GarageBand Audio Unit Effects Tutorial

LG writes "The wild popularity of Apple's new music program, GarageBand, has surprisingly not yielded much in the way of instructions or guides (the program does not come with a manual, printed or electronic -- just some simple tutorial PDFs). Thus, there are many cool but totally undocumented features in GarageBand. MacJams.com has recently posted a fairly lengthy tutorial on the built-in Audio Unit effects in GarageBand, including things like delay, filters, compressor, reverb, etc. Hopefully similar documentation will start to pop up."

Comments

Re:3 months

[Dstreelm]

It always takes longer for books to come out when an entirely new piece of software is introduced. This isint like the update from photoshop 6 to ps 7. In a situation like that, most of the info from the ps 6 book can be translated very easily to a ps 7 book and so on. This go around, they have to write an entire book about one release, it almost certainly takes longer.

Doh

[pldms]

...and the frequency would be the length of the wave, i.e., wavelength

Nice article, but things like that pain me...

Re:3 months

[Achernar]

I seem to remember that David Pogue has a Missing Manual series book on Garageband that's scheduled to be released before the spring is over.

If it's anything like the Mac OS X book he wrote for Panther users, I would say it's likely to be very helpful as a guide.

Re:Apple's Documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think it's probably had a lot of thought from Apple. Other comments have given possible reasons. If you read the tutorial that was referenced, you'll find that it's mostly a discussion of various filters. These are common types that anyone who has done much with music will know about. If you don't know about them, the program is just as easy to use. If you do know about them, you'll find them as you explore and say "Great". If you don't know about them and find them, and are a bit adventurous you try them and learn something. (In fact, that's just what the tutorial recommends in some cases.) No manual needed.

Re:where's the manual?

[rjung2k]

IIRC, MacOS X 10.3 ("Panther") came with a small booklet telling you how to get started with the OS -- how to use the "help" menu to learn more about information, how to reboot and repair your computer from the CD if something goes wrong, etc.

So it's not quite as bleak as you make it out to be. It's just a "play around and discover more" philosophy, instead of an "overwhelm the user with a thick manual" approach.