« Article: Garage Band for the Musical Newbie | Main | Home Made Dolly »
May 11, 2004
GarageBand Revisited
Troy's GarageBand Tunes (if I can do it, anybody can)
GB Sketch One
GB Sketch Two
GB Sketch Three
GB Sketch Four
I spent sometime this weekend tinkering with GarageBand. One caveat: This is the perspective of a listener of music, rather than a maker of it. One thing however that some of these new accessible production tools have done is not make everybody a superstar (iMovie can't make you a Hitchcock, GarageBand make you a Prokofiev) but rather provide a means to translate a person's active consumption of content into an expression, an interpretation. In this way tools like Apple's iLife which connect people to the technologies of production can potentially increase the ways in which people understand (read) and ultimately transform (write) the world they live in.
One more point. I read somewhere that tools like GarageBand that "make everybody a musician" can have the unintended consequence of homogenizing music (everybody chooses from the same loops, etc..) However, there are only 26 letters in the English Language, and we have over a million books here in the library...'nuff said.
GarageBand has alot of features, most of which I won't go into because I don't get them. But one thing I can see GarageBand useful for is the composition of "sketches" or filler for short video sequences. For budding musicians, it can provide a quick means to develop some chords, then a melody, to accompany a "work in progress." For Studio users, I see GarageBand as a way to construct a completely original video project in The Studio (without potential copyright snafu's and without the learning curve of something like ProTools). This has always been the weak link in the production chain: You check out a miniDV camera, shoot some video, bring it in The Studio and edit it, then you need some filler music. Generally its the video that's the important part. Why use someone else's music if you can make your own?
In the fall semester we'll include GarageBand in our Digital Video Workshop series and present it as a way to score video projects.
Troy's GarageBand Tunes (if I can do it, anybody can)
GB Sketch One
GB Sketch Two
GB Sketch Three
GB Sketch Four
Some interesting sites have sprung up around GarageBand, one of which is iCompositions.com. I was able to register, make some quick album art and upload a couple tunes I made in GarageBand.
Link to iCompositions.com submission
Posted by admin at May 11, 2004 07:15 AM