument but that almost none of them have recorded themselves playing.
Why not? Because before GarageBand came along, recording live music decently was just too darned complicated. It required expensive, hard-to-use software and expensive external hardware, not to mention a basic understanding of audio engineering.
GarageBand changes everything. Now if you want to record yourself singing or playing, GarageBand lets you do it without spending a lot of time or money. Better still; GarageBand will give you professional-sounding results even if you don't know the first thing about audio recording.
In this chapter you'll begin your acquaintance with GarageBand. First, you'll learn a bit about what it is and what you can do with it, along with what it is not and what it can't do. Then, we'll review GarageBand's system requirements followed by a quick look at the recording process.
What Is GarageBand?
GarageBand is the fifth and newest iLife application; it turns your Mac into a fully equipped recording studio, complete with hundreds of realistic-sounding musical instruments and audio effects, all preconfigured by experienced recording engineers.
In a nutshell, GarageBand is everything you need to record, mix, master, and share music with others.
RANT & RAVE
GarageBand's default settings are a big part of the reason GarageBand is so great, especially for beginners. The instruments and audio effects sound great right out of the box, and they rarely require much (if any) tweaking. It's kind of like having a crew of professional engineers right inside your Mac.
GarageBand is the latest addition to Apple's iLife family of software, along with iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto. At Macworld Expo in January 2004, Apple CEO Steve Jobs described iLife '04 as "Microsoft Office for the rest of your life," which sums things up quite nicely.
There has never been a program like GarageBand; it is the perfect introduction to multitrack audio recording. I mean that. GarageBand is easy, friendly, forgiving, and fun. And you can't beat the price.
TECHNICAL STUFF
Multitrack recording means recording instruments or vocals with each instrumental or vocal performance recorded on its own track. The sound contained in each track can be adjusted independently of other tracks. Ultimately, the tracks are combined (that is, mixed) in a pleasing manner to create the final product.
I've used 'em all; if you're new to this audio thing, nothing else even comes close to GarageBand. You're gonna love it.
What Can You Do with GarageBand?
GarageBand does things that used to require hours in an expensive recording studio. The following is a fairly comprehensive list of what you can do with GarageBand:
Record vocals
Record acoustic instruments
Record software instruments via MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital
Record electric guitars with GarageBand's virtual amplifier models, so that you can get just the sound you want
"Punch in" to a section of an otherwise excellent track to re-record over your mistakes
Adjust the volume (level) and other sonic characteristics (the way things sound) of anything and everything you've recorded
Make music using prerecorded loops Combine multiple tracks of music and/or loops into a two-track (stereo) file (so that you can play all the parts and combine them into one song)
Record a track while listening to other tracks
Adjust the sonic characteristics - volume, equalization, echo, reverb, and so on - for each track individually (all these elements are part of mixing a song, which I cover in Chapter 10)
Adjust the sonic characteristics - volume, equalization, echo, reverb, and so on - for the song as a whole (in other words, mastering, which I delve into in Chapter 11)
And, of course, being a member of the iLife family of Apple software, you can use any song you create in GarageBand in the other iLife apps; in your iPhoto slideshows, iDVD menus, and iMovie projects. And, of course, you can burn your GarageBand-created tunes into audio CDs with iTunes.
This list doesn't cover everything you can do with GarageBand, but it at least gives you the gist of the cool stuff you can do.
What Can't You Do with GarageBand?
Well, there's not much GarageBand can't do. Perhaps its biggest shortcoming (versus more sophisticated recording studio-type software or an analog recording studio) is that GarageBand limits you to recording one track at a time. So, for example, if you sing and play acoustic guitar, you'll usually record your guitar track first, and then record the vocal track(s). A more sophisticated multitrack recording setup would allow you to sing and play at the same time, recording voice and guitar (on separate tracks) at the same time. Any decent recording studio allows the simultaneous recording of 8, 16, 24, or more tracks.
TIP
As you might expect, this shortcoming makes it extremely challenging to record drums using GarageBand. That's because drums usually require four, five, six, or more microphones, with each microphone recording to a separate track. You can find ways to work around this (and I look at some of them in Chapters 7, 8 and 15), but they're not pretty or easy to pull off. So if you happen to be a drummer, you may want to consider other software and hardware for recording your music. Or plan to spend a lot of time recording your drums track by track.
Another shortcoming in GarageBand is that you may not change the time signature in the middle of a song. If your song starts out in 4/4 time, the whole song has to be in 4/4 time. Although there are ways to creatively work around this limitation in GarageBand, none of them are simple or fun.
TIP
Most other audio recording software lets you change time signatures anywhere in a song without missing a beat (pun intended). So if you tend to write songs that have time changes in 'em, GarageBand may not be your best choice.
Finally, it's way too easy to create a song that has too many instruments or tracks for your Mac to handle. The older your Mac and the less RAM it has, the more likely you will encounter this issue sooner rather than later. Although this can also happen when you use higher-end audio software, it happens more often and with fewer tracks or instruments enabled in GarageBand.
The next section covers GarageBand's system requirements, so I'll hold the gory details until then. Suffice it to say that the newer Macs (G4 and G5) with plenty of RAM in 'em run GarageBand better than older Macs (for example, a G3, even one with plenty of RAM).
Other things you can't do with GarageBand include typesetting a book, removing red eye from a digital photograph, and sending your mom an e-mail message. Still, the issues I just described seem to be the ones that are the most likely to give you ulcers.
So there you have 'em - GarageBand's biggest boogers in my book (pun-induced groan).
Checking Your System Requirements
Whether you know it or not, GarageBand does a lot of intense processing behind the scenes. So, not surprisingly, GarageBand requires more Mac horsepower than the other iLife applications.
