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GarageBand is Amazing Fun

After purchasing a digital piano and borrowing a friends USB-MIDI interface, I am finally able to spend some quality time with Apple's GarageBand application. This is a very dangerous program in many, many ways.

First of course, it makes it easy to make moderately decent sounding, but ultimately really cheesy music. Here is a sample song that I put together in about three hours of playing around. It sounds to me something like the theme music from an 80's cop show. :-). There are five tracks in this song -- the bass and drums are loops from the Library, slightly altered. I recorded myself playing the rhythm guitar, rhythm synth, and synth flute lead, all played on the keyboard via MIDI. I hope to soon try adding in real (recorded) guitar.

Second, it's a time killer. Much of that time (maybe 2 hours) was spent listening to all of the loops and samples in the library and imagining music to go with the sounds. Listening through headphones, the quality of many of the samples seems to be really good (to me anyway). My piano has 10 built-in samples -- it's really just supposed to be a piano. But when hooked up to the Powerbook with GarageBand I can spend hours playing with the sound library.

When I was considering which keyboards to buy, I decided that I'd focus on nice quality keys, and that's about it -- that's why I got the Casio Privia PX-110. For a few dollars more I can get a good sized library of additional instruments -- through the Mac and GarageBand. After playing with this setup for a few hours it seems to me to have been a good choice. Now I just need to learn something about playing music!

Categories: music

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