Thanks to Sarah Pullman for posting a good GarageBand beginners link in her del.icio.us links yesterday. It lead to one of those doh! moments of realization for me regarding GarageBand and what it is capable of. Like the other day when I was complaining about only being able to have one volume throughout the entire track and my friend pointed out the tab at the trackhead that allows volume and panning to be adjusted throughout the timeline. Duh.

Anyway, the thing I didn’t know, that the tutorial showed me, was that any music created with a software instrument can be converted to any other software instrument. In other words, if you have a melody you like, and it is in a loop that is a bassline, you can change it to a saxamaphone. This means that, in addition to all the effects and filters you can apply to your tracks, digital instruments can be changed to any other digital instrument. That’s huge. It increases the raw materials at your fingertips by an exponential amount. Duh, again.