iTunes is a music program, and its function is to organize and manipulate music created by other people. GarageBand is a groundbreaking new application that lets you create music of your own, in a simple and intuitive way that only Apple can deliver.

If you’re a musician, you’re gonna flip over GarageBand. It combines CD-quality music samples, hard disk recording features found in expensive and complicated applications like ProTools, and canned rhythm tracks of programs like Band in a Box. What really distinguishes GarageBand, is that you don’t have to be a musician to create great-sounding music. Here’s how it works.

GarageBand comes with over 1000 music “loops” (prerecorded snippets of music), sampling a wide variety of instruments - drums, guitars, pianos, organs, bass, strings, percussion, horns, etc. To create a song, you designate a key and tempo, then simply drag one of these loops (from a categorized listing), into a “timeline”. If you want the loop to play over and over again, you grab the end and drag it, extending the loop to the desired length. To add another instrument, you drag it onto the timeline, creating another track. Through the magic of computing technology, the second loop (as well as each subsequent instrument) conforms to the key and tempo of the first. While you’re listening to what you’re created so far, you can preview how new instruments will sound in the mix.

Now, if you’re a guitar player, you can connect your guitar to the Mac and play (and record) your guitar using one of eight included classic guitar amp sounds, like “British Invasion”, or “Arena Rock”. With a USB or MIDI keyboard connected to your Mac, you have a powerful “synthesizer”, able to play (and record) any instrument in GarageBand’s arsenal.

Oh, and of course you can connect a microphone and sing along, aided by recording-studio vocal enhancers like reverb and echo.

GarageBand can hold sixteen tracks of music, either loops, or recorded vocals and real instruments, or a combination thereof. When you’re done, with the click of a button your song is rendered into a CD-quality AIFF file, from which you can export an AAC file. It’s one more click onto the web or onto your iPod. One caution – GarageBand requires a fast, newer G4 Mac. The price of progress, I guess. Anyway, I’m having a blast with it, and you will, too!

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski