FEATURE:
Music Technology Breakthroughs
Part Six: GarageBand
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AS I tend to do…
with this feature, I going to bring in some history regarding the music technology breakthrough I am focusing on - before going on to look at its legacy and importance. I want to quote heavily from Wikipedia, as it provides a nice history and background to the wonderful GarageBand:
“GarageBand is a line of digital audio workstations for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS devices that allows users to create music or podcasts. GarageBand is developed and sold by Apple for macOS, and is part of the iLife software suite, along with iMovie and iDVD. Its music and podcast creation system enables users to create multiple tracks with pre-made MIDI keyboards, pre-made loops, an array of various instrumental effects, and voice recordings
GarageBand was developed by Apple under the direction of Dr. Gerhard Lengeling. Dr. Lengeling was formerly from the German company Emagic, makers of Logic Audio. Apple acquired Emagic in July 2002.
Steve Jobs announced the application in his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco on January 6, 2004. Musician John Mayer assisted with its demonstration.[1] It is part of the iLife '04 package.
Apple announced GarageBand 2 at the 2005 Macworld Conference & Expo on January 11, 2005. It shipped, as announced, around January 22, 2005. Notable new features included the abilities to view and edit music in musical notation. It was also possible to record up to 8 tracks at once and to fix timing and pitch of recordings. Apple added automation of track pan position and the master pitch. Transposition of both audio and MIDI has been added by Apple along with the ability to import MIDI files. It is part of iLife '05.
GarageBand 3, announced at 2006's Macworld Conference & Expo, includes a 'podcast studio', including the ability to use more than 200 effects and jingles, and integration with iChat for remote interviews. It is part of iLife '06.
GarageBand 4, also known as GarageBand '08, is part of iLife '08. It incorporates the ability to record sections of a song separately, such as bridges, and chorus lines. Additionally, it provides support for the automation of tempos and instruments, the creation, and exportation of iPhone ringtones, and a "Magic GarageBand" feature which includes a virtual jam session with a complete 3D view of the Electric instruments.
GarageBand 5 is part of the iLife '09 package. It includes music instruction and allows the user to buy instructional videos by contemporary artists. It also contains new features for electric guitar players, including a dedicated 3D Electric Guitar Track containing a virtual stompbox pedalboard, and virtual amplifiers with spring reverb and tremolo. GarageBand 5 also includes a redesigned user interface as well as Project Templates.
GarageBand 6, also known as GarageBand '11, is part of the iLife '11 package, which Apple released on October 20, 2010. This version brings new features such as Flex Time, a tool to adjust the rhythm of a recording. It also includes the ability to match the tempo of one track with another instantly, additional guitar amps and stompboxes, 22 new lessons for guitar and piano, and "How Did I Play?", a tool to measure the accuracy and progress of a piano or guitar performance in a lesson.
Apple released GarageBand 10 along with OS X 10.9 Mavericks in October 2013. This version has lost Magic GarageBand and the podcast functionality.
Apple updated GarageBand 10 for Mac on March 20, 2014. Version 10.0.2 adds the ability to export tracks in MP3 format as well as a new drummer module, but removed support for podcasting; users with podcast files created in GarageBand 6 can continue to edit them using the older version.
GarageBand was updated to version 10.0.3 on October 16, 2014. This version included myriad bug fixes and several new features including a dedicated Bass Amp Designer, the introduction of global track effects and dynamic track resizing.
Apple released GarageBand 10.2 on June 5, 2017.
One can access GarageBand through Apple and, since its inception, it has been a go-to for many musicians. Whether recording basic tracks and demos or full recordings, its range of sounds and instruments provides a worlds of choice for artists. There is also a Lesson Store that was introduced for GarageBand '09 that allows users to see a lesson delivered by a music tutor in relation to various songs. I have been thinking about using GarageBand in a basic sense to get down some musical ideas as, even if you are not a skilled musician, you can create songs and collages.
I want to end by bringing in a couple of articles that look at the influence of GarageBand – where we hear from musicians and producers who feel it is a breakthrough and has changed their music. Red Bull wrote about GarageBand in 2019 on its fiftieth anniversary:
“Grimes famously recorded her first album for 4AD, 2012’s Visions, entirely on GarageBand. Rhianna’s hit Umbrella grew from the ‘Vintage Funk Kit 03’ GarageBand drum loop. Lana Del Rey has spoken about experimenting with the software early on in her career, and Björk has previously revealed she's used GarageBand for her DJ sets. Elsewhere, leftfield artists like Kelsey Lu and Julianna Barwick have also used the software in their sonic experimentations.
