I’m stepping waayyy out of my comfortzone and into the mix. I’ve been a huge fan of what I’ll no doubt poorly name, electronica, and very recently, Danger Mouse & the Kleptones. I’ve begun turning my mac into a music studio & could use some community assistance & encouragement.

Here’s the story:
I’m no doubt a real poser when it comes to electronica. Over the past few years I’ve been a fan of Zero7, Kosheen, Underworld, and various unheard millions of songs I’ve listened to over streaming radio from BeatBlender at SomaFM.

I played with ACID (the music/loop making util) on my dual boot windows/linux tower here. While it was fun it wasn’t my cup of tea. When GarageBand came out I tinkerd a bit. I knew right away that the teaser version was only that and I wasn’t ready to commit.

Well, this past week I felt I was ready to start getting into it.

My first feeling was that GarageBand was a natural. I number of computer music mags were ‘cool’ with it. OK, it has street cred. But, once I started digging deeper there were some problems. I have a maxed out G4 iBook. Ding! Ding! Ding! Not going to happen. There was concensus among those in the know that while GarageBand is extremely newbie friendly, you gotta run at Warp 9. That’s G5 land. Dang.

So I’ve now a setup with something called M-Audio MBox. This is a soundcard/mixer-ish thang. With it I bought… Pro Tools, Reason & Ableton Live (cruddy link warning!). There were some other tools in there, but this is overwhealming enough in itself. I also picked up a M-Audio 02 USB Midi Controller. What’s that? you ask. I’d call it a mini keyboard.

I thought this was going to be roses. I’ve weathered Apache, Linux, etc etc.. -this- is complicated stuff!

In short I’m looking for some community around these tools. If you’ve suggestions I’d love to hear them. I learned apache and linux by hanging online with those folks in the know & I think this will be no different.

First lesson: don’t upgrade your mac too fast. All the software I bought appears to not run on OS X 10.3.5 yet which is what I’m running. One step forward two steps back. Now working! Whoo hoo!

*For clarity’s sake I should mention that I’ve been a basement analog musician for 20 years.