“Whether you’re a musical prodigy or just love creating your own walls of sound, Garage Band for iPad gives you all the tools you need to lay down fresh tracks and record music anywhere you go.” – Apple.com/au

Here at iDevices World, we are so excited to finally see Garage Band make its way to the iPad. After spending the whole day creating music, so far the iPad has kept up and runs great – it’s crashed a few times but hopefully the next update will fix this. Make sure you frequently save your creations and this will save you from pulling your hair out over hours of work and nothing to show for it.

The Details

Garage Band is an eight-track multi-recorder that lets you create music right at your fingertips. This might not replace the entire music industry overnight but what it can do will leave you amazed. Even without a technical background or any musical talent, the creators at Apple have thought of almost everything in this simple yet sophisticated interface.

You start virtually with a blank music canvas, giving you an option to choose between Multi Touch playing or Smart Instruments. We started our first song using Smart Instruments and here is a quick rundown on making our first song.

Building A Song

To start, you can choose between Smart Drums, Bass, Keyboard, or Guitar and then you get a selection of different instruments e.g Hip Hop Drums, Live Rock kit and a few more.

By default you start with 8 Bars or Section/Pieces, which are continuously looped while working out the best rhythm to start with. We started with the Acoustic Guitar; chose our chords G, C, and F; selected 4 on the rhythm dial for auto play and away we went. You can change your chords live or record them bar by bar – it’s up to you – just click record then, when you’re done, click on mix view and you have your first track.

For Smart Drums you can simply drag the kit icon to anywhere on the track pad and build your beat from the ground up. If you’re feeling lucky you can simply click the dice icon and it will automatically generate a drum beat for you and you can fine tweak the levels if you’re still not happy.

To record, click the top record button on the top navigation bar and away it goes. After a quick count in you will see the red track, this will record until stopped or until it has reached the end of the bar length.

We followed the same process with our other tracks by clicking the + icon at the bottom of the mix. What’s so handy is the ability to multi task in a way so that you can loop your previous track while working out the next instrument for your song.

Fine Tuning

At last, time to fine tune our song. You can cut, copy, delete, loop, and split each track or record simultaneously as the songs plays. You simply stop the timeline and drag it to your bar or section, click on the instrument then double touch the loop or recording to bring up your options. If you need to make a cut on your instrument, tap Split – an icon with scissors appears and you simply slide you finger to make the cut, how cool is that? You can either move, delete, or split tracks.

Mixing The Track

To mix your track, click the Mixing Dial icon on the top navigation bar. You can then click Show Track Controls, which brings up the volume and solo options for each track and from there you can adjust the mix to get the right volumes per track and any pans, echo or re-verb you want.

Save or Share

Now you’re ready to share and save. To do this, click on My Songs and, by default, the song comes up as ‘My Song’ but you can change this to anything you like. Click the box with the arrow pointing right and you can email your masterpiece to your friends or send it directly to iTunes as an AAC or Garage Band track.

This, my friends, is the beginning of hours and hours of music creation right at your fingertips. We hope you’ll share some of your songs with the world, you’re welcome to share some with us, and we hope you’ll keep some just for your private collection.

Here is the first track we created using Smart Instruments it’s called Garage Acoustic Listen Here:

We tried our second track using only Apple Library samples and it’s called Bad Mojo Listen Here – it’s pretty out there :

Our Third track using a combination and it’s called Pushing Daisies Listen Here:

What’s Missing

If you’re a savvy producer, you might find that recording your entire sample bank individually to be a bit of a pain, but it does have a feature that enables you record sounds directly into the iPad. Being the first release for iPad, the default sample bank is great but at some point you might run out of ideas; we’d love to see more Smart Instruments appear in future updates, because at the moment you only start out with the four basics.

The Verdict

After losing hours, missing lunch, and coming down with a case of head bopping Garage Band is an absolute must buy and would be in our Top 10 apps that every iPad should have. For only AU$5.99, nothing comes close to providing so much functionality and so many options for musicians and non musicians alike.

We hope you will enjoy this as much as we did. If you can bop your head then you can create music with Garage Band. You can purchase Garage Band here and start rocking out immediately.