Inside Home Recording.com

Derek’s comprehensive GarageBand ’09 review – expanded transcript

April 10th, 2009 by Derek

This review is based on my audio version from Inside Home Recording Episode #69, March 2009.

In 2004, GarageBand 1.0 got me back into recording after several years’ absence, so I’ve liked the program ever since. And unless your Mac hardware was too old to support it, every subsequent version has been worth the upgrade. GarageBand ’09 is no exception, even though when it was first announced, I wasn’t sure it had much new for me.

Since it’s part of iLife ’09, which costs $79 USD (or is free with new Macs), GarageBand is a super deal even if only a few of its changes are worthwhile for you—there are big improvements in iMovie and iPhoto anyway. But be warned that the newest version won’t work at all with G4 processors slower than 867 MHz. And one of the three major new GarageBand features, the Learn to Play lessons, requires an Intel Mac.

The Little Things: What’s New

When GarageBand ’09 was announced at the Macworld show in January, it sounded like there wasn’t much new for Inside Home Recording listeners who are mostly interested in recording music. But that was before I launched it…

At first it’s a little disorienting; the interface colour scheme has totally changed. But the way it works hasn’t really changed that much:

• The appearance is more like Apple’s “pro” apps (Logic, Final Cut, etc.): darker and more 3D and shadowed.
• Some interface elements have moved. The Loop Browser has been moved to the right side sliding panel, with the Media Browser and Track Info sidebar. That leaves only the Track Editor in the bottom panel.
• The look of some other controls and effects has changed too, for the better in my opinion.
• Everything sill runs in one window, and the friendly fake wood panel side strips are still there.
• There are no major changes to recording, loops, samples, or effects (other than that you can use one more effect in your chain now).
• Podcast creation works basically as it has since 2005, with a few tweaks to the interface. GarageBand remains one of the few programs on any platform that will create an Enhanced podcast, with chapters, changing artwork, and live links.
• There is still no way to zoom out all the way on projects longer than about 10 minutes, which is silly, especially for podcasts that can run as long as an hour.

There used to be only one music recording template, with a grand piano most people deleted right away. Now the launch screen now offers a variety of session templates. Each has a different sets of tracks and presets pre-loaded for songwriting, working with guitar, recording voice or an acoustic instrument, creating movie soundtracks, assembling podcasts, generating iPhone ringtones, and so on.

First Big Thing: Lessons

The most obvious new addition to GarageBand ’09 is the Learn to Play lessons, accessible from the launch screen. As I mentioned, they require an Intel Mac, and come with two lessons pre-installed: an intro to guitar and an intro to piano. There are a total of 18 free Basic Lessons for those two instruments available for download right now, as well as Artist Lessons available for purchase. The 10 Artist Lessons include tracks from Ben Folds, Fall Out Boy, Nora Jones, Sting, John Fogerty, and more, for about $5 USD each.

Apparently, more free Basic Lessons and for-pay Artist Lessons are coming in the future. Both the free downloads and the purchases work smoothly, but the list of lessons on your computer can get unwieldy once you have lots of them. There is also no indication of the size of files before you click Download. Since the downloads are 100 or 200 MB or more, they can take awhile, and are almost out of the question on dialup.

The interface for managing downloads needs a bit of work, because it’s too basic. There’s no way to stop without quitting, and no straightforward way to pause or reorder downloads once you’ve started them. If you want to get lessons in a different order than you initially choose, there’s quite a rigamarole of quitting and canceling and choosing another download. You can unwittingly download the same lesson more than once, which wastes bandwidth and time, even if GarageBand handles it well in the end and doesn’t leave duplicates. On the plus side, you can do whatever you want with the rest of GarageBand while lessons download, and come back when they’re done.

So hare they once you’ve finished your downloads? These are the best computer-based music lessons I’ve ever seen. They feature a typically Apple clean full-screen interface, with the instructor at top, the instrument and notation view in the middle, and controls at bottom. You can:

• Slow down and speed up tracks, mix and mute levels, and turn the instructor on and off.
• Show notation in different ways appropriate to the instrument.
• Practice and play along, adjusting speed as you improve.
• Export a song to the main GarageBand recording interface so you can work with it.

Artist Lessons cost a bit of money, and are friendly and clear. Some of the downloads offer both simplified and advanced versions of songs taught by the original composer/performer. You can, for instance, learn “Roxanne” from Sting, or “Proud Mary” from John Fogerty—pretty cool for an old classic rock guy like me. They also tell the stories behind the origins of their songs.

I think the pay lessons are a pretty good deal for five bucks each ($6.49 in Canada), even if you can get similar things from other people for free on YouTube. And the free lessons are fantastic if you play one instrument but want to get the basics of another (like me, a guitarist and drummer, learning piano), or if your kids want to try out guitar or keyboard before you commit to finding a teacher.

Second Big Thing: Magic GarageBand Jam

Magic GarageBand doesn’t look very different from its introduction in GarageBand ’08, but it’s much more useful and fun. While its genre list is basically the same, and it looks nearly identical with its spotlit stage, you can now:

• Jam along with the band, including using instrument and effects presets you create in the main GarageBand track recording interface.
• Randomly shuffle the backing instruments.
• Play full screen.
• Adjust the volume of all instruments.
• Record your jam with multiple takes, then export to the track recording interface to hone the performance.

