Jacking my strat into GarageBand to take the latest version for a spin reminded me of why I fell in love with this music software in the first place. It's a barrel of fun.
With the huge range of preset guitar effects and some new ones in the latest version I can switch from being Jimi Hendrix to Joe Pass to Carlos Santana to ZZ Top to, well, pretty much any guitar hero I can think of. Not saying I can play as well as those guys but being able to borrow their sound button kinda gets me half way there.
As with iMovie '11, the new version of GarageBand doesn't take giant leaps forward but it does bring some new features that will be appreciated by those who are musically trained or at least care a lot about small details. The two new tools for fixing timing, Flex Time and Groove Matching, are each wonderfully simple solutions for beats and notes that aren't sitting quite the way they should be.
Flex Time is my favourite. If a musician recording a live instrument track strays off tempo, Flex Time makes it a doddle to select the offending note(s) in the timeline and shift it back in to place. This is a whole lot easier than repeating a take to fix one poorly timed note. Some care should be taken not to make your timing worse. It is a little too easy to shunt notes about.
My biggest problem using Flex Time was viewing a real instrument waveform in the editor, which didn't scale sufficiently large to tell which part of the track was being selected. This appears to be a bug, because software instrument waveforms scaled large for easy editing as one would expect.
Having to download the help pages added a bit of frustration to trying to solve this issue, though there was no solution I could find. (And what's with this downloading help files? It's in place across the iLife suite. Did Apple sneak this in with iLife '11 or was it always there?)
Groove Matching applies the beat of a selected track as the master beat into which all other tracks must conform. In testing, I found this works brilliantly for pulling multiple canned loops into time. However, add a live instrument and the matching isn't quite so automagical but it still helps a lot. Combine it with Flex Time and you have powerful but simple and fun to use solutions to fixing timing problems.
This is no small beer. If you've done your best to lay down a live track and it still sounds naff, it could be that timing and tuning are a bit off. Being able to fix them is very appealing.
New additions to the Lesson Store are welcome but certainly overdue. Apple is making too little effort to populate the Lesson Store in between version releases of GarageBand and this is disappointing.
And while the new lesson components provide a non-threatening way to learn new techniques and develop skills, they place quite the burden on bandwidth. The "Hammers, Pulls and Slides" lesson of the Blues Guitar lesson series, for instance, is 647MB. Why not a smaller version of the lesson for those few who are far from both a guitar teacher and a broadband connection?
If you can easily manage the downloads, there are some good lessons to be had. I enjoyed Sting's Roxanne lesson as much as I enjoyed learning Fragile under his tutelage in a previous version of GarageBand. However, I sure would like to see a few more lessons from top artists on offer.
