GarageBand - page 4

If you dig creating fresh beats and smooth grooves on your Mac, you’ll likely love GarageBand. It’s a fantastic bit of musical creation kit for anyone, regardless of native ability or experience. You can use loops to make new songs, play your own music with MIDI keyboards–even make your own ringtones for your iPhone. It’s quite versatile.

When you download GarageBand from the Mac App Store, you’ll immediately get 50 sounds, 500 loops, 1 drummer, and 2 basic lessons for guitar and piano. Likely, though, you want the full package, which is available as a free download that expands the content to 200 sounds, 2,000 loops, 15 drummers, and 40 basic lessons for guitar and piano.

Here’s how to get it.

Apple Man, the “sickest” drummer on virtual skins, added black nail polish to his fast-flying fingers in his latest YouTube video to display his iPad-pounding prowess.

We never see his face, so there’s no telling whether he went full Marilyn Manson with the makeup when he produced a drum cover video on Feb. 26, drumming on the iPad to the song, The Beautiful People.

Apple Man of Japan prefers to remain anonymous, but as you can probably tell by the name, he is a fan of Apple products. He is always willing to share his drumming passion with Cult of Mac readers.

Apple has turned even the most modest weekend strummer into a guitar hero.
This week in Cult of Mac Magazine, our games editor and disco band frontman (!) Rob LeFebvre takes you on a magical mystery tour of Garageband’s latest and greatest features. He’ll walk you through a shiny new piece of kit called Drummer, plus get you ringtone making and learning from the pros in the Lessons store.

Rob has also kept his ear to the ground for all the other great gear you need to make your homegrown music making hit the right notes and, well, sound better. And definitely louder. Whether you’re rocking at home or taking your iPad with you on stage.

So. The beat goes on with Charlie Sorrel sifting through MacBook stands to single out the best, plus his picks for the best Apple-related gear and Buster Hein’s top choices from iTunes for music, books and movies you’ll be grooving to all week.

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While the latest version of Apple’s fantastic (and free!) music production suite, GarageBand, has lost some functionality like podcasting and Magic GarageBand, it still has plenty to recommend it for those new to music or old vets alike.

One of these cool features is the Learn to Play function, which has some pretty good basic music tutorials baked right in, along with the capability to purchase videos from hit artists like Sting and Norah Jones, who teach you how to play some of their famous songs.

It’s a pretty heady set of music learning; here’s how to access it. Getting really good at your instrument will take more than watching a video or three, but this is a great start if you want to try your hand at the guitar or piano.

Apple has updated Garageband for Mac today with the ability to export songs as MP3s, a feature that was removed in the big redesign of Garageband last fall.

Other changes include:

MIDI Guitar for GarageBand is a Mac app (remember those?) that turns your guitar into a MIDI controller for, well, for any instrument you like. Thus you can thrash away on your axe like the heavy metal rock god you are, and have the sound emerging from the speakers be a plinking, ringing triangle.

If you’re a user of the new, improved GarageBand 10 for OS X, you may want to head over to the Mac App Store to download the latest free update.

GarageBand is already the best prosumer music creation and recording app out there. Today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Apple showed off the newest feature for creating your own music: Drummer.

Holy crap, does this raise the bar for anyone using GarageBand out there.

Apple’s obviously not going to rest until all of their appshave gone flat, and the next obvious contenders are the icons for Apple’s App Store apps, including the iWork suite, iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband. But what will they look like? Wonder no longer: Apple accidentally leaked their new icons on the official built-in apps page for the iPhone 5s.

Apple has pushed out updates for its three iLife for iOS apps today that includes a number of compatibility fixes. iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand for iOS were all updated with compatibility fixes, while GarageBand also received some minor bug fixes for performance and stability.

With the official iOS 7 launch just weeks away, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is prepping the apps to play nice with the new OS, although we expect the icons and UI to get a redesign shortly after iOS 7 comes out.

Source: iTunes

By now, you’ve probably see Commander Chris Hadfield’s tear-jerking farewell to the International Space Station: a cover of David Bowie’s classic space song, Space Oddity, filmed and performed by Hadfield himself in zero-g. In case you haven’t, we’ve embedded it above: it’s hard not to be proud of humanity after watching it.

But do you know how Hadfield actually recorded it? With his iPad, of course.

Apple has released a big update to GarageBand for iOS that brings support for Audiobus, an iOS app that routes audio between other apps. This means that GarageBand can record and work with other music creation apps from the App Store. You could make a beat in DM1 and bring it right into a multi-track GarageBand project, for instance.

In this latest version of GarageBand you can “turn off grid snapping to get finer control over region and note editing.” A feedback issue has also been resolved.

GarageBand costs $5 in the App Store.