Unfortunately, there’s no indication of what key each “genre jam” is in within Magic GarageBand, so you have to noodle around and figure it out, or open it in the main GarageBand recording interface (where I discovered that the Latin track was in F minor, for instance), then come back. On my three-year-old Intel MacBook, loading a new Magic GarageBand session, or switching in and out of fullscreen, is also pretty slow, though once it’s loaded, everything else, including shuffle, is plenty fast.

Third Big Thing: Electric Guitar Tracks

The most interesting new feature for the IHR audience may be Electric Guitar tracks. GarageBand has had excellent guitar amp emulators and effects since the beginning, and you could apply them to Real Instrument tracks if you had a guitar plugged in, or to Software Instrument tracks (i.e. MIDI tracks) to fake it with a keyboard. Taking a different, visual approach, external third-party plug-ins like AmpliTube and Guitar Rig offer virtual amplifier stacks, microphone placement, effects racks and stomp boxes you can interchange and move around.

Now there’s a third type of track inside GarageBand ’09, dedicated to electric guitar, which brings that visual approach to the program itself. It seems designed to make it easier for electric guitarists who haven’t recorded much before to get into the process. Choose Track > New Track, and now you have Real, Software, and the new Electric Guitar track types to choose from.

Electric Guitar tracks show a totally different view in the Track Info sidebar. Instead of the familiar list of sound generators and effects, you see a 3D perspective image of a guitar amplifier onstage, with stomp box effects on the floor below it:

• You can cycle through several types of amps, and add different stomp boxes in whatever order you choose to the chain, simply by dragging them onto the virtual stage.
• Amps are inspired by classics from Fender, Marshall, Vox, Boogie, etc., though they don’t use those names. (Guitarists will know what an English Combo or a Modern Stack is by the name and appearance.)
• You can switch effects on and off by clicking the pedal switches, or automate them in the track mixer like other effects.
• You can also adjust knobs on the amp to change its sound. Those knobs change their look depending on the type of amp you pick—although every amp has the same types of knobs (gain, bass, mis, treble, presence, master, output, reverb, tremolo), even if the original real-world model didn’t include all those controls.
• There are also master reverb and echo for each amp.
• Ten pedals are included, such as chorus, phase, flange, compressor, overdrive, distortion, wah, and vibrato. Each has its own control knobs.

All the amps and effects sound authentic, and great. You don’t get as much control as in AmpliTube (even the stripped-down AmpliTube Live) or Guitar Rig—there’s no ability to mix speakers and amps, or change microphones and placement, or to have multiple effects chains—but Electric Guitar tracks are a good distilled version of that visual approach. And they’re free with GarageBand, of course.

However, unlike the old Real and Software Instrument tracks, Electric Guitar tracks are off in their own little world. There’s no way to add further regular GarageBand effects to the chain, as with the regular track types. You can’t, for instance, put in a multiband compressor or Visual EQ onto an Electric Guitar track, or (more critically) patch in external AU plugins. You can’t even change the track icon.

That seems like a strange design decision, and something Apple should improve in future versions. Based on the enhancements to Magic GarageBand, which was also pretty basic when it first appeared, my guess is that the company will.

Fortunately, the old guitar emulations and effects are still there. In a pinch, you can copy and paste waveforms from an Electric Guitar track to a Real Instrument track, or even bounce out a solo’ed Electric Guitar track to the finder as an AIFF file with all its effects, and then import it back in as a Real Instrument to add more. That’s a bit of a kludgy workaround, but at least the option is there.

Conclusions

Previous upgrades to GarageBand have each focused mostly on one part of GarageBand’s audience—music recordists like IHR’s listeners, or podcasters, and so on. This time Apple has gone further, targeting three different audiences:

1. Electric Guitar tracks are especially for electric guitarists new to GarageBand.
2. Templates and Magic GarageBand help people who aren’t sure how to construct a new project.
3. Lessons are the star of the show this upgrade, and bring in people new to music entirely, or to a particular instrument.

These big new features of GarageBand ’09 aren’t perfect. But they’re pretty ambitious for what was once a bare-bones little music program. Despite the add-ons, GarageBand ’09 remains a lean music and podcast creation machine.

If you want aux buses and complex effects routing, sophisticated support for external control surfaces, surround mixing, and so on, go get Logic or Pro Tools or Cubase. If, on the other hand, you’re like me, GarageBand lets you make music without getting in the way, and the goodies you need are still there.

When a new version of GarageBand comes out, it’s hard to go wrong installing the upgrade. If you’re a home recordist like me, the new interface appearance and Electric Guitar tracks will probably be your favourite changes. But you might surprise yourself having fun with the lessons and jamming with Magic GarageBand too.

Given the low price, and the benefits of the other enhancements to iLife, and provided that your Mac hardware supports the newest features, there’s little reason for you not to get GarageBand ’09 right away. I personally use it more than any other music program, and the latest version only makes that more true.

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