Hi everyone

I've been recommended this forum, by a fellow user on an unrelated forum.
I checked out Garage Band on my mac the other day, and after seeing it, decided I want to learn the keyboard

When I was younger, my parents bought me a Yamaha keyboard for christmas. And I loved it. I taught myself many melodies from songs that I knew.
But unfortunately my parents couldn't afford piano lessons, so all I knew were single note melodies of songs, as I couldn't wrap my young brain around reading music on the fly or playing with both hands (I did know chopsticks and another one, forgot whats its called lol)

So, yeah, here I am. And it looks much more confusing than I remember with all these midi controllers and DAWs etc.
I've spoken to a local music shop and they were nice enough to allow me to pay of my purchase in installments. So by this time next month I should be rocking my "Novation Impulse 49". I plan to use it with my iMac, though I do also have a PC if needed. iMac is running on Lion, and PC is running Windows 7.

Anyways, I've been looking around and am finding it hard to understand all the terminoligy and jargon that is being used today.

Can anyone point me to any "Beginner Friendly: information? I did study music in highschool, but only remember some of it, lols, it was almost 20 years ago!

And any advice to a newcomer or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, i also mentioned to a friend I wanted to learn to play using garage band. He told me there are many better products out there such as Ableton, Reason....
Which one would be best for a noob like me?

Anyways, sorry for the long ass intro, lols

Cheers
DrMagickZ

Oh yeah, if anyone can recommend some good textbooks or workbooks for me to work through and get my feet wet, that would be gr8!
Something that had exercises and examples I could work through would be awesome!

Cheers
DrMagickz

here's a good site for beginners on Garageband. I started out with Garageband and it was enormously helpful to me.
http://www.bulletsandbones.com/GB/GBFAQ.html

there are also a bunch of tutorials on youtube (search garageband tutorial). not sure what version of garageband you have, but I would include that in your search.

when I first started, I watched and read everything i could get my hands on, recorded a bunch of horrible stuff, asked millions of questions and had fun. garageband is pretty simple once you get going, but you can do an awful lot with it. I posted my songs on macjams.com and the people there were really friendly and helped me with the learning process an awful lot.

your setup will be more than adequate to record with, have fun. here's the songs I did that I posted on MJ, the bottom half of the list was all done on Garageband.
http://www.macjams.com/artist/michael2

it's interesting to listen back to them for me, as I got halfway decent with Garageband, switched to Logic and then started to sound like crap again. Now its finally sounding halfway decent again. Learning is fun. And for someone like you who doesn't really play keyboards (yet), you will love working with MIDI. easy, fast and so much fun to watch things take shape and come to life.

Thanks for the reply
I actually just spent over an hour watching this lol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3lNP-rZE0M&context=C429c52dA DvjVQa1PpcFNGK2QUf72NiLBlHRAH4IycwgDPxrUcx8o=
Some fella made a tutorial on how to make drum loops and beginners basics for ableton. I can't wait to get my keyboard lol

Howdy. Don't think "noob," think "got a practically infinite variety of incredibly cool stuff to discover, learn about, and have fun with." There can also be a heap of frustration -- which is part of what KVR's here for. Folks here can answer nearly any question.

Best of luck with it!

while you're waiting for your keyboard, just dive in and start using the pencil tool. you can put beats together really quickly, I even know guys who pencil in whole piano parts.

I pencil my entire song in

since the 2 kids came along, I find myself using the pencil tool and the QWERTY keyboard more and more.

Here's a great audio tutorial learning site that might help.
http://audio.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/

Many thanks!
I actually did find a really good one that I wanted to share in case any noobs needed it. Its from Lynda.com They do great video tutorials accompanied with exercise files that you can follow along and work through as you watch the vid.

They are really good, its how I learnt most of what I know about using Adobe Photoshop.

Ableton Live 8 Essential Training
Here is a link to the official site, in case anybody else wants it:
http://www.lynda.com/Ableton-Live-8-tutorials/Essential-Trai ning/70663-2.html
Last edited by DrMagick81 on Sat Apr 21, 2012 12:51 am; edited 2 times in total

Lols I have no idea why, I've tried editing the link but for some reason the space keeps reappearing after I post. If you have troubles with the link try deleting the space in the address.

Cheers
DrMagickZx

You can watch the Lesson videos for free, but if you want the execise files I think you need to purchase the lesson.
If you don't want to, or cant afford to buy the lesson, you could use your own files instead.
I hope to have a copy of them soon, that I found floating around online

Well the link I posted is for free tutorials that won't require you to float around online. Which is best of course.
Floating around online can be hazardous to ones well being, in this forum.

You should be able to get a free lite version of a daw with the keyboard your getting, but I believe the Novation only gives a free lite version of a windows only daw. You should really use that imac for music if you can. Depends on your windows unit soundcard really. You can get Logic Express from the Mac App Store for $100, or Logic8 for 200usd.
Those are better than any other daw in my opinion. They certainly come with the most instruments, samples, synths, fx...etc.
An M-Audio Axiom keyboard comes with a free version of Ableton LiveLite8, which is cross-platform. I got that model, and it works great for me.

Thankf for the info I'[ll be sure to research your recommendations

I plan on using my iMac with the Novation Impulse. My uncle has his own DJ business, and is going to donate me one of his Ableton Live 8 licenses, so I'll be saving a bundle there. I can put those saving towards other purchases for my music studio, such as microphone, earphones etc

Oh yeah, just wonderin:

Did you guys dive into making your own music from the start? Or did you start by remixing/recreating songs? That's what i plan to do till i learn the basics...

Also, my keyboard comes with Ableton Lite.
Whats missing from the live version compared to the full Live 8 version?

lol sorry for all the Q's, but trying to learn all these new things, information overload lols