Hello all...
I'm a long time lurker that decided to become a little more active here. My name is Mark. My musical past has been spotty but it started with high school bands and we quickly got into recording on a 4-track, then later Tascam 8 track tape.
During those years experimentation for us was tough as to do anything you had to bus out, go through some device, bus in and eat up another track. With only 8 tracks we often ran out of room and had to bounce everything to stereo tracks which added more generations of noise.
In the 90's I got my first MIDI setup with a Mac IIci and I loved it however I was frustrated at the inability to do much with vocals and guitar. I purchased a two channel audio card which was very expensive but kind of worked. Still it was frustrating to use. I had a copy of Studio Vision which was pretty cool. The other frustrating thing was having to MIDI out for all *sounds* and then somehow get all that back in for a final mix.
Around 1998 my wife and I adopted a young (2 1/2) year old boy from Romania and pretty much everything but child care came to a complete stop. I didn't touch my guitar for almost 3 years.
I've had Macs on/off most of my life but my career, bio-medical software, is in the PC world. In about 2006 I got a Mac again and found GarageBand. My first impression was it was a *play* thing where you could fiddle with sounds. I did a few loops in it. I was so pressed for time I didn't realize it could do audio at all. All the examples were just loops and midi.
One sleepless night I decided to see if people were doing stuff with GarageBand so I searched the net and ran across
www.macjams.com. I spent a good part of the night listening to the creations and being floored at what people were doing with GarageBand. It immediately spurred me back into the recording mode.
I got an interface, then upgraded to logic express, later to studio and bought plug-ins, new guitar, etc... It has been such a fun ride. My earlier tape mixing days have transferred easily into logic and much of the bussing, auxing and other stuff makes total sense. These days it is not the equipment that is lacking it is my talent. Still I have a ton of fun making music.
If any of you have not visited MacJams it is a cool place to hang out. If you a not pro and don't mind sharing your music you can have a great time there.
My page is at:
www.macjams.com/artist/MarkHolbrook
I'm not very talented and pretty much a hacker but I have a ton of fun just seeing what I can come up with.
Nice to meet everyone!
