Apple’s GarageBand picks up traditional Chinese sounds and instruments in new update

Apple’s interests in China, its second-largest regional market, expand far beyond their recent $1 billion investment in Didi Chuxing. As the company eyes a larger presence in China, they’re also looking to capture the country’s creativity and imagination with their content creation tools.

Today, Apple’s GarageBand music creation software is gaining an update on iOS and Mac that will more tightly integrating traditional Chinese instruments and sounds into the program.

The updates (2.1.1 for iOS and 10.1.2 for Mac), which are available now for free to existing users, adds more than 300 loops built with several different Chinese instruments and styles in mind, adding guzheng, dizi, yangqin and Peking Opera to GarageBand’s library of Chinese musical content.

Past playing around with traditional-sounding loops, users can now create their own customized sounds on new Chinese instruments, including the pipa, erhu and Chinese percussion. Users can capture the intricacies of these instruments by dynamically controlling vibrato and intensity with 3D Touch or can just tap a few chords and let Autoplay take over on the pipa and erhu.

In addition to the new musical instruments and loops, Apple is making it easer for users in China to share their GarageBand tunes to the region’s most popular social networks, including QQ and Youku.

This certainly isn’t the craziest GarageBand update, but it does signal that Apple is aiming to keep a closer eye on how they can more closely integrate their Mac and iOS creative software to attract Chinese users and serve their needs.