So before you go any further with GarageBand, make sure your Mac is up to snuff.
The official requirements
The official system requirements (copied right from the side of an iLife box) are as follows:
Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor 600 MHz G3 or faster required for GarageBand G4 or faster required for GarageBand software instruments
256MB of physical RAM
Mac OS X v10.2.6 or later (Mac OS X v10.2.8 or later recommended)
QuickTime 6.4 or later (QuickTime 6.5 included)
Display with at least 1024 x 768 pixel resolution
DVD drive required to install GarageBand (and iDVD)
4.3GB of hard drive space required to install GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD
WARNING!
If you purchased GarageBand as part of Apple's iLife '04 retail package, GarageBand and iDVD can only be installed from the iLife DVD. If you don't have your own DVD drive, you can use any FireWire DVD reader that you can beg or borrow, because after the installation, GarageBand doesn't care whether you have a DVD drive.
TECHNICAL STUFF
Unfortunately, iDVD not only needs to be installed from a DVD, it will not burn a DVD unless you have an authentic internal Apple SuperDrive. In this case, a FireWire DVD drive doesn't cut it. Luckily, the rest of the iLife '04 applications don't share this limitation.
The realistic requirements: Dr. Mac's advice
Now, please allow me to add my two-cents worth:
Cent #1: GarageBand may run on a G3, but it won't run well.
Cent #2: 256MB of physical RAM may be enough to play and record your one-finger rendition of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," but it's not enough to do a lot more than that. I recommend at least another quarter or half gigabyte of RAM; GarageBand will run much better if you have a total of 512MB or even 1024MB of RAM.
TIP
As a bonus, the more RAM you have in your Mac, the more tracks your songs can have before GarageBand chokes. If you want to know how much memory GarageBand actually uses, open up the Activity Monitor (in /Applications/Utilities). You'll see that even when GarageBand is open but minimized to the Dock, as shown in Figure 1-1, it uses more RAM and more processing power than any other program that's running.
But wait; it gets worse: If GarageBand is merely running in the background, as shown in Figure 1-2, it uses three times more processor power than when it was minimized.
REMEMBER
Any program or utility that uses that many CPU cycles even when it's minimized or in the background slows everything else down. I recommend that you quit all other apps when you use GarageBand and quit GarageBand (GarageBand?Quit GarageBand) immediately when you're done using it each and every time.
What Else Do You Need to Run GarageBand?
Although there are hardware and software items you may want or need (which are discussed in loving detail in the very next chapter), even if you don't acquire a single item recommended in Chapter 2, you can have a lot of fun using nothing but GarageBand all by itself.
If your Mac has a built-in microphone, as most of them do, you can use it to record vocals and musical instruments. The quality will not be as good as any external microphone, but in a pinch, you can use built-in microphones to capture the moment.
And, you can use GarageBand's on-screen keyboard to play any of the software instruments, as shown in Figure 1-3. It's hard to play music by clicking a mouse, and you can't actually play chords on this keyboard, but it's better than nothing at all and it's free.
Speaking of which, be sure to pause for a brief interlude about tape - the old kind (cassette, 1/2-inch, 1-inch, and 2-inch) and the new kind (hard drive) in the sidebar, "Recording with tape versus a hard drive."
Recording with GarageBand: A Few Teasers
Before I move on to the discussion of your recording space and audio gear, I think you should have a slightly clearer picture of the way this whole recording-studio-in-a-box thing works. This material is covered throughout the book in glorious detail, but these brief "sneak peeks" should make the big picture a little clearer.
Sneak peek 1 walks (actually, more like sprints) you through the process of making songs with GarageBand. Sneak peek 2 is a quick look at GarageBand itself.
Sneak peek 1: The recording sequence
When the folks at Apple say GarageBand contains everything you need to create songs, they aren't kidding. It really does give you everything you need: recording, editing, loops, software instruments, overdubbing, mixing, mastering, and the ability to make your own audio CDs that you can share with friends or even sell.
I delve further into every step of the process in upcoming chapters. For now, I'd like to provide a painless introduction to the process of making a multitrack audio recording:
1. Select or write the material.
I know this seems obvious, but it bears mention just the same. Creating an audio recording, like so many things in life, is subject to the GIGO effect - Garbage In, Garbage Out.
There are, of course, exceptions. If you prefer jam bands, aural sounds-capes, random noise, trance music, or Brian Eno, you can probably skip right over this step. As for the rest of you: It's better if you have an idea of what you want to record before you launch GarageBand.
'Nuff said.
2. Rehearse (and/or record your rehearsals).
Rehearsal can make your recording sessions faster and easier.
TIP
Later in the book, I countermand this advice and tell some of you to record every note you ever play. When I produced the band Vengeance, who were all really good players, I would say: "Tape is cheap. Studio time isn't. I record every note from the moment you plug in until you walk out of the studio. I'm not losing a single usable note just because the tape wasn't rolling."
As for me, I'm such a terrible musician that I never even record a take until I can play the part without mistakes (or at least play the part without a mistake in every measure).
If you have more than a drop of musical talent, though, you might want to record your practice takes. Sometimes, that first or second "practice" take turns out to be the best.
If tape is cheap, hard drives are cheaper, which is a good thing because GarageBand chews up hard drive space at a rapid clip. My songs range from 30 or 40MB for the simple ones to over 100MB for more complex tunes. At any time, I may be working on a dozen different tunes or more. It doesn't take long to accumulate several gigabytes of GarageBand song files.
Continues...
Excerpted from GarageBand For Dummies by Bob LeVitus Excerpted by permission.
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