GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual

Chapter 1. Setting Up the Garage

GarageBand is a great name. It calls to mind all the great bands that began as amateur acts that rehearsed in some kid’s garage. The name suggests the homemade, independent nature of the music you’ll be making. It even carries overtones of the us-versus-them, little-guy-against-The-Man, counterculture spirit that Apple has always embraced.

The truth is, though, GarageBand is practically incapable of producing anything but professional, polished music—a far cry, that is, from the slightly out-of-tune, drum-heavy work of true first-time garage bands. That’s where the name isn’t such a slam dunk.

On the other hand, it’s catchier than “GarageDigitalRecordingStudio.”

This chapter introduces you to GarageBand. It teaches you how to play back music with GarageBand, and goes on to explain the difference between the two kinds of music the program works with (MIDI data and audio recordings). You’ll learn how to create new music in the following chapters.

Equipment Requirements

Here are the official Apple minimum requirements for GarageBand:

• A Mac whose processor is a 600MHz G3 or faster. True, but you can’t use the Software Instruments (see Section 1.7) unless you have a G4 or later chip.

• Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later. Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) is ideal.

• 256 megabytes of memory. Well, you might be able to record “Chopsticks” with two fingers with this much memory. But if you expect to create compositions much more elaborate than that, 512 MB is the bare minimum. A gigabyte ...