With Apple’s free GarageBand app, you can start making professional‑sounding music right away. Plug in your guitar or mic and choose from a jaw‑dropping array of realistic amps and effects. You can even create astonishingly human‑sounding drum tracks and become inspired by thousands of loops from popular genres like EDM, Hip Hop, Indie, and more.
Steve Jobs announced GarageBand in his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco on January 6, 2004.
The last major update (not counting minor bug fixes) to GarageBand for the Mac was in 2013, but you wouldn’t know it when you fire up Apple’s iconic DAW, short for Digital Audio Workstation. Inside, the interface is as simple as it’s always been — a kind of modular and rectangular consensus of how any modern music production software should look.
But once you start peeling back layers of the GarageBand onion, you begin to see just how much functionality is hidden in that simple form…
GarageBand is not a professional-level DAW. If you’re a pro sound engineer, you don’t need me of all people to tell you that Pro Tools is still, for the foreseeable future, the industry standard.
But if you’re not a pro, GarageBand has a lot going for it, and even if it’s not quite at the level of sophistication you want to record your music, it’s impossible not to admire as a piece of (technically) free software that comes on basically every Mac (and iPhone and iPad if that’s your flavor) you can buy today.
MacDailyNews Take: As Pero discusses in the full article, GarageBand’s Drummer, the virtual session player created using the industry’s top session drummers and recording engineers, is the real star of the show. Drummer features 28 different drummers and three percussionists. From Pop, Rock, EDM, Dubstep, and Hip Hop to Metal, Latin, and Blues, whatever beat your song needs, there’s an incredible selection of musicians to play it.
Fun fact: Rihanna’s Umbrella used a drum loop from the Apple GarageBand (Vintage Funk Kit 03). The loop was tweaked into the song which hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a 2008 Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration in addition to receiving nominations for Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
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