Interview with Steve Sobek, conducted by Matthew Kleinrock, Aug. 28, 2004.

How long have you been playing guitar and writing music?

I've been playing guitar, singing and writing songs since my preteen years. I've been recording, in one form or another, for nearly as long. My first band, in high school, was a loud heavy metal cover band. We used to set up in a friend's attic with a Fostex four track cassette tape machine, and did a demo that way. In later bands, we moved up to using a reel-to-reel eight-track machine, and even spent some time in the studio. Believe it or not, compared to what I still have on tape from what we did in the studio in the mid-1990s, I actually prefer the GarageBand material I recently recorded, in terms of quality of the sound and the overall feel of it. Some studios (and studio technicians, of course!), are better than others, and the recordings we made sounded very tinny and were heavily reverbed, a sound I dislike and have moved away from. "Mood Swings" uses reverb on some songs and on some parts (it's a necessary evil for blending tracks together in the mix), but I try and use it sparingly.

What were your first attempts at recording music digitally like, and what programs did you use?

I made my first attempt at digital recording using Vision DSP (which has since been discontinued) in OS 8 on a PowerMac 7100 with a G3 upgrade. The sound was decent, but it was very complicated to get the program to do what I wanted. For instance, in order to get effects, or to even hear the tracks I was recording, I had to figure out its bus system and use sends and returns. That setup also had a huge latency problem, in that everything I would record would be a beat behind in the mix and I would have to manually nudge the tracks to get the sounds where they were supposed to be. After all of this, the sound left a lot to be desired, it was too easy to clip the signal, and trying to get a good mix was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

My second attempts at digital recording started with Reason, when I discovered the beauty of MIDI and sequencing. I bought the Oxygen-8 MIDI keyboard (which I used with GarageBand on "Mood Swings") and began fooling with samples and synth sounds and computer-generated beats. I loved the feeling this would produce when combined with my folkish/poppish-type songs. But there was one huge problem. You couldn't easily record regular audio tracks (like my acoustic guitar and vocals) in Reason. So I would export the reason track and then play along with in Deck, another multi-track program that didn't feature sequencing. Deck was familiar because it worked a lot like Vision. But it was problematic to have the two different parts of the songs residing in different programs. And if I changed something in one, I often had to redo the other. It didn't work very well, and produced modest success.

I also dabbled with Cubase, but found it overwhelmingly complicated and got tired of it rather fast after realizing that I had to head to the manual every time I wanted to do simple things, such as record a track!

I gave up for awhile, and then Apple's Soundtrack piqued my interest. I loved the percussion loops, and the ability to combine several of them to get walls of drums. It seemed I could get any rhythm section going that I could dream up easily. But again, there was the problem that it was very difficult to record regular audio. You could do it, but the program wasn't necessarily designed for it.

What was it like the first time you used GarageBand?

When GarageBand came out, I was in the process of trying to figure out what to do about combining Soundtrack's capabilities with a multi-track/sequencer. It was like Apple had designed the program just for me! Finally, those Soundtrack capabilities were there, and so were the audio recording capabilities. When I finally used it, I was flabbergasted at its ease of use compared to anything else I had used before. I consulted help about three times during the recording of the album to troubleshoot specific problems, but other than that, I was able to use it easily and effectively -- right out of the box. Almost immediately, I recorded the first song, "I Feel Just Like My Dad," for my father's birthday. The way it is on the album is exactly the way I recorded it. It was my first GarageBand song. I quickly realized that my dream of recording an album of my songs at home was within reach, I just had to sit down and do it. Even with heavy work and social obligations, I quickly realized a steady rate of about a song a week.

What makes GarageBand so powerful, in your opinion?

It's the combination of tools available in the program, and its simplicity. It's not as powerful as other programs, but that's because of the simplicity. Since I'm not a Moby, I'm more like a John Mayer or a David Gray, it's exactly what I was looking for. The program has a powerful looping engine (that is expandable, just look on the Internet for GarageBand loops, you'll find more), a basic but powerful audio recording engine, a sequencer for using samples and a MIDI keyboard (which I mainly used for bass lines and some other accompaniment, such as strings and synths), and tons of presets to make it all sound good pretty easily. Those who are adventurous can also manipulate many of these settings and create their own quite easily. There is no vast system of busses or sends or returns to confuse you, either. Just double-click the track and all of its settings and effects pop up. Customize, change, and close.

One of its best features also is its graphical display of the tracks and its snap-to-grid abilities. If your song is 4/4, or 3/4, and you set it that way in the song's attributes, then all of the tracks line up exactly in the timeline, and it's quite easy to select a whole selection across all of the tracks and seamlessly cut-and-paste it elsewhere in the song. In many of the songs, once I had a base of a verse and a chorus, I could build the rest of the song quite easily by cutting and pasting. I also used this for the quick bridge I put in after the second chorus and before the longer bridge in "In The Morning." I did this in 10 seconds.

