THESE GO TO 11: BEYOND GARAGEBAND
Where to go when you’ve outgrown GarageBand
GarageBand has its limits; it’s designed to make creating and recording music easy, but it isn’t intended to do all the things the Mac in a recording studio is expected to do. That’s why it lacks even really simple, standard features such as exporting ‘stems’ – separate files for each track in your project that you can then share with other artists or producers or give to a mixing engineer. If you do need to do that in GarageBand, you have to export the same song to disk multiple times, each time with all but the selected track silenced so that only one track is exported at a time.
Most of the music you’ll hear on Apple Music or Spotify was recorded, produced, mixed and mastered on one or more Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs for short. The best known ones are
ProTools, Ableton Live and Apple’s Logic Pro X, but there are many more including FL Studio, Cubase, Persona Studio One, Reason and Reaper. Some are free; some cost hundreds of pounds.
If you’re moving from GarageBand, Logic (£199.99) is the easy option; it can open GarageBand files perfectly and you can even make it look like GarageBand too. But it’s much more powerful than GarageBand because it’s a fully-fledged DAW designed for pro users.
Different DAWs have different features but they typically enable you to record multiple artists and instruments simultaneously; tweak and edit audio down to individual notes; restructure songs by moving entire sections; apply complex chains of effects; and add enhancements such as stereo widening, compression and equalisation.