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mmcirvinI finally broke down and shelled out the Apple tax to get the better version of iPhoto, GarageBand, and a couple of other things I don't use. I can't comment on the things I don't use. But the new version of iPhoto really does seem considerably better; based on a very cursory look, it's definitely much faster on my G4, the interface organization is better designed to deal with large libraries, and the live zooming in the edit window now does a high-quality pass once you're done fiddling with the slider. Subtle as it is, this last is actually my favorite enhancement; most people probably don't notice it, but the low-quality zoom in iPhoto had always annoyed me, and it's really nice to see that fixed.
GarageBand is an interesting toy. It may never be anything more than that for me because I suck, so I'm probably not the right person to review it. I did manage to bang out a little composition in an hour or two, which I am not going to post for you because it was mind-shatteringly inane, this being the extent of my musical imagination. But, who knows: I may be able to do slightly better someday if I fiddle around with it a whole lot. If not, no harm done; you'll never hear any of it. And since I have headphones, I can do this without irritating anybody, unlike my experiments with Electronic Arts' Music Construction Set many years ago, which annoyed my parents intensely.
Since I'm not really a musician, I don't have any instruments or mikes that plug into my Mac. I was interested to see if, under these conditions, it was possible to go beyond the pasting together of canned loops and actually compose a melody with the MIDI-esque software instruments. The answer is yes, though it's obviously not what the program was primarily designed for. There's an awkward on-screen piano keyboard palette that you can dink on with the mouse. No human being could play this at a reasonable speed (and it's obviously impossible to play chords), but that's not an insurmountable limitation, since there is also a track editor. This displays the notes you played, not in conventional musical notation, but as little rectangles on something resembling a player piano roll, with time on the horizontal axis and pitch in a chromatic scale on the vertical. (Apparently this is a popular interface for digital music software.) You can then drag notes in both dimensions, copy them to make chords, snap them to the time intervals of your choosing, and vary their lengths and keystroke velocities. The notes play when you click on them, so the way they sound is not left entirely to the imagination while you're editing them. You can control the speed of the whole track, and also control how the volume of a track or of the entire piece varies over time, and move tracks around in the stereo space, and probably do lots of other stuff I don't understand.
So even without a MIDI instrument or any ability to play one, it's possible to stumble your way through a rough melody on the keyboard and then turn it into something resembling music. In this way, I managed to produce a track of piano and a track of fakey-sounding strings, and then added a canned drum loop out of the library. I'd kind of like the ability to just start with the track editor, but if that's possible, I haven't figured out how to do it yet; you have to have some notes to start with. I suppose you could play one note on the keyboard and then spawn all the other notes from that one ancestral Ur-note. There also seem to be some occasional small interface bugs with the editing process, though nothing crippling; once in a while it can be hard to get a dragging operation to take. The recent 1.0.1 update seems to be better in this regard than 1.0, though I could be imagining things.
I was interested to hear![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwgh's positive reaction to GarageBand, since I've heard disdainful and/or fearful reactions to it from some musicians; they either see it as some sort of threat, or as a useless toy, or both (which makes no sense to me since it seems that one would preclude the other: the essay I linked to can be summarized as "GarageBand is evil because amateurs pasting loops together will put us all out of work, except that that won't happen because the music wouldn't be any good, but because I just thought that might happen it's evil anyway"). The usual reaction seems to be that anyone who actually knows something about music has already paid more money for some more serious music software, and the only people remaining are people like me who won't be able to do anything interesting with it anyway. But Jake seems to be a counterexample.
The obvious analogy already made by many is that it's the audio equivalent of low-end consumer desktop publishing software: it didn't make graphic designers obsolete, and most of the people using it produced wretched clip-art-infested results, but it still has its place.
