when i got my first laptop (a brick made by “twinhead” back in 1996) my dream was to be able to have a mobile studio. the kind of thing i could open up and just dive into. i had visions of realtime synthesis, recording, non-destructive editing and controlling midi devices. but at that time, it was difficult to get midi to sync over the serial bus as it was quite flakey. i needed to tweak IRQs and all that jazz. and windows 3.1 (i always thought 95 was crap!) wasn’t exactly overflowing with cool software. and audio interfaces? um. well, there was the minijack that went into some 16 bit thingy, but…
over the years my dream waxed and waned. then i got my powerbook. everything changed. i could do everything that i wanted to do on the go. my studio was anywhere with an outlet and some headphones. i had to bust my butt to get free software to work on it, but it was worth it. puredata was my miracle application. and it helped me make music for a long time.
but as time passed, i realized that i wanted something more integrated. i wanted to be a lazy user. i wanted to open up my laptop and start composing or mixing as easily as i would browse the web or send email. for the longest time i equated my desire with laziness. and then i realized that i was spending more time minding, researching and building tools than i was actually making music. and the bottom line is: that sucks.
my music requires tools. most art does. tools need to be maintained. they should be examined. workflows should be analyzed and adjusted from time to time. but tools should never come between the creator and the creation of new work.
as i stewed over this for about two weeks, i began to wake up to the fact that what i needed to get started on my latest project was something with a simple piano roll editor and the ability to run audio files along with it. the catch? i didn’t want to spend $700 to get it. i tried intuem with sketchy results. basically, i think it hates camel audio’s cameleon 5000 which is my AU synth of choice right now. i got random crashes, hangs on freezing audio, etc. i’m pretty sure, after an analysis of the crash logs, that it’s a disagreement between the sequencer and the AU that results in me losing all of my work with no crash recovery. so that didn’t work out. and that’s a shame because intuem is pretty tasty stuff. i’ll keep an eye on it though. and if cameleon gets updated, i’ll try it again. after all, i paid for it.
then i tried running a debian vm in parallels on my macbook. um. no. that got me MusE running on my macbook (which if i’m going to be honest is REALLY what i want) but it wasn’t stable, didn’t use my AU stuff and wasn’t the integrated “open and go” that i need to be productive. and bootcamp? no thanks. i don’t reboot on purpose.
i hacked up some things in puredata and almost went so far as to learn the GEM extensions to see what i could do with an interface there. i quickly assessed that as three weeks of coding and not really arriving at what i wanted. i searched the free applications and found some things here and there but nothing that really did what i wanted it to do. i thought my list of features was pretty simple. so easy, in fact, that i opened Xcode.
and then i closed Xcode.
finally, i did what i didn’t want to do: i opened GarageBand.
the iLife suite is amazing. i don’t think that one could spill enough ink about the coolness that things like iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD have brought to the table. it lets a moron like me take the red eye out of a photo without having to think about it. i can whip up a movie out of a set of stills and fool my family and friends into thinking that i have a gift for the visual arts. it has everything i could need to use my computer for what i want to do. it was even pre-installed on my machine. and that’s why i fear GarageBand. i’m afraid that it has the potential to be a creative crutch.
why don’t art photographers use point and shoot, autofocus cameras? because they rely on their tools for their art and they want control the results. and that’s why i stayed away from GarageBand for as long as i did. i was afraid of the loops and the auto-this and auto-that that might be buried in there were just waiting to take over my work and make me sound like every other mac nut who popped open iLife and built a “multimedia experience.”
but it wasn’t like that at all. i don’t use loops, so i didn’t bother with that. for people who want to do that sort of thing it’s there, though certainly not required. the piano roll editor does what i want it to do, though it’s lacking in some parameter controls that i’d like to see. it handles audio like a dream and is a rock solid AU host. and as for opening my macbook and getting to work? it’s never been easier and i’ve never been more productive. three songs in one week can’t be wrong!
the evil of it lies in the fact that i have to work in 44.1 kHz 16 bit format and can only export to m4a. but the billions of tools that i have lying around my HD can take care of some of that for me. i can even dump the output into ardour for further tweaking, though that hasn’t been my way of using GarageBand yet.
i’m treating it like a sketchpad. i can pop it open any time i like and be as detailed or abstract as i want. i can test out arrangements and mix things up for my ipod in minutes. and it makes my lunch hour incredibly productive. for a “serious” musician who has been conditioned to do things the hard and disciplined way, it makes getting things done even more efficient because all of the pre-thinking that was once done before using an environment like puredata or other more intense toolchains is coupled with an interface that makes executing those plans more like a gesture and less like programming.
this should not be underrated.
and it doesn’t mean that GarageBand, or any other piece of software i’ve met, is magic. it has a niche in my creative process where it really shines. i’m still looking, but not as feverishly as before. i have a tool that i can use to capture my ideas. i can use my myriad of other more sophisticated and nuanced tools later. but for a rough cut or sketch? GarageBand is a killer app.
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