Apple rocks on with new GarageBand

January 6, 2009, 3:29pm PST | Length: 00:05:32
At Macworld 2009 in San Francisco, Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of marketing, demonstrates the company's updated GarageBand software. Now designed to help Mac users learn to play a musical instrument, GarageBand will let users download lessons from artists such as John Fogerty and Sting for $4.99. As a part of the lesson, artists give a bit of songs' back stories.

Transcript

Apple rocks on with new GarageBand

Door Shutting

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>> I like to talk to you about the new GarageBand '09. A GarageBand '09 has a number of really great features, great new guitar effects, great way to jam in magic GarageBands, but I'm not gonna tell you about those. I wanna tell you about just one feature because it's really the most exciting one and a true breakthrough. The team was challenged with doing something no one has ever done before. To create a piece of software that can help people learn to play a musical instrument. So that's the biggest new feature in GarageBand '09, it's called Learn to Play. So, what's Learn to Play? When you go into learn to play, you go to new user interface. You can learn to play a guitar or keyboards, you see the instrument you've chosen facing you so you can easily see what you're gonna learn on that instrument. You have an instructor up above, in this case this is Tim, and it's in HD resolution and he's gonna teach you how to play the instrument. And down below at the bottom of the window, a control, so that you control the rate at which you learn, the sections you are studying slowly--do it slowly, quickly, jump ahead, you're in complete control of the learning experience. Can we just play a snippet of one of these lessons to give you a feel for what it's like to learn to play in GarageBand '09?

>> Tim: This is the first in a series of lessons that will help you learn how to play the guitar. In this one, I'll give you a short introduction to the instrument and help you get started quickly with some music that's really easy to play. Many blues and jazz songs use a chord progression called the 12-bar blues. We're gonna learn the progression in the key of A using the 3 chords background guitar strumming A, D, and E.

>> So that little snippet gives you a taste of what's it like for Tim to teach you how to play the guitar. You saw the guitar playing, you saw where your fingers go. And the controls going on in the bottom, you can repeat that if you need a little more time to learn it just right. Here's a snippet of what it's like to learn something on a keyboard.

>> Tim: In this lesson, you'll learn how to read some music and how it relates to the notes that we already know on the piano keyboard. Let's add the base part to the new chord progression. Put your left thumb on middle C piano playing.

>> So in addition to what you saw in the last lesson, this one now you see what it's like to have notation turned on to learn the notation along with how to play the keyboard. It's so simple and such a breakthrough way to learn music. But with the new GarageBand '09, we bundle for free 9 basic lessons for guitar, 9 basic lessons for piano, and you download the ones that you want to use when you need to use them. But the really cool part is once you started to learn the instrument, when you actually want to learn to play a song. And to do that, we've enlisted the help of some amazing artists to teach you to play their songs. We call this feature, Artist Lessons. Well, applause hold your applause because this is really cool. So who are some of the artists that are gonna teach you to play the guitar and keyboard? Well first, some of the guitar players.

>> John Fogerty: Hi, I'm John Fogerty, and for you guys that are just starting out on guitar, I'm gonna show you a simple way to play my song "Proud Mary."

>> Colbie: Hi, I'm Colbie and I'm here to teach you how to play a simple version of my song "Bubbly."

>> Patrick: Hi, I'm Patrick, and I'm gonna show you how to play my band Fall Out Boy song "I Don't Care."

>> Sting: Hi, I'm Sting, and I'm here to teach you my song "Roxanne."

>> John Fogerty: Well it was early 1968, the best I can remember it, we have just finished or we're just finishing up recording the first album which was called Creedence Clearwater Revival. I became aware or fascinated with the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth, you know pum-pum-pum-pum, pum-pum-pum-pum, that's the right way. But I couldn't play that with chords on the guitar, so kind of bouncing off Beethoven's inspiration guitar strumming I knew it needed something else to turn into a guitar rift guitar strumming. Well, now we come to the verse of "Proud Mary." It's based around the D chord guitar strumming and I've always thought D is just a really bright and uplifting sound, beautiful sound, background guitar strumming it sounds sunny, it sounds happy. And you can tell already that's starting to sound like that rolling, rolling, chugging rhythm that "Proud Mary" is known for. 2, 3, 4, A. Now we're going to the B minor chord, and back to the D chord.

Guitar Strumming

>> So that's just a clip background applause of all these incredible content in this GarageBand lessons.

Applause

>> Now you see why that's the one feature to talk about. It is so unbelievable and so much fun. That's GarageBand '09.

Door Shutting

Clock Ticking

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