Make sweet music on your Mac with Garageband

Every two weeks, East Idaho News brings you Creative Tech, a column by Robert Patten on how to use technology to increase your creativity.

If you had an unlimited number of guitarists and drummers at your disposal, what would you do?

How about an orchestra? A choir? Here’s what I did:

If you are a Mac user, you can do the same by downloading Garageband for free or cheap.

If you have ever used iMovie, you’ll understand Garageband in short order. You can figure out a lot of it on your own and consult tutorials or Google when you get stuck.

Everyone can use Garageband — even if you don’t consider yourself a musician. It comes preloaded with loops – clips that last a few measures that you can expand to go on for as long as you like. Have them play on different tracks and go to town. And if you feel like making up your own melodies, you don’t even need a MIDI keyboard – Garageband will let you use your computer keyboard. (See picture below.)

Here’s an example of what you can do with the loops that came with Garageband. My wife, kids (ages 6 and 9) and I put it together for a family activity. I think it sounds like a short sci-fi space battle.

Here’s another loopy song. I made my own loops and placed a simple melody on top:

Funky Dragon Warriors by Robert Patten

But Garageband isn’t perfect.

For one, it’s only available on Apple platforms. (Check out the version for iOS here.) And depending on what you want to do with it, you might come up against a limitation that will make you consider buying Garageband’s big brother, LogicPro X, for $200. But you should probably stick with Garageband until you hit an insurmountable wall. There’s no sense in paying a good deal of money for a hobby you’re trying out.

Garageband also suffers from lack of instrument selection out of the box.

Although you can hook up your music keyboard to you computer via USB, the instruments on your keyboard will not transfer over. (Simple explanation: Your keyboard is sending data about the notes you’re playing, not the audio itself.) Once upon a time, you had to shell out $100 or $200 to buy collections of instruments and loops called Jam Packs. Fortunately, those days are over, but it’s not as straight-forward. You have to download another application, MainStage. Once you buy MainStage for $30, all those instruments are yours.

When you have a wide selection of instruments, you can combine them in new and interesting ways. The song below has features a harpsichord, a grand piano, synthetic strings, and a cathedral organ. Throw some percussion in, and it rocks:

You can also explore what a single instrument can do. I combined four kinds of pianos here:

In addition, you can record your own voice (or “real” instruments for that matter). I’ll spare you the agony of my singing.

I think it would be great to someday put together a soundtrack for a movie or video game — but so far, playing with Garageband has been its own reward.

Regardless of what you want to create or whatever you perceive as your musical talent, I promise you are in for an adventure. Garageband can start you out on a journey that will take you to the stars and beyond:

If you create an awesome song on your computer, send it my way on Facebook. I may feature it in a future column.