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.
My friend has a teenage daughter who thinks Garageband is way cool. Actually I agree - it is certainly fun and pretty and easy to use. I am looking at vids about G'Band on Youtube and I dont see anything like a way to enter your own chords. There is no way to create songs of your own except via entering MIDI notation, or recording live instruments. Have I got that right?
Can G'Band create a song using chords entered by the user?
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flatfoot,
I've recently been somewhat forced into the Mac world, so have played around some with garageband. You cannot enter chords, but you can tranpose loops. To explain, lets take a rhythm guitar loop on a G chord. If I wanted to change chords to C, in Garageband I have to tell it to transpose this loop up 7 half-steps, and now it will sound on a C chord. Then, a couple of bars later, I can tell it to transpose up another 2 half steps, and it will sound on a D chord, and so on. Does that explanation make any sense?
So the answer to your question is "no", but you can accomplish chord changes in the above roundabout way.
Bruce
Last edited by babarton; 12/16/11 12:03 PM.
Macbook Pro 2018
2.6 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM
OS Monterey
BIAB for Mac 2022
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BIAB and RB are about the only game in town for accompaniment generating programs worth their salt for that purpose. There's a couple more much smaller players without the following of the PG stuff.
There's lots of DAW that allow the use of loops and transposition of them as barbarton describes. This is how Garageband, Tracktion, Ableton, ACID, FL Studio and perhaps more operate.
Garageband is a great DAW, with excellent included content (the included amp simulation is really quite good), but it's not an accompaniment generating tool.
-Scott
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I have Logic Pro (GB's big bro) and I frequently use Biab tracks in it to access their loops. You can transpose their midi with great success , but audio loops only transposes so far before it sounds bad . Now that Biab has loop-ability in 2012 you may not need GB to get all loopie ! If I had to choose one it would be Biab as the hands down winner ,would not even be a contest for me!
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I'm completely with Scott and Tommy on this - there's no comparison for generating accompaniment, it's BIAB hands down. I also thank you guys for not pointing out the errors in my post G to C ... lets see, that would be FIVE half steps, wouldn't it?
Bruce
Macbook Pro 2018
2.6 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM
OS Monterey
BIAB for Mac 2022
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Quote:
I've recently been somewhat forced into the Mac world, so have played around some with garageband. You cannot enter chords, but you can tranpose loops. To explain, lets take a rhythm guitar loop on a G chord. If I wanted to change chords to C, in Garageband I have to tell it to transpose this loop up 7 half-steps, and now it will sound on a C chord. Then, a couple of bars later, I can tell it to transpose up another 2 half steps, and it will sound on a D chord, and so on.
Although loops have been around a while, it has always been "clunky" to use them as other software companies implemented them. PGMusic's chord-based paradigm is by far the most intuitive way to make loops user friendly and useful. And, with the groundwork they put in place to make the real tracks stretch more fluently, adding loops was a the logical next step.
Now their implementation of loops has leapfrogged what everybody else is doing. How cool is that??
(VERY!)
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Pat,
I haven't upgraded to BIAB 2012 yet, so I haven't had the pleasure of playing with PG's implementation of loops. I'm getting a Mac for X-mas, so I'm sort of torn about this. I've thought long and hard about the whole Mac thing, and only thing I know I'm going to miss is BIAB for Windows (along with Real Band). In fact, I may end up doing the boot camp route just to allow this. I certainly haven't been very impressed with using loops in Garageband to make any music - the BIAB route just seems so much more intuitive to me. A lot of this probably just depends on what you "grew up with", so to speak.
Bruce
Macbook Pro 2018
2.6 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM
OS Monterey
BIAB for Mac 2022
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Quote:
Pat,
I haven't upgraded to BIAB 2012 yet, so I haven't had the pleasure of playing with PG's implementation of loops. I'm getting a Mac for X-mas, so I'm sort of torn about this. I've thought long and hard about the whole Mac thing, and only thing I know I'm going to miss is BIAB for Windows (along with Real Band). In fact, I may end up doing the boot camp route just to allow this. I certainly haven't been very impressed with using loops in Garageband to make any music - the BIAB route just seems so much more intuitive to me. A lot of this probably just depends on what you "grew up with", so to speak.
Bruce
Computers are cheap these days. My solution to that same problem is to have a dedicated computer for music and another computer for everything else. No need to give up BIAB/ WIN just because you have a MAC
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Boot Camp works with Biab just fine ,have the best of both worlds on 1 machine !
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