Garage band is really good. It’s very powerful for it being free. I was at an Apple exhibition on it the other day and it gave me an incite into Garage band.
I take it that you want to hook your instruments up to your computer and then mix around with them. Like in a professional recording studio? I warn you now, is it not cheap at all to do! You need to get a Midi production system (I think that’s what its called.) It’s basically a box that you plug your instruments into and then plug the box into your Mac using USB. It allows you to play your instrument and then record it onto your computer. I take it you have a Mac already so this is going to be you’re biggest expense. You’re looking at about $200 to $500. You obviously get bigger better ones but you wont need one and they’re upwards of $3000. Mbox are a good make so check them out. This is the only way to get your music from your instruments onto your Mac. There is no way round this expense.
"whatever else garage band does" There are various cool functions to garage band. One of them is that it has pre recorded samples loaded on it (you can expand this library by buying "Jam Packs" from Apple) and what’s even better is that if your song is 120 Bpm in E major and the sample is recorded at 90 Bpm in G minor the program will automatically convert it to match your song (amazing!) At the exhibition the guy had a guitar hooked up, he had a drum sample and he was jamming over it, which sounded really good. On top of that you if you record a song and then decide to put lyrics over it or something and your signer cant sing in that key you can change the key without having to record everything all over again.
You say that you play the piano, so lets imagine that you have it hooked up to Mac and your playing the piano track of a song that your band have written. Suddenly it comes to you that it would sound so much better if it was played with the sound of a church organ (strangely) garage band allows you to change the sound of your piano. There are thousands of sounds out there for every instrument you can think of. There is also a bottomless pit of sounds from 3rd party plug-ins. You can custom the sound of your instrument for example to give it echo or a bit of gain. This is an amazing tool. If you plug a guitar in there are 1000s of different amps and sounds to pick from. Honestly $500 on a box but you get so much with it! You can plug your piano in and get the sound of anything with keys.
The mixing of music is pretty powerful to. You can have like 200 different tracks. On one song! If you put your basic backing beat in you can have all the other tracks from your other instruments mixed into it perfectly by garage band.
There so much more you can do with garage band.
Give me a shout if you need to know how you actually use in interface of it.
Oh and check out
http://www.mediaspec.co.uk it’s a British site but it'll give you an idea of prices and equipment (its not cheap but its worth it!)