Source: App Store

Apple has posted two new iPad ads to its official YouTube channel that highlight the device’s expansive app catalog. Called “Alive” and “Together,” the videos use the iPad and the iPad mini to showcase some of the 300,000 apps available through the App Store, including iBooks, GarageBand, iPhoto, FaceTime, TED, and more.

Apple is on the hunt for two senior software engineers that will join its iLife development team to “re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work.” Both positions, which were posted to the vacancies page of Apple’s website, are based at the company’s Cupertino headquarters, and indicate Apple is working to overhaul the iLife software suite, which consists of GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto.

Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.

From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for the whining kids in your life.

Android users got a bit of a surprise over the weekend when they opened up Google Play to find a number of popular Apple apps had been ported to their devices. Apps like Garageband, iMovie, iPhoto, and the iWork productivity suite were all available to download for a brief period before they were pulled again.

Those who managed to purchase them before they disappeared, however, quickly found out that they were not the real thing. Surprise, surprise.

How well do you know GarageBand? Heck have you even launched GarageBand? How about a little freebie to get you started?—Become a Rocker With GarageBand : Learn How to Make a Song in 1 Hour For Free

Really, what is there to lose? Let your inner rock star out…

When iOS 6 rolls out tomorrow, you be able to download all five of Apple’s free iOS apps — including iBooks, iTunes U, Podcasts, Find My Friends, and Find My iPhone — with just one tap from the new App Store. The Cupertino company has introduced a new ‘Apple Apps’ page that greets first-time App Store users, and it features a button that will install all five apps at once.

Let’s say you want to program, oh, everything. Websites, responsive-design websites, iOS games, and iOS apps. Then let’s through in, just for kicks and giggles, Ruby and PS6. Cool?

This is hours and hours of classes. If you take classes the “traditional” way in a classroom, getting through all this will take a while. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for in-person classes (I teach them myself), but I’m also a big fan of self-paced, online courses that let you learn at your pace and on your own terms/time.

This is why I like these bundle deals for courses. Like the Programming Bootcamp we kick off today.

The Tiki, from Blue Mic ($59), is a compact USB microphone designed to give you great audio for Skype calls and voice notes in rooms with even moderate ambient noise. And while Blue is known for creating mics that sound as good as they look, the Tiki’s beauty is only skin deep.

Redditor GrandHarbler is a musician and music teacher. He took to the popular social news sharing site today to start a conversation about how the iPad has improved his own practice, teaching, and music learning workflow.

As a musician, GrandHarbler has to practice every day. A lot. He works on goals that he times with an app called TaskMatrix, setting up 25 minute on and 5 minute off practice intervals called Pomodoros. He times them with a simple timer app, called 30/30.

GarageBand for OS X changed the way us mere mortals create great music on their Macs. Included with all new Macs or available in the Mac App store for $15, it gives musicians from the brand new to the seasoned veteran a way to record all kinds of music, connecting real instruments, MIDI devices, and microphones to your Mac for easy music sessions. It also does some other cool things, which we’ll tell you about right now.

GarageBand is not only a full featured recording studio, a highly capable MIDI synth station, an electronica musician’s dream, or a place to record full songs without a day of music lessons. It’s also fantastic software for podcasting. GarageBand makes creating a podcast easy and fun.

Back in the heady days of the early 2000s, I recorded and distributed a podcast of my own, called The ANC Podcast. It was a short internet radio show that focused on local music in Anchorage, Ak, where I had recently relocated to. I spent some time working on the craft of creating a podcast, and let me tell you, GarageBand makes it much easier than it really has any right to be. Most of the podcasters I know use a Macintosh and GarageBand to get their internet audio show on, including the Insomnia Radio Daily Dose, The Portable Podcast, and The Touch Of Gaming Podcast, just to name (drop) a few.

GarageBand for Mac OS X is a full recording studio for your Mac. It allows musicians to connect microphones, guitars, basses, and other instruments for a fully analog recording session. It has MIDI playback and recording capabilities as well, allowing anyone with a MIDI capable keyboard to record right along with those instruments.

One of the less-touted features, however, is the Loops section. GarageBand comes with pre-recorded MIDI and sampled audio that fit together in various ways. Without knowing to play a single instrument, you can create amazing sounding music with GarageBand, simply using Loops.

With GarageBand for the iPad, Apple has brought an inexpensive, very powerful music recording studio right to your favorite mobile device. This fantastic $5 app lets anyone with an iPad create, record and enjoy making music, even if they have little experience with recording software or musical instruments.

With a killer beat in place, it’s time to add the second (mostly unsung) hero of modern music: the bass. Whether your tastes run to big, fat and bottom-heavy or quick, snappy and distorted, GarageBand has you covered. With GarageBand for iPad, you can create bass tracks that sound incredibly good with very little knowledge or expertise.

Let’s take a look at the simplest way to do that: Smart Bass.