Hi everyone!
Today I'd like to write a little about my history in music recording, how I finally ended up with the almighty Garage Band and why does absolutely everything I need.
Recording music is a difficult field for me. Generally, there are not too many aspects about a recording software that I truly need. Yet, there are one or two requirements that are absolutely essential:
- Quickness: When I've got an idea for something I want to record, I need to do it fast. I need to flick a few switches to get my gear powered on anyway and I need something that boots up and is ready to record something quick and dirty in that time. If it takes much longer, I might have forgotten what it was that I originally wanted to record. It's happened before and it's 'orrible.
- Sensibility: After recording, I want to be able to roughly edit things, move them around a little until I like them and then produce a quick mixdown of what I have. I want to add new things easily and painlessly, edit or delete them again. If that takes too much work, I can't use that piece of software.
- Flexibility: Today, I might do a Rock song, tomorrow a classical soundtrack-like piece. I don't want software to push me into a certain direction so I need to be able to tweak and extend my recording software.
That's it, basically, and although it doesn't really sound like too much, I've made the experience that you can mostly pick two out of the three, sometimes even only one.
I started off on Windows using Magix Music Studio (yeah, I know, I was young, innocent and it was a present) which I kept for quite a while. I only ever used the MIDI part of it, because I couldn't figure out the audio editor part... Anyway, I got a simple Roland MIDI keyboard and played away.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the final say on the subject as a while later I realized that I spent way more time tweaking the MIDI file note by note (because either I didn't play the notes exactly enough or that freaking piece of s...oftware wasn't able to figure out what I intended to play), so it was time to move on.
Fast forward a couple of years to my early band years. I switched to Cakewalk Pro Audio on Windows. It was a lot closer to my needs (which I hadn't even defined at that time) and I recorded a lot of band material with it. I had gotten a 16 Port Firewire mixer which allowed me to record stuff with my notebook instead of my desktop PC - something that I've gotten incredibly used to by now.
Anyway, even Pro Audio didn't really fulfill the first requirement: Quickness. It took too much time to set things up, too much time in which my precious musical idea had already floated out the window.
Which brings us to the present: Garage Band. I bought a Macbook a while ago and with it came Garage Band and... well, I know it's a little cliché to say so but it really changed the way I record music.
Nowadays, I flip open my Macbook, enter my password, click the Garage Band icon, switch my gear on while it launches, connect my Firewire mixer, click two buttons and I'm ready to go in about a minute, busily humming the thing I want to record. And I haven't forgotten what that was ever since.
Now, don't get me wrong, Garage Band has quirks of its own (which I'm going to write about soon) and it's by no means a perfect product but it comes close, pretty close. It's quick, easy to use and extensible like hell. And that, dear Garage Band, is why I like you.
Dennis