GarageBand is an interesting toy. It may never be anything more than that for me because I suck, so I'm probably not the right person to review it. I did manage to bang out a little composition in an hour or two, which I am not going to post for you because it was mind-shatteringly inane, this being the extent of my musical imagination. But, who knows: I may be able to do slightly better someday if I fiddle around with it a whole lot. If not, no harm done; you'll never hear any of it. And since I have headphones, I can do this without irritating anybody, unlike my experiments with Electronic Arts' Music Construction Set many years ago, which annoyed my parents intensely.
Since I'm not really a musician, I don't have any instruments or mikes that plug into my Mac. I was interested to see if, under these conditions, it was possible to go beyond the pasting together of canned loops and actually compose a melody with the MIDI-esque software instruments. The answer is yes, though it's obviously not what the program was primarily designed for. There's an awkward on-screen piano keyboard palette that you can dink on with the mouse. No human being could play this at a reasonable speed (and it's obviously impossible to play chords), but that's not an insurmountable limitation, since there is also a track editor. This displays the notes you played, not in conventional musical notation, but as little rectangles on something resembling a player piano roll, with time on the horizontal axis and pitch in a chromatic scale on the vertical. (Apparently this is a popular interface for digital music software.) You can then drag notes in both dimensions, copy them to make chords, snap them to the time intervals of your choosing, and vary their lengths and keystroke velocities. The notes play when you click on them, so the way they sound is not left entirely to the imagination while you're editing them. You can control the speed of the whole track, and also control how the volume of a track or of the entire piece varies over time, and move tracks around in the stereo space, and probably do lots of other stuff I don't understand.
So even without a MIDI instrument or any ability to play one, it's possible to stumble your way through a rough melody on the keyboard and then turn it into something resembling music. In this way, I managed to produce a track of piano and a track of fakey-sounding strings, and then added a canned drum loop out of the library. I'd kind of like the ability to just start with the track editor, but if that's possible, I haven't figured out how to do it yet; you have to have some notes to start with. I suppose you could play one note on the keyboard and then spawn all the other notes from that one ancestral Ur-note. There also seem to be some occasional small interface bugs with the editing process, though nothing crippling; once in a while it can be hard to get a dragging operation to take. The recent 1.0.1 update seems to be better in this regard than 1.0, though I could be imagining things.
I was interested to hear
jwgh's positive reaction to GarageBand, since I've heard disdainful and/or fearful reactions to it from some musicians; they either see it as some sort of threat, or as a useless toy, or both (which makes no sense to me since it seems that one would preclude the other: the essay I linked to can be summarized as "GarageBand is evil because amateurs pasting loops together will put us all out of work, except that that won't happen because the music wouldn't be any good, but because I just thought that might happen it's evil anyway"). The usual reaction seems to be that anyone who actually knows something about music has already paid more money for some more serious music software, and the only people remaining are people like me who won't be able to do anything interesting with it anyway. But Jake seems to be a counterexample.The obvious analogy already made by many is that it's the audio equivalent of low-end consumer desktop publishing software: it didn't make graphic designers obsolete, and most of the people using it produced wretched clip-art-infested results, but it still has its place.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 04:55 am (UTC)(I wonder if there were professional writers who had the same reaction to USENET or Livejournal?)
Whereas I think that the more people making music the better. (I was raised by folkies, you understand.) Sure, what they record may not be particularly great (lord knows my stuff isn't), but if it brings them and their family pleasure, that's a good thing! Garage Band encourages the making of music rather than the passive consumption of it, and anything that concentrates peoples' attention on that end of it is a good thing, in my opinion, and can ultimately only be good for the music world in the end.
And I think it'll be great for someone who's learning a musical instrument if they can set up a drum beat and maybe a chord progression and play along with it for as long as they want.
I am not quite the target demographic for Garage Band, because I already had a multitrack recorder and some software I used for most of the Interrobang Cartel stuff on the first CD, but I'm pretty close, and the advantages I see to it for me (as opposed to the more abstract stuff above) is that it lets me easily record multiple tracks, add a drum part and bass line (since I wouldn't know to start with a drum set and don't own a bass guitar), change the relative volumes of the various tracks, and export to an mp3, all in one piece of software. And it's cheap; there's no realistic chance that I would have ever shelled out for professional recording software (in fact the $50 price for iLife made it pretty iffy as to whether I was going to get Garage Band).
