Probably the thing that pinpoints why I like Garage Band and the guy you linked to doesn't is the phrase 'real musicians'. My mental image (which is unfair, but if you can't be unfair on Livejournal where can you be unfair) is of someone who thinks there is the select few, the REAL MUSICIANS, who are the only ones who can be entrusted with the making of music, and the others should just hang back and applaud and heaven forfend if they should so much as whistle.
(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!
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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!