![]() ![]() Options to tweak your drums include selecting a style/genre you want your drummer to play in (think “alternative” or “hip-hop”) and even get as granular as sub-genre (think “Indie Rock” or “Garage Rock.”) Instead of the old-school Apple Loop style of dragging and dropping your drums into a track and having to deal with whatever the pre-recorded loop throws (or doesn’t throw) your way, GarageBand’s virtual drummer lets you select a wide variety of parameters. The best part about GarageBand’s virtual drummer is that the convenience doesn’t necessarily come at the cost of quality or customization. And if, like me, you’re just demoing tracks that you intend to record with more professionalism later on, finding a drummer and then recording those drums in a way that doesn’t suck is a tall order. Anyone recording rock music knows that tracking drums can be a herculean task. One very notable change - if you haven’t used GarageBand in a while like me - is the inclusion of one of Logic’s best features, the virtual drummer. And automation! Never discount the beauty of being able to automate volume for track fade-ins and fade-outs. Photograph by James PeroĪnd then you’ve got a fairly generous array of software instruments, which - as a snob of VSTs and synths myself - aren’t the best, most original, digital instruments in the world, but have improved over the years to deliver something close to serviceable. Hipster apartment not required to make great music with GarageBand. For the latter, I connect my guitar via 1/4-inch cable to a PreSonus Studio 24c audio interface that links to my MacBook Pro through USB. You, of course, have the ability to slot in live sounds recorded through a microphone, or you can go direct-in with an instrument of your choice. Inside, the interface is as simple as it’s always been - a kind of modular and rectangular consensus of how any modern music production software should look.īut once you start peeling back layers of the GarageBand onion, you begin to see just how much functionality is hidden in that simple form. The last major update (not counting minor bug fixes) to GarageBand for the Mac was in 2013, but you wouldn’t know it when you fire up Apple’s iconic DAW, short for Digital Audio Workstation. And let me tell you, I was shocked to discover what exists inside that guitar-shaped icon today. But when I decided this year to start recording music again, I went back to my roots back to my parents’ basement back to GarageBand. It was, for me at the time, an Apple-made music revolution.Īs I moved beyond my teenage angst, I naturally moved on from GarageBand as well, transitioning to other digital audio workstations - Fruity Loops (later FL Studio) and then to Reason and eventually Logic. ![]() It was an idea that I - an angsty teenager with too few friends and too little confidence to start a band - could listen back to. It had pre-recorded drums (shout out to Apple Loops) it had a real direct-in guitar with digital distortion and naturally a guitar solo. But more important than its quality, was another, more meta factor: it existed. That’s to say it was redundant, unoriginal, incomplete, and not at all ready to be released unto the world. It was what real heads in the music-making biz call. I still remember the first song I made with GarageBand. ![]()
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