Hey folks, HRF here.
GarageBand on iPad Air and shiny certified refurb Mid-2012 13" 2.5 I5 Unibody MBP
I'm "novice" at this now, but I'm never novice for long once I set my mind on something.
If you're up for a read, see below:
tl;dr
I have been a life-long jack-of-all-trades musician, but I've never been particularly good at capturing, let alone fleshing out my musical ideas. I had a childhood of singing at a rich widow's annual holiday parties for neighborhood children, eight years of public school string/orchestra groundwork and years hanging out with creative theatre/drama/chorus types.
4 years of college was not my immediate future, but I gave it a shot for a semester. At 18, I picked up a guitar for the first time and have been jamming ever since, adding other stringed instruments into the fray to varying degrees of quality.
I spent quite a bit of the mid-1990s caught up in the
post-Amiga tracker scene (Scream Tracker/Fast Tracker/Impulse Tracker), all DOS-based tools for generating music. In hindsight, it seems like I was using hammer, chisels, and a stone tablet. If you've never heard of
GSLINGER.MOD, you must check it out. For the technological limitations at the time, it is a quarter-century old masterpiece.
Over time, life events took most of my "spare" time away, but I found myself with freedom in my mid-30s, and I became enamored of the looping musicianship of my hometown guitarist,
Keller Williams. K-Dubs led me to re-acquaint myself with a phenomenon, the Grateful Dead, I hadn't fully understood at the time I started collecting their bootlegs (well before archive.org was a thing). The idea of pro-am sound engineers standing in a field doing their best to capture a live recording that, by the very nature of the Dead, was one-of-a-kind, was a bit romantic to me. That instilled a bit of interest in the gear used for the purpose of recording.
It wasn't until my mid-30s that I had the self-confidence to play with others (own worst critic, so to speak). Both drummer and bassist were sound techs/roadies, so I picked up a little knowledge from setup and teardown from our gigs and practices. Nowadays, with family and children, I'm a family man, but still have the desire to create music. It wasn't until I toyed with Garageband on an iPad that the itch to really focus on recording as many of the ideas I still have floating through my brain.
I'd used a 15" 2015 MBP at my last job, and missed it. Logic Pro X is calling my name, but I figure I should get better at GarageBand first, AND see if I'm committed to this cause I've put in front of me.
Thanks for reading, if you made it here! What a long, strange trip it's been!
