In this episode of Gear Daddy, Daddy Troy reviews Apple's Garageband software. This innovative music software is a great way to teach your kids about music theory. Garageband has great features such as magic garageband that allows kids to pick a music genre and arrange a song according to instrumentation. It's a great way to teach your kids about different music instruments, and get them familiar with the song writing process. While some music teachers may argue that this doesn't teach your kids how to play the guitar or how to play the piano. Garageband also has great interactive music lessons that include video lessons from several celebrities such as Ben Folds, Norah Jones and John Fogerty. These guitar lessons and piano lessons are a great way to learn to play guitar. Download Apple's Garageband and get your kids rocking out on the computer, and teach them a guitar lesson or piano lesson. Gear Daddy ep 531 is brought to you by BabyBjorn.

Welcome back to Gear Daddy, I'm your host, Daddy Troy. My kid knows the difference between a dobro, a pedal steel and a fiddle and the reason he knows this is because of Apple's Garage Band Software. Stick around. I'll tell you all about it.

Today's episode is sponsored by Baby Bjorn. They make some of the best baby gear on the planet, Baby Bjorn.

So this is Apple's Garage Band. It's a professional grade program. Today I want to focus on how you can use it with your kids to encourage them to appreciate as well as make music.

Here I'm going to choose magic garage band. The first thing that comes up when I choose magic garage band are a bunch of genres of music. What I really like about this is that already I'm going to talk to my kid about what's blues or rock or jazz. I'm going to choose roots rock. Here you will see that there are a bunch of instruments on the stage and a kid can run his or her mouse over them and upon mouse over you'll see that they light up.

The kid can play the song as it was already written. So here a kid gets to hear what roots rock sounds like. I'm going to press stop and rather than have an electric guitar play the lead the melody can be played by a whole variety of instruments. My kid can experiment what would happen if I took electric guitar off the melody and played a mandolin instead?

What I really like about this environment is that it's really self contained and hard to mess it up. You can simply make a few choices and there's a dramatic effect. A kid could play for hours.

Once your kid has found the right type of instruments you can open this song into garage band proper. Here you have the song the kid was working on and this is a little complicated for younger kids but I think older kids can jump right in and start to manipulate this. Instead I'm going to clear all of this out and start a new project just to show you another thing you can do with kids as young as five years old.

Instead of doing Magic Garageband I'm going to do a new project I'm going to choose loops. Apple has a bunch of different types of loops. Call it "My Dad Rocks" and this is a project that doesn't have anything in it yet. I'm going to put in some loops that Apple has given me. In the upper right I'm going to pick guitars and I'm going to find a funky electric guitar. That's a good one, I like that.

I'm going to drop this up into the time line. For demonstration purposes I'm going to lay down some electric bass. Pull that in then I'm going to duplicated that a bunch of times by copying and pasting it just for efficiency. You kid could drag and drop these individually. Come in with the drums, into the bass, and then the electric guitar.

You'll notice that it teaches your kid about musical phrases and that music tends to repeat and the kid starts to develop an intuitive feel for that. You can see where a kid could noodle on this for hours. I know some music teachers may think you're not teaching a kid an instrument but that you're just teaching a kid to use the computer but I beg to differ. I think you're teaching a kid a lot about experimentation and working with different music.

Now if you are one of those music teachers check this out. Here you can get video lessons for the piano or the guitar. I'm going to choose guitar and along comes a guy named Tim. So Tim will teach you how to play the chords. You can strum along to a pre-recorded song. Notice here I can speed it up or slow it down. I can also open the song in Garageband proper. And while Garageband is teaching you to play a pretty simple E chord up here you can also see that it's added bass, a set of drums and an electric guitar for you to play along with.

Now it gets even cooler than this. You can also go to the lesson store where you can get lessons from artists themselves such as Norah Jones can teach you how to play a song on the piano. John Fogerty will teach you "Proud Mary" on guitar. These are really inexpensive lessons.

That's all this week for Gear Daddy. This episode was sponsored by Baby Bjorn. They make some of the best baby gear on the planet, Baby Bjorn. If you liked today's episode you can also go back and check out a few weeks ago we did one on Apple's iPhone software. It's great for families. Check that out. We'll see you next time on Gear Daddy and all week long at DadLabs.com.