Garage band - major and minor issue! :-)

karavite

karavite

Registered
Dear Apple,

I just bought garage band (iLife 4) and after many years of being away from midi and all that stuff, I find some things great about garage band (wonderful quality loops and sound), but lacking in one area - musical sophistication. What I am saying here is there is more to mylife and music than vanilla major and minor chords for bass lines, pianos, guitars, horns...

How about a dominant 7 chord let alone major and minor 7th chords. What about diminished chords or augmented chords? While we are at it, how about 6th, 9th, 13th, minor 7b5, and a whole other range of "altered" chords common not just to jazz, but all music? Hey, people play jazz in the garage too you know - I used to!

Though it was a crude midi based program with a simply awful interface and produced cheesy output, Band-in-a-Box allowed users to input all these types of chords in any key and for any length of beats and would then generate the bass, piano, horn... tracks for those chords - in a range of musical styles (about 50 I think). Perhaps you could model something like that in future versions of Garage Band? I'm not saying it would be easy with sampled loops (you would need many more obviously), but it would be slick and far more impressive than what you have today. Analogy, if Garage Band were a word processor it would limit users to words of 3 or less syllables! We need a better vocabulary please!

In addition, Band in a Box, though again awful from a user perspective, also had an editor based more on score (with repeats, codas, A/B/C sections...) than a linear time line. I suppose the time line is a solid standard in sequencers, but GB isn't a sequencer! So, something like this score type editor/view might be a worthwhile option for those who, well, know how to read and write music or just think and work in established musical forms.
 
Though I agree with you, is GB really supossed to be that complex? Wouldn't you buy a higher quality MIDI program for that. I mean come on its only $49 and for that price you not only get GB which a heck of a program for $49 but also the rest of the iLife suite. If I had to list a complaint though it would have to be that it only supports 16 bit sound but i guess thats ok though because thats all you can get on a cd anyways.
 
Yep - all good points, so you have to come up with 999 other wrong things to say today to keep up on your stats! :)

I kind of think Apple's foray into this is "music making for the masses/the rest of us" and for those who want to wip out some tracks as a song or to play along with, Garage Band is a lot of effort. Band-in-a-Box was a cheap program by the way and it did all this in 1989 - and as far as I know it was very unique - instant (though cheesy sounding) music with drums, bass, piano... in any style you could think of and with all kinds of chords.

Maybe I am wrong, but I see Garage Band as more in line with this than a "sequencer lite" with samples. As it is now, the only useful loops are drums and percussion IF you are interested in laying down chord progressions. For example, say I wanted to practice some jazz standards and play along with my computer. There is no way I can easily input a chord progression, even for simple songs with a couple of 2-5-1s (Minor 7, Dominant 7, Major 7). And it isn't just jazz - I just tried to use GB to do a little version of the banjo playing Cripple Creek (C G and D major chords over and over) and transposing the banjo loops 1. sounds awful transposed too far up or down from C and 2. is a big pain to transpose those chords with a numeric slider - just let me say "C, G and D" please.

In summary, Garage Band should be simpler to use, but more flexible. It really doesn't let you create your own music or reproduce music easily (using the computer and loops). It does let you combine what they offer easily, and that may or may not be creative, but that is not the same thing. In short, what I want to do, GB cannot do.
 
You could use another SW to create MIDI files and then input these MIDI files in GB.
 
Good points also, I don't know if anybody has heard of this but macjams.com is a great GB resource. If your looking to make garage band a little more than it is they have great articles on how to do it.
 
Hi Chevy. Yes that is true too - I just thought GB would be a more "one stop shop" kind of program. I used to spend my life doing just that sort of thing with midi - using multiple programs so I could have my own little band to play and practice with (bass players are so unreliable!) - but the time spent on it, was for me, not worth the effort. The only program that could somewhat meet this kind of need was Band-in-a-box, but it's generated songs, though completely on in terms of chords and song structure with ease, sounded just too cheesy! So I would take midi files from it and clean them up in a sequencer.

I guess what I need is "Garage Band in a Box" and I think something like that would be really useful to anyone wanting to practice their instrument and playing with a "band." Practice time is hard enough to find! :)
 
Maybe next GB upgrade.... Apple will need some arguments for us to buy iLife'05, when iTunes is free and iPhoto will be free too (because of the photo capable iPod...)
 
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