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Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jan 19 04: new toy!
Paul made an investment this weekend. He bought Apple’s new GarageBand application (as part of their new iLife suite). It is unbelievable. And if there’s any karmic justice then Apple will make a skillion dollars off it.
GarageBand is Apple’s new make-your-own-music application. It is basically a huge multitrack music mastering system for total newbies. You can put your own music in via MIDI or analog inputs, or you can pick your favorites from over a thousand little musical snippets that come with the program, representing an immense variety of musical styles from around the world. You can loop things; you can fade in and out; you can twiddle reverb and echo and compression and dozens of things I don’t understand at all yet; you can build the soundtrack to your head, piece by piece, and then send it out into the world. Its interface is typical Apple, by which I mean clean, fairly intuitive, pretty to look at, and easy to use. Very, very cool. At first glance, it seems to be best suited for dance music, but I’m sure that ere long all kinds of folks will start churning out all kinds of stuff that hadn’t been expected. Get yourself a copy and let your mixmastery shine. (Assuming, of course, you’re a Mac user.)
It’s been great watching it take over huge chunks of Paul’s mental bandwidth over the last couple of days. I just knew he’d enjoy it. Mark my words, there is a USB MIDI keyboard in our immediate future.
Actually, it’s likely to foster a revolutionette similar to what apple’s iMovie did for home digital video production: the discovery of an art form’s potential by the great unwashed, followed by everybody and their kids trying their hands at it. So be prepared, because there’s going to be a huge wave of bad homemade dance music posted to the web ere long. I’m delighted by that idea. It also means that there are going to be some weird and exciting and totally new things in there as well. Anything that gets more people to flex their creative birthright in more ways is aces in my book.
As an indication of what can be done with it pretty much straight off the bat, Strange Radiation is proud to host the first efforts of Paul Phillips, DJ: “Chase Music,” (2:02, ~2MB mp3). He wishes it to be known that it’s a first effort, and that he was mostly focusing on mood and effect rather than structure, and he’s not much of a dance-music person really. But I think it’s pretty impressive for somebody who claims all of the above and was discovering the abilities of the tools as he went along. And it’s also fun and charmingly dorky (viz. the voice samples) and I love it. So there. As soon as my own thing is ready I’ll put it up, and in the interest of fair play he can call mine dorky, too, if he likes.
A final aside: if the title of this entry has filled your head with the song stylings of Lene Lovich, I love you.
Commentary
I love you too, sweet thang.
posted by Cousin Erika, Jan 19 04 6:43 PM
“Chase Music” is today’s unofficial atmospheric music while toiling away at my office. You go with your digital delayed, funky self, Paul.
posted by Cesar (a.k.a. phlex), Jan 21 04 11:59 AM
Chase Music is funkalicious. At first I thought it had something to do with banking.
posted by Sari, Jan 21 04 1:12 PM
Now, now. You think that can’t be done on a PC and hasn’t been for the past, oh, twenty years? ;)
See ACID Music, Cakewalk, Sonar. :p
posted by Peter, Jan 23 04 9:05 AM
Actually, Peter, I realize that the concept here isn’t new. There have been multitrack programs for the Mac for a good while as well (Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Cubase).
Those programs, however, are all designed with professional musicians and composers such as yourself in mind. The exciting thing about GarageBand is the way it has been designed and marketed for the total newbie. In terms of ease of use, happy friendly interface, the extensive library of starter loops, and such, this is software that is perfect for somebody who has never done anything like this before. What’s exciting here is not the fundamental idea but the way it gets the fundamental idea into the hands of people who have never been exposed to it. I look forward to seeing what happens next.
Cesar, if you think I’m going to start calling you phlex, you’re out of your mind.
posted by Andrew, Jan 24 04 10:47 AM
I was just teasing, dear.
But it was nice of you to refer to me as a professional composer/musician. Especially after I just spent an entire weekend recording and mixing one song.
::shrinks off::
posted by Peter, Jan 25 04 6:26 PM
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