The release of an iPhone version of Apple's music creation app GarageBand quickly followed the arrival of a loaner 4S which, coupled with that phone's fab new camera and iMovie, meant the iPhone could be a complete mobile audio and video production studio, right? Wrong.
My excitement over having all this creative power in my shirt pocket was short lived. Turns out there's no way to export a song created in GarageBand directly to iMovie on the iPhone to use in an audio track. Here I was thinking you could be the consummate vlogger with nothing more than an iPhone in your toolkit. Shoot it, edit it, voiceover it, and create your own music before uploading to a sharing site of your choice. Cool! No, really … doesn't that sound cool?
Except to get your GarageBand song into iMovie, you have to export the song to iTunes. This sounds easy enough, except the export doesn't happen when you sync with iTunes. You have to select the apps pane in iTunes, select GarageBand, highlight the song you exported, save it to wherever, import it to iTunes, then sync with your iPhone. Seriously? Apple, what the… ?
This is such a shame because GarageBand for iPhone is otherwise brilliant. Sure, it's cut down a lot from the desktop version. That's to be expected. If Apple had tried to cram the desktop version into an iPhone app it would bring the handheld hardware to its knees, not to mention requiring a massive amount of storage space. At least, massive by iPhone standards. Yet, despite paring it down, Apple has managed to put more than enough features in to enable some impressive functionality.
There are tools sufficient to arrange a song structure, build a multi-track recording, add synth textures and sound effects, drums and other instruments, and export the song project to the desktop version if you want to further refine it. Here, in the palm of your hands, is a great app for fleshing out a song idea, complete with most, if not all, the instruments you need to complete that task.
If you're not an adept musician (I believe to get the best from GarageBand it pays to have some musical aptitude), you can turn to the "Smart" versions of instruments to help you get some kind of musical track together. For instance, I used the Smart Guitar to create a backing track for a short video featuring scenes from Port Adelaide. All that took was choosing one of the canned fingerpicking styles and tapping the required chord changes. A simple C, Em, Am, F, G progression sounded usable and, faded back into the mix on the video, provided an agreeable ambience. There you have it. Royalty-free music for your videos. Right there in the palm of your hands. Tell me that's not a great thing.
Well, yeah, OK, it would be great if exporting the song to iMovie were an option.
GarageBand can be more, though. It can be a fun way to doodle a bass line. A nifty way to experiment with guitar chord changes. A piano in your pocket with which you can create a melody. A great musician's companion.
A favourite feature of mine is the ability to edit the chords in Smart Guitar and other Smart Instruments. Not accustomed to how a Gsus2add9 sounds? Could it be the "magic" chord you need to add some sparkle or tension to your song? Try it out. See how it sounds between a major 7th and a relative minor chord. Don't like it? Well, at least now you know.
However, getting back to my initial moaning, another failing is there's no straightforward way to get a sample — by which I mean an audio sample captured with GarageBand's sampler tool — into your Mac. So here's a pocket-sized audio sampler from which you can't easily upload the samples to a desktop computer for use in another app? Not even if that app is GarageBand? Headslap!
Ah well, there are plenty of other neat tricks, such as being able to send audio to an AirPlay, Bluetooth or HDMI device. I didn't have any such device (still plodding along with an Apple TV 1, folks) so I couldn't try it. You can plug a guitar into it, too, with the appropriate headphone socket adaptor and record in multi-track, with effect pedals. You can experiment with pedal effects as well by stacking effects. Sweet.
Usability-wise, I found GarageBand for iPhone very stable and responsive on both an iPhone 4 and 4S. If you've used GarageBand on iPad, you'll be on familiar ground as it's that version that Apple has adapted to iPhone and I can't pick a difference between the two. If you've only used the desktop version of GarageBand, you'll need to remember the iPhone version isn't trying to be everything the desktop version is, so adjust your expectations and be ready to adapt.
While the limited screen real estate means some elements such as flipping between keyboard mode and sampling mode while using the sampler can be a bit frustrating, Apple has done a stellar job with the interface design and adaptation for iPhone. This is one of the best phone apps I've used. A poster child for iOS. Well done, Apple. Now, if you could just do something to make sharing songs and samples easy, or easier, or even possible in the case of samples, that would be truly awesome.
