Learning music with garageband?

Take an introductory college course on music theory. Then take the course on harmony. That should get you started. If you want to go it alone, here are a few good music theory books I would recommend:

Basic Music Theory: How to Read, Write, and Understand Written Music by Jonathan Harnum (ISBN 0-9707512-9-X)

Harmony & Theory: A Comprehensive Source for All Musicians by Keith Wyatt & Karl Schroeder (ISBN 0-7935-7991-0)

The Harvard Dictionary of Music by Don Michael Randel (ISBN 0-674-01163-5)

I've recently come across this series of books by this author:

http://marcschonbrun.com.hosting.domaindirect.com/publishing.html

http://marcschonbrun.com

This is a series of books for adults on the basics of music, reading music, music theory, etc.

The Everything Reading Music Book
The Everything Home Recording Book
The Everything Rock and Blues Guitar Book
The Everything Music Theory Book (Coming Spring 2007)

My thoughts are that if you really want to learn to play music, get a music teacher. There are probably some books and video as well as software out there that teach music. But when you buy them, they can sit there forever collecting dust. But, if you enroll in lessons, then there's a teacher expecting you to practice something to play back for your next lesson, so you become more committed. Playing music is fun. Learning to play is not LOL It is boring and takes a long time before you feel like you are really playing. At age 11 I took guitar lessons (after begging for a year). After 2 lessons, I wanted to forget about it. But my Mother wouldn't have it, and "made me practice" every day. If it had been just a book or something, I'd have given up right away.

Just food for thought.

I was a bit surprised that there is no book like "Teach yourself music with GarageBand" or the like...

That's probably because GB avoids any musical terminology. You never see the words "chord" or "chord progression", you can never see all the notes that you produce on one sheet, only the notes of one track. In other words: For the layman, GB is not a program to learn about why this note sits there and another note sits there. It tells you to trust your ears and put together fun stuff with the loops. (Yeah, I know that the ads suggest that anybody can do anything ... but real music, at least in most genres, isn't generated from pre-fab pieces.)

In this forum, we have been talking e.g. how to put together chord progressions in GB (harmonies that change while the piece progresses), and the program is hardly of any help in that regard. While there are some basic capabilities (like shifting regions up and down a note), the bottom line is: If you want to do more complex music, you have to play it or "write" it - either with the software instruments or by recording a live instrument. But how and what to play - this knowledge you have to get elsewhere.

This is not to discourage you - on the contrary, go on and explore this fascinating world. But if you want to know why this note sounds right and the other note sounds wrong in a certain bar, you have to dig deeper, and GB isn't very helpful.

You can follow a movie-type tutorial here.

Are you musical? Do you do music by ear? Using Garageband you can record live music as well. Since the loops are not as flexible, set up the rhythm via drum loops first and then layer on your real sounds.

Garageband can also be used as a multitrack recorder. If you play instruments or have friends that do you can ignore the loops and just record music. With the proper interface you can record eight tracks at a time. Record your band, etc.

Kurt

I guess I'd suggest going through the tutorial. That might give you an idea on how to build a song. I assume you are just using the loops. If you want to learn how to play notes using a keyboard, perhaps some piano lessons would help there, if you have no musical background. If you have a good ear, then it can be just a matter of your own preferences as to what sounds good and what doesn't. I have been a musician for 39 years, so I tend to take that part of it for granted.

A lot of popular song will have a sort of standard format, such as an intro, verse, verse, chorus, verse, verse, chorus, maybe a middle part that is different, and so on. But you can just add loops that sound good to you in any order that you think sounds good. A musician will be thinking of the chord progression and the timing of things, but if you don't have that background, all you can really do is what sounds good to you. You'll probably get better at it as you progress.

I don't know of any books that tell you how to create a song, but there are many that tell you how to use GarageBand and many have tutorials you can follow.

if you have a usb/midi keyboard,and want to learn a bit about playing keys, a good site to check out is www.pianonanny.com