Studio in a Box: 
Apple's New 
Garageband Software

If you know animation, you know Fred Seibert, the visionary who helped bring cutting-edge TV cartoons back to life with Nickelodeon and Hanna-Barbera. What you might not know is that he’s as passionate about music as he is about animation. In addition to having been a recording engineer and jazz record producer in the ‘70s, he was also the original creative director at MTV, doing all the original music for the network.

A former musician himself, Seibert says he always dreamed of having his own studio. With Apple’s GarageBand, he says he got his wish. "As soon as I heard about it, I got ticked off that I wasn’t 14 years old again," he says. And he soon realized it would be a great tool for creating the music for the upcoming Nicktoons Film Festival, an on-air animation festival honoring the best in independent cartoons. "GarageBand fulfilled my dream easily, cheaply, and made up for the fact that I had long ago forgotten how to do anything worthwhile in the recording studio."

Seibert says GarageBand’s a software tool Apple introduced this year that features hundreds of loops and clips as well as software instruments and the ability to interface with guitars and MIDI keyboards. In fact, he found it easy enough to use that he was tempted to compose the festival’s music himself. Instead, he turned to Bruce Kapler and Art Labriola, co-founders of TimbreLab, to create the incidental music for the festival.

Using GarageBand clips, the duo took direction from Seibert and returned with more than a dozen eight-bar snippets in styles ranging from bluegrass to house to classical. "I realized we needed to be more original and burrow deep into the capabilities of the software," says Kapler, who also plays saxophone in the house band for "Late Show with David Letterman." "The end result is a healthy mix of Apple loops, GarageBand software instruments, real guitar, and MIDI instruments."

While the software truly is simple enough that even a non-musician can create catchy tunes, Kapler and Labriola say they really put it through the paces, with extensive editing, track freezing, time stretching, and cutting and pasting. "My Dual GHz G5 was really huffin’ and puffin’."

Kapler, whose also worked extensively with Apple’s higher-end Logic software, adds that GarageBand’s ability to use Audio Unit plug-ins as well as third-party software and loops makes it as useful to pros as to amateurs. But he sees its real promise lying with empowering those without a deep knowledge of the studio to create professional-sounding music. "With GarageBand, Apple has provided the final phase in the metamorphosis from consumer to creator," he says. "Even your grooveless, tone-deaf uncle can create his masterpiece."