Apple Garageband ’11 Announced (‘Back to the Mac’ Event)

Written by Rob Nichols on October 20, 2010 · Filed under Software 

So here is the musicians favourite, Garageband. What’s in store for us with this new edition then? Well first up is the new ability to control rhythm in your piece. It’s called group matching, and it allows you to almost synchronise each element of your track by analysing each instrument and individual tracks and altering the rhythm of each to match with the most rhythmic part of the track.

During the Keynote it was described as a spell-checker for bad rhythm, and of course that pretty much sums it up and it’s called ‘Groove Checker’.

Secondly is ‘Flextime’, allowing you to select individual segments of your track and stretch out the wave form or condense it to get the perfect duration for your notes, chords or whatever it is musicians tear their hair out about.

If you are one of those, however, who isn’t exactly perfect at your selected instrument, Garageband now has integrated lessons. For piano or guitar players who don’t really know what they’re doing, or even those who just want to get that little bit more perfect. A video instructor will take you step-by-step through pieces and theories behind the video and in your own time you can go through practicing or playing a variety of famous pieces whilst being guided by a virtual demonstration of your instrument on-screen.

You can read the music within Garageband and play through the piece displayed with it lighting up note-by-note either green, yellow or red depending on how good or how out of time you were, with a running score mounting up depending on your performance.

You can see at a glance how good or bad you were in different parts of the song and I guess then go back and work on it a little more. What’s even more impressive is the history section, keeping track of your progress over time until you get perfect at a particular piece. This amazing new feature set is called ‘Learn to Play’.

That’s it for Garage Band, so check out our summary of iLife ’11 later on and even more great Mac updates coming our way tonight.