Why Apple’s iPad with GarageBand will be my creation device of choice for music and songwriting
I get that GarageBand has the best UI of any iPad app ever built. Laid back music? Sure. It’d just never be music creation device of choice.
I disagree with this, not because there will suddenly be loads of bands using iPad GarageBand to create a new album (there will be one or two, purely for the gimmick, hoping to propel themselves into the day’s news), but because your ‘device of choice’ depends on your circumstances and way of working.
I’ve been writing and recording music since the 1990s, using the Project Noise moniker for well over a decade. I have a new, comically delayed album in the works, for which I’ve mostly used GarageBand to record and produce. (Despite what some people might think, GarageBand is a powerful piece of software, akin to Logic Express Lite, and it’s great if you avoid loops and concentrate on recorded audio and MIDI.) However, GarageBand is on my work Mac, which is inevitably used for work purposes. Distractions are many, and while I’ve spent something like two years tinkering with my new album, I haven’t written much new material on the Mac in that time.
Enter NanoStudio. Blip Interactive’s mini recording studio for the iPhone was a revelation. I’ve always been the person who got the idea for a song while walking along a street or watching TV, not while sitting in front of the Mac. Hundreds of songs have been lost to poor memory over the years, and scribbling down a beat or trying to sing a tune into a dictaphone really isn’t optimal. NanoStudio, on the other hand, enables you, through its fantastic interface, to rapidly get a song sketch down. You can overlay drums, bass, samples and synth lines, using live playing and pattern writing, and the entire lot can later be spat out in various formats. I’ve noticed that even when I’m at home, the iPhone (with NanoStudio) has become my ‘creation device of choice’, because I’m more relaxed and creative when lying on the sofa, noodling around with a focused app, than I am sitting bolt upright in front of my office Mac.
This is where I see GarageBand for iPad fitting into my musical creativity. NanoStudio already works brilliantly in 2x mode on the iPad, and GarageBand offers an additional means of getting ideas down. To that end, I’ll be shocked if the iPad doesn’t become my ‘creation device of choice’ for music. It will be where I work on and evolve riffs, creating song stubs that can then be developed and fully produced back on the Mac. To that end, I’m echoing Steve Jobs’s thoughts, in that the Mac becomes the workhorse—the ‘truck’ of music creation, primarily for weighty tasks and production. But the iPad is where the creative spark will happen, and this will increasingly be the case across all kinds of artistic and expressive fields, not just music.
The Gorillaz have already created an album using the Ipad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(Gorillaz_album)
Yeah, but they used a whole bunch of apps, rather than just GarageBand. “We used GarageBand” will be the hook for at least one band, to try and get in the headlines. Still, The Gorillaz thing only further proves the point about creativity versus media consumption on these devices—if you have the apps, you can do both.
Great article. I downloaded GarageBand yesterday and was very impressed with it. I dont know how to play any instruments but this app makes you want to learn and helps you along the way.