GarageBand for pro use: Introduction

GarageBand is all of the things you've heard. It's a poor man's multi-track digital recorder. GarageBand is a lush assortment of royalty-free sampled drum, backup and melodic music, meta-tagged by type. It's a collection of MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) instruments, and a foundation for Apple's optional Jam Pack expansion kits that put gigabytes of additional loops and instruments at your disposal. The Jam Packs are insanely priced considering what sample libraries cost.

World Music and Remix Tools (get a demo of the latter and play the loops and instruments under the "Urban" category) are my top Jam Pack recommends.

GarageBand adds real-time effects and signal processing to music, vocals, field recordings and any kind of audio. You run your audio, ideally using a FireWire or USB 2.0 interface, into GarageBand, and then dial in crunch, tube amp, echo, pitch change, compressor, and any of a huge assortment of parametric Audio Units (AU) software-based digital audio filters. You can use preprogrammed filters or hack new ones. One day I'll get into that process here. Just know that even if you're not an audio freak, fooling around with AU will keep you up at night because the possibilities are literally unlimited.

If you add hardware, such as a MIDI keyboard or controller, with the latter being a panel of proper knobs and sliders that attaches to a MIDI interface, GarageBand will yield the GUI to external control. There are MIDI keyboards that double as controllers. Most handle MIDI-to-USB interfacing, and many incorporate analog audio-to-USB interfaces.

So, why are you reading about the musician's friend here? Well, GarageBand is truly exceptional for capturing, editing, sweetening and layering audio and music for amateur production use. For podcasting, narration, voice-overs and presentations, GarageBand is all you need until you decide to go pro.