Messing with GarageBand

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Last night, I came home late (as usual) and figured I didn't have much time to mess around with my new Mac Mini, but I went downstairs to clear the Trackback spam out of my blog anyway. While waiting for the web server to remove several dozen penis enlargement spams, I started messing with GarageBand and couldn't believe how easy and intuitive it was. A riff popped into my head and I hacked it out on guitar. Within 10 minutes I had drums, bass and a rock organ backing up the guitar riff. Back when I used to mess with Cakewalk and PC-based recording tools, it would take forever just to set things up - make sure the MIDI cables were hooked up right, make sure the mics were in the right input on the digital audio interface, level-setting, etc. GarageBand makes it easy to quickly get those ideas out of your head.

I know this is an entry-level application for recording, but it's definitely going to help me get a lot of songs out of my brain and onto a hard drive. What I really need is another week off, so I can mess around with this stuff unmolested for hours at a clip.

Speaking of messing around, I dropped into TekServe yesterday to see what was up and ran into my old bud Steve Grassotti, who I know from his days in Gringo Love Show (a band I loved that used to play my summer party). Turns out he sells the high-end Apple video systems at TekServe, which is nice. We caught up a bit and talked widescreen displays for a bit. I had no idea he worked there.