THE BEST MUS IC MAKING APPS
You don’t need to spend lots of dough to be a music-making pro
GarageBand wasn’t the first good Mac music app and it wasn’t the last, but it kick-started an explosion in DIY music making
Not so long ago, if you wanted to make any kind of music you needed an astonishingly large
amount of money. You’d then give that money to somebody with a recording studio, some microphones, poor personal hygiene and a Mac running Pro Tools, and after a day or two you’d emerge much poorer with a recording that was almost but not quite as good as what you’d set out to capture.
And then in 2005, GarageBand happened. GarageBand wasn’t the first good Mac music app and it won’t be the last, but it kick-started an explosion in DIY music making. Pro Tools remained the choice of studio pros, but GarageBand was surprisingly influential – and even more so when it became available on iOS as well as macOS. The drums in Rihanna’s Umbrella are from GarageBand (Vintage Funk Kit 03 at 90bpm, if you don’t believe us). Oasis’s last album was largely demoed in GarageBand. The beats on Kendrick Lamar’s Pride were created in an app that begins with G and ends in arageBand.
Something for nothing
GarageBand also has something rival apps don’t: a price tag of zero. The enormous pile of dollar bills that Tim Cook snowboards down every morning means Apple doesn’t need to charge people for its music app. Apple gives it away as a freebie, knowing full well that GarageBand sells Macs. It gets its money back many times over.
But GarageBand isn’t the only option, and you don’t need to move to £200-plus pro apps if you want to do more ambitious things with your music. It’s possible to get apps with much more power than GarageBand for very reasonable amounts of money. Some of them are cut-down versions of more famous and more expensive stars. Others are standalone and actually suprisingly fully-featured. But which is the best app for your music needs? Let’s find out.