Apple recently celebrated the 15th anniversary of GarageBand with a retrospective highlighting the highlights of the software. Now, to mark again the anniversary of Ma's music production application, the Rolling stone published a very nice report bringing backstage details and some interesting curiosities.
According to industry author Amy X. Wang, this is the first time Apple has allowed "outside elements" to enter its GarageBand labs. Understandable: Since its introduction in 2004 when Steve Jobs stated that the software's goal was to “democratize music production”, his skills have been honed in a way that several first-time artists routinely use the app as part of their creative process. /professional.
That was always the idea that motivated the creation of GarageBand, incidentally. As Ma Vice President of Global Marketing Phil Schiller told us:
GarageBand came up in 2004 as an experiment of what we could do with computers. Later, when we were working on the first iMac and thinking about how the world was about to change, we were inspired by the idea of ​​a new kind of software that would connect everything that was about to appear. Maybe someday the next John Lennon will discover his talent using the computer that he had as a child at Christmas.
Taking this philosophy to the next level, Apple's "music labs", located in an anonymous building a few miles from Apple Park, spend weeks trying to perfectly capture each note of each instrument. A particularly significant example is the American double bass:
In digital playback of an American double bass, the musician in the studio plays a note and holds his breath for seven seconds to ensure that there is no additional noise in the recording while the sound travels through the air (engineers created a custom app to record the duration). precisely). He then repeats this process at various finger positions, volumes and pressures, day after day. After exhausting the possibilities of each instrument, the team looks over the hundreds of recordings to choose the best ones. When they recently added a series of East Asian instruments, engineers consulted designers around the world to choose the right color of wood and the right font for a guzheng Chinese as authentic as possible.
The advances in GarageBand are so remarkable that even though it is not a reportedly professional product (Apple has the $ 200 Logic Pro for high-level tasks), it is routinely used by many artists. As stated by music producer Mike Elizondo:
Some people do we gave So good at GarageBand that they bring something here and I say "we can use 80% of that in the final recording if you want". Sometimes an artist brought in a GarageBand recorded vocal with just a laptop microphone, and it sounds so good. Skylar Gray does that a lot. Alex Greenwald from Phantom Planet and Phases I made a recording with him since at least half of things had been done at GarageBand.
Other first-time performers such as Rihanna, Radiohead, T-Pain, St. Vincent, Fall Out Boy, and Kendrick Lamar use GarageBand for a variety of purposes, whether it's doodling a song, producing a final recording, or even releasing it. samples on the internet for fans and DJs to play with their music.
Schiller notes what he hopes will be the key element in GarageBand's progress: machine learning. He hopes that the techniques will help the user get things done faster and more accurately, but as expected, he didn't want to elaborate the thought.
Sounds promising, doesn't it?
via AppleInsider
