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Guitarist will have fun working out what hardware inspired the new amps and stompboxes... and even more fun playing them.

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When Apple launched GarageBand back in 2004, many assumed that its future would be as a loop-based, drag-and-drop music creation tool - it was explicitly designed for beginners and came with thousands of Apple Loops, after all.

However, as the software has evolved over the past few years, it's become a go-to application not only for aspiring songwriters and other musicians who want to record themselves, but also for established artists who see it as the ideal demo-maker and scratchpad.

Even Nadine Coyle of Girls Aloud fame recently told a national newspaper that she's become "obsessed" with GarageBand - and where Girls Aloud go, who are we not to follow, right? Right.

"This remains a great first DAW, though its focus feels skewed."

The great news is that GarageBand is now available on its own from the Mac App Store for the bargain price of £8.99, but you can also get it as part of the iLife '11 suite (also containing iPhoto and iMovie), which costs £45. And, of course, it ships with all new Macs.

For the GarageBand '11 update, Apple has continued to take the software down the 'proper musician' path, adding several features from its pro-standard Logic and some that are exclusive to what now feels even more like Logic's friendlier baby brother.

As we shall see, the focus is on correcting bad playing and teaching you to play better in the first place.

Time moves on

First up, there's Flex Time, the technology that made its debut in Logic Pro 9. Put simply, this gives you hands-on control of the timing of audio, enabling you to grab and move waveform transients (the sharp 'peak' at the start of each note).

It's all beautifully simple: double-click an audio clip in the Timeline and its waveform appears in the editing pane at the bottom; then you can move the start of any note forwards or backwards, as well as adjusting its length.

GarageBand '11 analyses the file for Flex Time adjustments when you make your first edit, and a button enables you to toggle between the altered and original files.

Flex Time does a great job of sorting out minor timing errors 'naturally' (particularly on monophonic parts) while also giving you a tool that can be used creatively. What's more, given that GarageBand is an application that's often used by musicians who are still honing their chops, its inclusion here makes total sense.

The new Groove Matching functionality is cut from similar time-based cloth (and also comes from Logic): it enables you to extract the groove of one track and apply it to all the others in your project.

Simply choose and activate your Groove Track by hovering over its track icon and clicking the star that appears. The groove is then applied to all other parts, although you can deselect any that you don't want to be changed.

In practice, Groove Matching works splendidly. You're not likely to use it on every piece of music you make, but if you want a quick way of locking a bassline and rhythm guitar part to a drum track (for example), it does the job admirably well.