What were some of the challenges you faced while recording the album, and how long did it take?

One of the main challenges was getting the right sounds for the vocals and guitars, which are often the most challenging. The loops and MIDI sequences are easy, as they're already in the program and set up for use. The quality of the audio you take in still depends on your ability to act as a good audio technician. Bring in bad audio full of background noise and distortion, and everything is lost before you even start to mix. I solved it by getting a good condenser microphone, a pop shield for it, a tube-based pre-amp for the microphone (which I also used for all of the guitars coming in) and a hardware-based compressor that added a bit of compression to everything before GarageBand even recorded the sound to disk.

Another challenge I faced is one of the few weaknesses of the program -- its engine for entering MIDI data using your computer screen instead of a keyboard and its lack of loops/percussion for non-standard time signatures. Two of the songs on the album ("Well Alright/Real Life" and "Mood Swings") were in 3/4 time, which made it a challenge to find good percussion. I ended up having to create it myself, but I'm not a drummer, so I didn't use the MIDI keyboard, but the on-screen MIDI map in GarageBand. It was tedious work, and it was kind of clumsy and hard to get the notes exactly where I wanted them. Hopefully, Apple will improve this feature in future updates of the program.

Did you use any other programs/specialized plug-ins to get the results you desired?

Yes. All of the audio recording/sequencing/mixing was done in GarageBand, but after exporting the tunes, all of the songs (except for "Lullaby," which was pretty simple and I didn't want it to get too noisy with lots of compression) were mastered in Bias' Peak with the PSP Audioware MixPack set of VST plug-ins. These plug-ins do a great job of mimicking the sound and feel of analog compressors and tape saturation. The songs sounded great without this step, but the mastering added a ton of warmth to the songs and brought their audio levels up to the same audio peaks that you would see on professionally recorded CDs these days. I compared, and the levels were quite similar. That was one of my main complaints with the GarageBand audio as it came directly out of the program and into iTunes, even with the levels pegged as high as they could go without clipping, the resulting mix was still lower in level than many professional recordings. So it needed an extra oomph, and leave it to PSP to come up with the means to do that. Some of the best money I ever spent was on those plug-ins.

What kind of equipment/software does one need to set up the best minimal GarageBand studio?

A couple of things, if you want to get truly good sound out of GarageBand, are needed. First, invest in a good microphone and pre-amp. Do some research, find out what you can get for the amount of money you're willing to spend. Some hardware compression before the signal comes in is helpful, but not essential. It'll save trouble though as you try and mix vocal sounds later, which can vary wildly in level. And a software-based compressor, such as Apple Audio Unit provided with the system, can only do so much if the signal was not compressed on the way in. Make sure you get a pop shield for the microphone. Also, invest in a pair of good speakers to hear the output, and some headphones, so you don't get the tracks bleeding together while you're recording individual parts. If you even have minimal keyboard training, get a MIDI keyboard. It's much easier (even if you're the one-fingered piano-player type) than trying to use Apple's note-entering system within the program. Other than that, experiment and see what sounds good. That's about the extent of the equipment I used to record "Mood Swings," except for a Dean Markley piezo pickup that I used for my acoustic guitar.

What do you hope to gain by doing the album?

I'm not under any illusions that I'm going to get rich from it, if that's what you're asking. Some of these songs are brand new, and some of them have been with me for years. It's in my blood to record them, get them down, so others can hear them, and like them, or not, according to their tastes. Hopefully, some people will enjoy them as much as I do. If I make some money, that will be nice. I like my day job, but music has always been my first love, and it would be a bonus if I could do it full-time and make a decent living. I'm currently living in the Philadelphia area, and may be thinking of putting together a band to play these songs (and the dozens of others I have!) soon, so if you live close and are interested, drop me a line.

But basically, I did it because I had to do it, and also to prove that it was possible to do a high-quality recording at home without spending thousands of dollars. I couldn't have done that without GarageBand.

Will you continue to record using GarageBand, or will you upgrade to another program, such as Logic Audio?

Yes. I've already started figuring out which songs (I have many more!) will be on the next album, including a song or two that didn't make it on "Mood Swings" because they didn't match the overall flavor of the album and seemed out of place. At this point, I plan on still using GarageBand and seeing how much I can squeeze out of it as my skills improve. I think it still has some more secrets to reveal to me. The new album is tentatively being called "That Peaceful Spot," and my goal is a release date of January 2005. So I don't plan on resting too much now that "Mood Swings" is done.

Who is Frankenmac, anyway?

Mac users will know that we look at computers a bit differently than PC users. They often feel like a member of the family, and many of us actually name them. Frankenmac is my PowerBook. And since GarageBand, and its many musical voices, did so much to make this album possible, I realized that the computer was in fact playing half of the parts in my arrangements -- the drums, the bass, strings, organ, etc. So it seemed only fair that I give Frankenmac double billing, since he played many of the instruments.