There’s no question that GarageBand represents one of the better values in music software, especially since even Apple expect a lot of its users will simply acquire it with their Mac. It still ranks high on software you’d recommend to a beginner on a budget. Apple’s decision this year to add lessons, interactive lessons that introduce you to musical concepts, and to invite famous artists to play familiar songs, is a fantastic idea.
The Artist Lessons themselves, however, have been relatively few in number. I expect more are coming, but so far the only release since GarageBand came out was this week’s three episodes, featuring Sting and Sarah McLachlan.
Yes, that’s right, here’s Apple’s artist lineup: Sting, Sarah McLachlan, Fall Out Boy, Norah Jones, Colbie Caillat, Sara Bareilles, John Fogerty, OneRepublic, Ben Folds
So, at worst it feels a bit like the 1990s, and at best, like the tour schedule at Long Island’s Jones Beach. The issue here is, musical tastes are varied; part of what drives people to music in the first place is personal expression. There are a total of just 13 songs on the platform, all picked by Apple. Some of the lessons are pretty good, and the production values are slick, but there’s not enough quantity to satisfy people hungry to learn music and the choices overall are bland.
With all due respect to Apple, though, you can’t expect Apple to provide everything. Some artists and publishers have already built their own lessons. It’s time for others to step up, too.
The blog Synthtopia is pretty succinct in its headline:
I agree with Synthopia that the solution should be opening this up as a platform for people to make their own lessons:
“turn GarageBand into a video podcast store that lets you watch free and commercial educational music podcasts.”
The lessons in GarageBand are more than just video files; they include music files and some interactive features. Some sort of authoring tool wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Right now, you can build on the existing open standard of Apple’s podcast support in iTunes – which, in turn, works with a variety of players and mobile devices. In fact, a “podcast” is really just an RSS feed. There’s no reason you can’t add media to those files. Apple explicitly supports the use of PDF, which means you can create podcasts that include video and notation. There’s no way to charge for that, but advertising support is possible. It’s also feasible for some artists that such a feature could be used to promote other revenue streams.
At some point, a retail option could make sense, too. Believe it or not, basic tablature and Standard MIDI Files remain highly popular online. All that’s missing is for artists to start packaging this up and selling on its own.
Maybe Apple will figure out how to build a store for this. But there’s no reason to constantly be dependent on Apple to get it right – or anyone else, for that matter.
And in the meantime, I think lessons are a good enough idea that other people will run with this even when Apple doesn’t. Macworld’s review looked at some of the current alternatives.
obviously, they can't have a T-Pain or Hannah Montanna episode until they acquire celemony or anteres. 🙂
Both of those would FLY off the virtual shelves, BTW.
Guitar Player, Guitar World and Keyboard mag have some great videos on their site for free.
While I"m not especially surprised over the choice of artists it is grating that they're all from the US (yes I know Sting but…).
Third party pods seems like a give, wonder why they haven't gone for that yet?
Maybe we'll see a "pod" store soon…
Actually, I think all they would have to do is modify the podcast format / iTunes store metadata to recognize GarageBand project files. Those could in turn be opened in both GarageBand and Logic.
I'm pretty sure Sarah McLachlan is Canadian:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005214/
As always, I highly recommend iVideoSongs. Their lessons are very clear and well produced, almost as good as Apple, and over 200 lessons. NowPlayIt is another site that does the same thing.
Both of them have artist videos as well as generic ones from their own staff.
There are also lessons on Youtube from folks like Justin Sandercoe. The big difference is that NowPlayIt and iVideoSongs (and Apple) have licenses to use the song, while the youtube people are just praying that the RIAA won't take them down.
I had really high hopes for Garageband's lessons, though. Apple has the star power to get people like Sting and Sara McLachlan, while iVideoSongs is stuck with Art Garfunkel. It's a shame Apple hasn't devoted more time to expanding the lesson lineup.
(Really, Apple? You can't get John Mayer or Jack Johnson? After all you've done for them?)
[…] Create Digital Music seems to like the idea to and after being mentioned twice or thrice on Synthtopia i’m glad that i can give something back to @podcasting_news. […]
I woudl be cool if a band were to release lessons for their albums. BTW, I would totally be all over Radiohead if they took out a full albums worth of lessons. They also need to get a little more in-depth with the basic lessons, and get more advanced lessosn that aren't artists lessons.
[…] quite. Since January there has been exactly one update, which introduced a whopping three new artist lessons, bringing the grand total to 13. Given how varied musical tastes are, I’d be surprised if any […]
[…] ?????????????1????????1??????????????????????3???????13?????????????????????????????????4??????????????????????????????? […]
[…] dropped the ball on the whole idea; there’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that their GarageBand Lessons have been too few to make any real impact. But that shouldn’t stop other outlets from getting in […]
just downloaed the john legend lesson. Really enjoyed – shame that apple seems to have forgot about doing more of these, or even better – opening up as suggested above.
Great. I love this. Very beautiful.
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