Guitar Gear

For those of you who’ve known me for a long time, I’ve been a PC devotee for as long as I can remember, and used to scoff at the Mac as being a toy. But a few months ago, I decided to try out a MacBook Pro at my previous job, and what I thought would never happen happened. I fell in love with the Mac. I have to say that it really boils down to falling in love with OSX, which is an incredibly usable operating system. Anything before that, I’d still be scoffing at the Mac as being a toy. There were lots problems with OS9, and I just didn’t like the interface. But with the new version of the OS, it’s just incredible! But I digress…

To make a long story short, my former company closed its doors 3 months after I arrived – yikes! But the fortunate thing for me was that I had to opportunity to get some equipment in the company’s fire sale. I ended up with two G5 iMacs, and real nice Dell laser printer.  Included with my iMacs is a nice little music composition program called Garage Band. I’ve been playing around with it for a couple of days, and I just love it! It doesn’t have the features of my ProTools, but for spec’ing out songs, it is incredible!

Central to Garage Band is the ability to drag and drop loops onto the workspace to create the foundation for a song. It’s a very easy process. You can drop guitar loops, organ loops, percussion and bass loops – there’s lots to choose from, and within minutes you can have a full song constructed on your workspace. Then you can add your own instruments by plugging direct into your Mac, or using the built-in microphone (not really recommended as it’s a very sensitive condenser mic and it picks up EVERYTHING).

For instance, this evening, I got an idea for a new song. I browsed around the loops till I found an acoustic guitar, bass, and percussion loops that I liked, dropped them onto my workspace, and arranged pitch and tempo as needed. Then I plugged my ES-335 directly into my iMac using a 1/4″ to 1/8″ adapter cable. Now here’s the cool thing about plugging directly into your Mac: Garage Band comes with built-in amp modelers and effects such as a noise gate, reverb and even delay. There’s even two manual slots available to add distortion and specific types of amp models. As to the amp models, they’re not all that good, but they get the general idea across. I wanted to get kind of a Tube Screamer effect on top of a clean amp, and with a couple of clicks, I had it.

The great thing about Garage Band for me is that I now spend less time getting the foundations of a song laid down, and can concentrate on my compositional ideas. Looks like I’m going to have lots of late night dates with my iMac… 🙂