Andy Chase

The iLife applications have to be some of the most underused ones on my computer… Once I can figure out a way to easily get my photos out of iPhoto and into Movable Type I’ll be using iPhoto a lot more, but the thing that’s going to get me to drop $49 on the new iLife suite next week is GarageBand.I’ve been drinking the Apple kool-aid pretty much since I heard what OS X was all about a few years ago. It wasn’t until last spring that I actually got my hands on anything other than a floor model at Fry’s, and now with a PowerBook as my primary computer at home and at work the only place my fairly new PC has is running Linux and sharing our internet connection from the basement.

The iLife applications have to be some of the most underused ones on my computer… Once I can figure out a way to easily get my photos out of iPhoto and into Movable Type I’ll be using iPhoto a lot more, but the thing that’s going to get me to drop $49 on the new iLife suite next week is GarageBand.

As I watched the demo during yesterday’s Macworld keynote address, the recurring thought in my mind was

“Gah! What if they had this when I was a kid! How good I would be on electric guitar if I’d had something like this to practice against instead of buddies who only ever wanted to play ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Sunshine of your Love’!”

As a matter of fact, my parents did (after much pestering) buy me a program called Kawasaki Rhythm Rocker for our Commodore 64, which sort of did the same thing GarageBand does, on a much, much smaller and cruder scale; it had loops and a number of different instruments, and you could record your melody via the keyboard - there was even a plastic piano keyboard overlay you could buy that would fit over the C64. I believe the thing was even MIDI capable, if you had the proper MIDI processor (probably hundreds or thousands of dollars at the time) to plug into the RS232 port.

But, it was fairly limited, and suffered from lack of a way to record your finished pieces, and I suffered from a general lack of musical knowledge and probably a lack of patience.

So I’m pretty damn excited about GarageBand… the vintage amplifier feature is going to get me back on my electric guitar again, and it should be a great practice tool for banjo.