Back when I was in high school I was very interested in creating electronic music. I remember going through dozens of different kinds of software and virtual synthesizers. I had a small old Yamaha keyboard that I would use to play more than should’ve been possible on such a simple instrument. We also had a full sized Korg digital piano but I only really used that to actually practice my playing. On the Yamaha keyboard, I would work out some kind of chord progression, riff, or sound that I liked and then move to a piece of software called Fruity Loops on my desktop and try to recreate it with the bank of virtual synthesizers and sounds it had. You had to edit what’s called a “piano roll” which was basically just blocks you drew on a graph. Then when you played it back, whatever virtual instrument you selected would play the notes represented by the blocks.
Fruity Loops was a very complex piece of software. Virtually everything was tweakable. You could change the configuration of synths and virtual instruments. You could add any number of filters and effects and then automate each aspect of them over a section of the track. I remember when I first started using it I was a bit overwhelmed, but after creating a few tracks I started to get really good at making complex and nice sounding songs.
Fast-forward to today. I don’t have any computer that would run Fruity Loops anymore (it genuinely is Windows-only as far as know). While in college I also slowed down on writing music so I’d been out of it for a few years when I recently decided to have some fun playing around with GarageBand on my Macbook Air. Now, I’d used GarageBand back in high school on an iMac running OS X (probably Panther or Tiger, but I don’t remember for sure). I remembered it as a fun thing to make songs, but it didn’t have anywhere near the amount of control over composition that Fruity Loops had given me.
I wasn’t expecting much, but as I played around with it, it was clear that it had really been updated quite a bit since 2004 or so. One thing I noticed right away was that it seemed to now support editing music notation note by note. I was intrigued. Playing around more, I noticed you could edit the configuration of the virtual instruments as well as add filters and automate them, just like with Fruity Loops. Was it actually just as capable as Fruity Loops now?
I decided I really wanted to get back into music production and since I already had GarageBand sitting here, I might as well try to use that. This time though, I tried something I hadn’t tried before. I ordered a USB–MIDI connector. I still have the Korg digital piano and I always knew it had MIDI, but I’d never used it. MIDI–USB connectors are all basically the same, and they’re all pretty cheap. I picked up this one from Newegg.com.
When I got it, I plugged the MIDI end into the piano, and the USB end into my mac. GarageBand immediately saw it and I was off and running using the piano as a MIDI controller for the virtual instruments in GarageBand. Wow! I had so much fun! Using an actual keyboard to play the virtual instruments is so much more natural than trying to use the keyboard on the mac. I haven’t been able to play with it too much yet, but the feature I’m most excited about is being able to record the MIDI “performance” inside of GarageBand and then actually be able to edit a piano roll or score of the performance. So if you make a tiny mistake, or your timing is off slightly, you can go into the piano roll, edit the note and it’s like the mistake wasn’t even there!
The great thing about this setup is that if you already have a Mac, you already have GarageBand. All you need is some kind of keyboard that supports MIDI and there are many cheap ones out there that will work. One thing to note though is that when you first install GarageBand it installs with a small subset of virtual instruments in case you don’t want all of them (they take up gigabytes of space). If you want to use all of them, you can download them from the GarageBand menu. It’s a big download, so be prepared to wait, but having all the instruments is definitely worth it.