I do think that the looping thing is interesting. Through no particularly conscious choice the two Interrobang Cartel projects I've put together since getting Garage Band (one hasn't been 'released' yet) have been one-cord loopy things. To a large extent that's because Garage Band makes it pretty easy to make these -- you program your pattern and then click and drag and, bam, you've got fifty copies of it, and putting in other patterns with other chords would require actual, you know, effort -- but I think also because Garage Band allows me to do more complex things (add a fake horn part, control the drum line more closely, add in another keyboard part) that I concentrate on that aspect of it and pay less attention to other aspects of the piece, such as harmonic structure. As I become more used to it and this stuff becomes easier for me to hold in my brane I think this will be less the case.
The guy whose article you linked to suggested that the musicians who recorded the loops are the ones who deserve the credit for any musical merit peoples' compositions have, and I think there is something to that, although it's not like studio musicians ever get huge amounts of credit on most recordings you hear. And of course there's the concern that your piece of music will sound exactly like everyone else's. My plan is to try to minimize my reliance on the built-in loops for these reasons, although I may change my mind again. We'll see.
I've been doing more with the MIDI stuff in the past few days. (This past weekend I moved around a bunch of stuff in my apartment so that my computer is now right next to my keyboard, which allows me to play the keyboard through the computer to the reasonably nice speakers I have hooked up to the computer, which makes it all a lot nicer.) It's going to be fun to continue to fool around with it, and though most of the stuff I record will probably be of interest to me and maybe some people who know me I'm still looking forward to it a lot. Whee!
no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 06:18 am (UTC)several, and they're all named "Harlan Ellison".
incidentally, I think a lot of the same arguments surface about machinima.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-18 02:04 pm (UTC)I know that the coming of cheap PC-based word processors was an immensely disruptive event in the world of writing. For me, encountering them as a kid just a few years after I had gotten interested in writing (while I was daunted by the sheer mechanical difficulty of writing in longhand or on typewriters), they were immensely liberating. I just read Bruce Sterling's recent preface to his early novel Schismatrix in which he described his adoption of a word processor as a transforming experience that made the novel possible for him. But at the time, I also remember reading lots of grumpy articles about the downside: in particular, what some literary critics felt was an explosion of excessively long, padded books, and the loss of rewriting discipline that arose from the elimination of the need to retype multiple drafts all the way through. I'm sure that slushpiles expanded exponentially in size around that time, though I haven't seen data on this.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-18 03:10 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-18 02:39 pm (UTC)It's kind of nice to get partway back to a world in which this is a significant part of the appreciation of music. (Which I suppose ties into stuff
One of my other favorites is a song that I accidentally discovered that is by some random guys I never heard of on the Internet, and I'm probably this song's only fan. It is the Joe Shlabotnik of songs. I have this on my playlist in between songs by the Rolling Stones and the White Stripes, and it fits perfectly.
I suppose that if you wanted to extract a hand-wringing complaint out of this, you could worry that it is a sign of the fragmentation of society and the loss of a common cultural canon that might otherwise unite the world. Whereas if the opposite happened it would be the suppression of creativity in favor of mass-produced pablum. It's always convenient to find a slippery slope that slips downward in both directions.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 06:13 am (UTC)... that does the exact same thing. that's the part that makes me laugh at the musical jeremiahs.
I like KeyKit, which doesn't do loops or audio mixing (but then, Audacity,) but does do MIDI piano-roll-style editing and also MIDI generation out the yin-yang, although it has one of the worst interfaces ever and it really scares James Vandenberg. but I used KeyKit to do all the music on my version of "Rewind", and I think it sounds great, except for the singing, which is the one part that didn't involve a computer tool.
oh, and also: I am unbearably happy that you used the phrase "ancient Ur-note".