Customer Reviews

Power Tools for GarageBand: Creating Music with Audio Recording, MIDI Sequencing, and Loops

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Other reviews are valid; the motivated GarageBand user
can find tremendous resources on the Internet.
The author of this book explains that it was rushed to satisfy early GB customers.
Beyond that, GB, like most Apple software, has evolved appreciably since 2004.
On the other hand, if you consider the "More Buying Choices" prices for this book
and are a digital music novice whose time is worth anything,
this is a nicely succinct and well-organized introduction to
topics that are probably unobvious to Mac owners moving beyond
their first steps into computerized music making. Thankfully,
Mac-speak is translated to industry standard terminology.

The book mentions hardware only in passing,
which was a shrewd choice, since hardware [in]compatibilities
for Mac and GarageBand evolve even faster than software.

Good item as described. fast delivery. i would buy from this seller again.

Clear, concise, and informative. Lots of useful examples. Plus, anybody who would include a discussion of hocketing automatically gets 5 stars.

Toying with Garageband gave me a burning curiousity about what went on "under the hood" of its deceptively simple looking synthesizers. Francis answers these along with many other questions I may not have thought to ask. He discusses GB2, which apparently did not include the "hybrid" synths found in GB3. He also missed that the Tonewheel Organ's drawbars can be varied with a foot controller pedal [cc4]. His included software CD is somewhat outdated, but led me to an intriguing free software synth [Automat] that I had not known about.

In concise and clear prose, Francis Preve explains a variety of techniques you can use in Garageband to make the best use of the software. He assumes you are comfortable with Macs, and does not start from absolute zero. I'm a regular Mac user, and have has some experience with music software before, so I really appreciated this. It keeps the book short and to the point. The approaches, tips, tricks, and advice he offered saved me a great deal of time in grasping all that Garageband is capable of, and also, how best to deal with its limitations.

This book was a let down of sorts. Tho it did give me some insight to some of the MIDI workings of GB2, overall I found out most of the info thru the net & reading forums for free.

It's OK.

I got this book for free from the Author after he did a presentation about GarageBand at the Houston Galleria. (Signed, too. hehe)
Since my PowerBook is in the shop for HD failure, I got on my brother's iBook and used Garageband and the book.
It is so well written, he explains things in english, without watering down the info too much, and it's really helpful to have the accompanying pictures.

If you get a chance to see this guy's presentation, DO SO! It is great to just watch him do his thing. It's like breathing for him.
He is also one REALLY cool guy.