Exhibit A: A GarageBand drum sequence in progress.
Rolling Stone has a fascinating read about GarageBand on the occasion of its 15th birthday. Fascinating for me, at least, because I use the software every single day. Mainly as a practice tool: Rather than use an amp at home, I plug my bass into my laptop and listen to myself on headphones. This makes it very easy to play along with songs and demos, and especially to record and listen back to myself as a way to better understand and improve my performance. (Practice via self-recording is a key takeaway from one of my favorite blogs, by the opera timpanist Jason Haaheim.)
The thesis of the Rolling Stone article is that GarageBand has democratized music by making the means of production accessible to the masses, but that this has come at the expense of music becoming more homogeneous. My take: Sure, a lot of people, including pop stars, can and do use the loops that come prepackaged with the software. But stock loops are just the beginning. GarageBand lets you create so many of your own sounds, and the palette is expanding all the time.
Exhibit B: Susanne.
My band has been without a full-time drummer for a few years now, but rather than let that bum me out I decided early on to use GarageBand and our trusty JamMan loop pedal to make a substitute. I’ve gotten pretty good at building backbeats and fills, blending available drum samples and nudging beats ever so slightly off the grid to make what comes out sound almost like it was played by a real person on real wood, aluminum and polyethylene terephthalate.
We call our robot drummer Susanne. She never drops a stick and she never speeds up or slows down (unless we tell her to). She’s enabled us to keep up the high-volume rocking even in the absence of someone bashing a kit. Only trouble is, if we mess up, she can’t adapt.
Exhibit C: A template.
Exhibit D: A reconstruction.
Creating Susanne’s beats, I started pretty simple. Eventually I got a little obsessive recreating the performances of human drummers we’ve played with over the years. Sometimes I brought in other instruments — from pianos and synths to tablas, taiko drums, and a Persian santoor — to flesh out the backing tracks. GarageBand became my basement orchestra.
Perfecting all this audio down to the smallest detail was very satisfying for the Aspergian side of my brain. On the other hand, spending hours making microadjustments would always give me a megadose of self-loathing.
Nowadays, for my sanity’s sake — and thanks to the realization that my simulacra will never sound “real” — I’m working in another direction. These new percussion sequences ought to embrace their artificiality. I’m still figuring out what that means and what it sounds like.
As to the notion that GarageBand constrains music? The opposite has been true in my experience.
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