While I’ll admit to coveting Apple’s new iPad just because it’s cool (if I could think of a more rational excuse to redirect $500 of my income toward one, I would), there’s something quite extraordinary about at least one evolution in the breakthrough device. With the announcement of the iPad 2, Apple also released an iPad version of its GarageBand music production/recording software. The result is much more than the sum of its parts.
For a very long while now, musical performance devices and music production devices have evolved on separate tracks. Musical instruments have been fairly single-purpose — built to translate physical action into audible expression. Music production equipment — even in the digital age — has been designed to serve a separate function: capturing, modifying, and combining that expression toward a cohesive experience. While there was some crossover between the two (sequencers on keyboards, effects on guitars), they pretty much stuck to their own.
As you’d expect, the software that created virtual versions of these two worlds has looked differently, worked differently, and followed different visual metaphors (virtual instrument programs looked like instruments, virtual production programs looked like amps or mixing boards). Even Apple’s GarageBand program for standard computers looks like a mixing board most of the time.
But GarageBand for iPad is an entirely different beast. It is at once an instrument and a production device. It’s a guitar that you can strum, a keyboard that you can play, and a multi-track production system that combines the two. And that makes it a new species of expressive appliance.
It’s obvious that even Apple hasn’t fully digested the implications, since the demos seem to show a bit of a split personality between instrument and mixing functions. But, as ever, their first elegant effort to connect the dots is likely to unleash a whole bunch of new efforts that redefine how we make, and think about making, music.