York-born songwriter and XL Recordings’ alum Lapsley makes warm, stripped-back electronic pop that’s rife with emotion. She released her debut album, Long Way Home, in 2016 and recalls using GarageBand on one of the first tracks she ever made, Station – the song which coincidentally kickstarted her career. She still uses the software as a tool. “If I’m trying to record something quickly or I’m feeling a bit bombarded with the number of plug-ins on Logic, I find GarageBand is a really good creative tool to just take it all away and try and figure stuff out,” she says. “It’s really important to be able to work with space and I think GarageBand enables you to have that space.”
Lapsley credits GarageBand with “opening the doors to her career” – doors which she says are so often shut to artists like herself with no prior experience of or connections to the London-centric music industry. “Sometimes it can feel in this industry that only rich people can make it, as everything costs so much money… I would encourage anyone who is interested in music production to start with a simple programme like GarageBand and work their way up,” she says. “I got a record deal from using GarageBand, it’s basically given me a career.”
Varg, a Swedish producer who co-runs the Stockholm-based label Northern Electronics, is also drawn to the streamlined nature of GarageBand. “I just find GarageBand really easy to use,” he says. “I use it like I have used tape recorders in the past. I record beats on my iPad and export to GarageBand on my computer – it’s easy to do that mix and match thing. I find joy in the limitations that it brings you.”
For Varg, snobbery about production has the potential to kill creativity and render musicians unproductive. “Of course, I can see the point of Logic or other DAWs for having those advanced effects, but if you’re just recording, then GarageBand is great. It’s nice because what you see is what you get – it’s like MS Paint. Maybe you won’t be able to find that warp function that you’re looking for, but maybe you don’t need that at the time. But maybe you just need to record some music that’s really fucking good”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Carrie Brownstein/PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn de Wilde/Riverhead Books
I think that many musicians use more sophisticated software and tools to put together music in a D.I.Y. fashion but, as so many artists are isolated and can benefit from the convenience and options on GarageBand’s new release, I think we will see it impacting more on music through this year. The final article is from Pitchfork who, in 2015, collected testimony from various artists and producers who have been affected by GarageBand:
"I know a lot of 'real musicians' prefer more advanced programs like Pro Tools or Logic," says Frances McKee, 49, of Scottish alt-rockers the Vaselines, "but I'm a part-time punk." When McKee and her Vaselines partner Eugene Kelly started making music together in the late ‘80s, the two were inseparable during the creative process. But the two were rarely in the same room while working on their 2010 comeback album, Sex With an X; they began to collaborate by sharing GarageBand files over email—a process McKee describes as "black magic." The experience hooked McKee on GarageBand as a songwriting tool, or a digital four-track. "Up until then I hated using computers," she says. "But [GarageBand] changed everything."
Carrie Brownstein shares McKee's sentiment. Earlier this year, the Sleater-Kinney guitarist told The Wall Street Journal that GarageBand is a songwriting tool she wishes she had when she was younger. Through the years, the program has become the tech-averse musician's way of crossing a digital divide where Pro Tools certifications, gear-talk at Guitar Center, and the coded gender of technology often blocks their path.
IN THIS PHOTO: Emily Lazar/PHOTO CREDIT: Adam Wolffbrandt
Until the advent of GarageBand and MySpace in the mid-2000s, female musicians were chained to an entire infrastructure designed by men, from recording, to distribution, to marketing. And while the "silent chuckle" Barwick refers to isn't explicitly by men, the fact is that the technical side of music is still largely a boys' club. "The feminist implication of GarageBand definitely encouraged a lot of my female friends to explore something that had previously seemed out of reach," says Dum Dum Girls' Dee Dee.
For Emily Lazar, the engineer behind Haim's Days Are Gone and Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City—as well as the first female mastering engineer to ever be nominated for a Record of the Year Grammy, for her work on Sia's "Chandelier"—the industry's quiet biases have always been more direct. "I could describe so many awful experiences," says Lazar, "but doing that would give the people that have behaved so offensively more attention than they deserve”.
I wanted to salute a technological and musical breakthrough that, like others, has not really dated. Like the iPod and vocoder, GarageBand has evolved and updated through the years. I think that it is invaluable and terrific for artists, producers and novices who either want to sketch out a song or just experiment and play around. Seventeen years after its release (the stable release, out 10.4.2 /, came out on 10th December, 2020), so many artists swear by the utility and practicality of GarageBand – something one might have imagined would be usurped or rendered old-fashioned in a modern technological age. I was keen to throw a salute to a musical tool that, for so many years, has been used and valued by people…
ALL around the world.