GarageBand Articles
Drumroll, please…GarageBand is a full-featured music creation app for Mac and Windows. Teach yourself to be a music producer and creator with these quick articles.
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Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-25-2022
Using keyboard shortcuts makes working with GarageBand ever so much easier on a Mac. But did you know that when using an external Bluetooth keyboard with your iDevices, you can use many Mac keyboard shortcuts! So, if you’re using GarageBand on an iDevice, give the Mac keyboard shortcuts a try. And, if you record a great take (on any device) with one or two small mistakes, here’s the easiest way to silence the boo-boos and salvage your otherwise stellar performance.
View Cheat SheetStep by Step / Updated 03-27-2016
GarageBand loops are professionally recorded (and royalty-free) musical snippets that supply drum beats, rhythm parts, melody lines, bass sections, and so on for your music. Apple includes more than 1,000 loops files with GarageBand, and you also add thousands more by purchasing optional $99 Jam Packs (covering Remix Tools, Rhythm Section, Symphony Orchestra, World Music, and the newest addition, Voices). To add loops to your music:
View Step by StepArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
The track is the basic building block of a song; each song is made up of one or more tracks. In GarageBand, you can record only one track at a time so that you can adjust and mix separate elements. For example, when you begin laying tracks, you can record everyone in your band playing a song together or record yourself playing the piano and singing at the same time. If you do, however, you can't adjust only the drums or only the vocals later in the mixing stage. If you want to adjust, say, the guitar or the vocals separately from the rest of the song, you have to record each part individually — on a separate track. To record a track in GarageBand, follow these steps: 1. Open GarageBand and create a new song. You can create a new song in one of two ways: • If this is the first time you've launched GarageBand or no song was open when you quit GarageBand, a "Welcome to GarageBand" dialog box appears. Click the Create New Song button, and that's what will happen — a new song window appears. • If a song opened when you launched GarageBand, you can create a new song by choosing File --> New. 2. When you see the standard OS X Save As dialog box appear, as shown in Figure 1, give your song a name and tell GarageBand where to save the file. Figure 1: GarageBand's Save As dialog box offers adjustable settings. You can also set some basic settings for the song. The settings that are shown in Figure 1 are the default and the most common settings for a song. Of course, you can change these settings for any song using the menus and slider, as follows: • Tempo: Use this slider to adjust the tempo. • Time: The pop-up menu lets you adjust the time signature. The adjacent bpm box indicates the beats per minute as selected with the Tempo slider. (If you type a new number in the box, the Tempo slider will move by the appropriate amount.) • Key: Use this pop-up menu to adjust the key. It's probably a good idea to leave the Tempo, Time, and Key settings alone if you don't know what they mean, at least for now. You can always change them later if you like. After you save the file, you see the timeline, where your new song is just waiting for you to put something on its tracks. 3. Create a track by choosing Track --> New Track, by pressing Command-W, or by clicking the New Track button on-screen. Whichever you choose, the New Track dialog box appears. 4. Click the name of the type of track that you want to create (at the top of the window): Real Instrument or Software Instrument. GarageBand offers three different kinds of tracks: Real instrument tracks, software instrument tracks, and one master track per song. You can have as many real and software instrument tracks as your hardware can handle, but each song has but a single master track. When you're laying down tracks, real and software instrument tracks are the ones that you need to focus on. The master track comes into play in the mastering stage. Here's how to choose the right type of track for the instrument that you want to record: • Real instrument tracks: If you connect an instrument — an electric guitar, electronic piano, synthesizer, or any other electronic instrument or a microphone — directly to your Mac when you record, this device requires a real instrument track in GarageBand. Vocals are also considered real instruments in GarageBand, so you record them on real instrument tracks. There is one exception — a MIDI keyboard. • Software instrument tracks: If you connect a MIDI keyboard to your Mac, you use a software instrument track. This is also the type of track to use if you want to record a track using GarageBand's built-in software instruments. After you select the type of track that you want to record, a set of related options appears in the left. At this point, recording a real instrument track becomes a little different from recording a software instrument track. After you record a track, the "region" you just recorded appears on that track in the timeline in its proper color — real instruments are blue, and software instruments are green. The tracks even glow their proper color when you select them. Loops and real audio regions in the timeline are also colored this way. You'll have it memorized in no time; blue tracks are real instrument tracks, while green tracks are software instrument tracks.
View ArticleArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
GarageBand lets you disguise and fix mistakes in tracks in a number of different ways. The next time you lay down a track that's not quite perfect, don't delete the track until you've tried some of or all the following techniques. Punching in and out to replace part of a track If you make a mistake when you record a track, you can sometimes fix the mistake by re-recording the part with the mistake. In recording parlance, this is called punching in and punching out. When you punch in and out in GarageBand, you choose which part you re-record by using the Cycle Region. When you turn on the Cycle Region, the playhead loops back to the beginning of the Cycle Region every time it reaches the end. So the region plays (or records) continually until you click the Stop button or press the spacebar. To punch in and out on a track, follow these steps: 1. With your song open, click the Cycle button (located at the bottom of the screen — the one with the curved arrows, next to the double-headed arrows) or press C to activate the Cycle Region. A yellow ruler appears under the beat ruler showing the Cycle Region, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Click the Cycle button to turn on the Cycle Region. The first time you use the Cycle Region, it appears at the far left end of the beat ruler, but if you move it, the Cycle Region appears where you moved it the next time you turn it on. 2. Select the track that needs fixing. 3. Find the precise part that you want to re-record by moving the playhead and listening to the track. 4. Position the Cycle Region over the part that you want to re-record. Click and drag the middle of the yellow Cycle Region to move it; click and drag on either end to extend or shrink it. Use the Zoom slider to zoom in on the timeline if you need to. Click Play or press the spacebar to play the contents of the Cycle Region. If it's the exact part you want to re-record, proceed to Step 5. If it's not, continue to move, expand, and/or contract the Cycle Region until it contains only the precise portion of the track you wish to re-record, and then proceed to Step 5. It's almost impossible to perform a decent punch in without using GarageBand's Count In feature. Choose Control --> Count In and select it. Count In is a toggle: It's activated when there is a check mark next to its name in the menu. 5. Click the Record button (the red dot button) or press R to start recording. 6. Play the part. If the track is a real instrument, only the first pass through the cycle region is recorded as you play. If you don't stop recording after your first pass, the second pass (and every subsequent pass) plays back what was recorded on the first pass. But if the track is a software instrument, something different and very useful happens instead: Every pass is recorded and merged with the previous passes. So, for example, you can play snare drum on the first pass, the high-hat on the second pass, and the ride cymbal on the third pass. When you click the Stop button or press the spacebar, all three passes have been recorded on the same track. Neat, eh? 7. When you finish playing the part, click the Play button or press the spacebar to stop recording. Now listen to the track closely and if it's not what you want, try again. When you're finished with this punch-in, don't forget to click the Cycle button or press C to turn off the Cycle Region. Just undo it . . . and then redo it With GarageBand, it's easy to undo many mistakes immediately. You can undo the last thing that you did. But did you know that you can undo the next-to-last thing you did, and the thing before that one, and the thing before that, and so on? Here's a quick list of undo and redo commands: To undo the previous action: Choose Edit --> Undo or press Command-Z. To redo what you just undid: Choose Edit --> Redo or press Command-Shift-Z; what you undid will be redone. To get the ultimate undo: Choose File --> Revert to Saved, and your song goes back to the way it was the last time you saved it. The Undo and Redo features are linear, so pay close attention. It's easy to undo something good — something that you didn't want to have undone — if you just keep pressing the shortcut without watching what happens each time. Instead of relying too heavily on the Undo and Redo features, save a copy of your song before you begin undoing or redoing by choosing File --> Save As. Splitting and joining tracks You can take any region on any track and divide it into two or more parts. This option has many practical uses, but the one that you'll probably use most is deleting part of a region. From a cough to a botched note, splitting a region is the most direct, easiest, and often the best way to edit out a part of a track that you no longer need. If you trim out "dead space" in live instrument tracks, your songs will have a brighter, cleaner sound. For example, if you start recording 12 seconds before the first note the guitar plays, you should trim out the 12 seconds of dead space before the guitar kicks in. The same thing goes for vocals — if you recorded air, trim it out. That dead space has noise in it. Deleting the dead space lowers the overall noise level for your song, so if you want the cleanest, brightest mix possible, delete dead space on any real instrument track if it's longer than 2–3 seconds. It's a big hassle, but your song will sound better for your trouble. To split a region, follow these steps: 1. To split a single region, click it once to select it; to select multiple regions, Shift-click or drag to select them all. 2. Move the playhead to the precise point where you want the split to occur. 3. Choose Edit --> Split or press Command-T. The region will split into two regions at the playhead, as shown in Figure 2. Go ahead and try it out. I have all the time in the world. You can split a region into as many regions as you want. If you're cutting out part of a track, you may need to add a second split to isolate the section that you want to delete. After you do that, select the section of the track that needs to go and delete it by pressing Backspace or Delete. Figure 2: A region before (top) and after (bottom) being split.
View ArticleArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
GarageBand exports exactly one file format — the Audio Interchange File Format (with extensions of aif, aiff, AIF, or AIFF). Fortunately, AIF files are the gold standard of audio files, the highest-of-high-quality uncompressed audio that you can save on a disc. AIF files sound great, but a cost is incurred: The files are huge — too big to send via e-mail or download or to stream from the Internet. AIF files are, by definition, uncompressed. They're usually five to ten times the size of a song in its compressed form (that is, encoded or ripped). Other audio file formats, such as MP3 and AAC, are compressed and are much smaller, by 50 to 95 percent, than the same song uncompressed. Sound quality Compression, by its nature, takes away part of the sound. In theory, it's the part that people can't hear, but some people do notice a big difference between uncompressed audio and compressed audio, even on cheap stereo systems. Others can't tell any difference. Some people can hear the difference between compressed audio files that are encoded (ripped) at bit rates of 160 and 192 Kbps. Others hear no difference. The smaller, compressed audio files sound good enough to most people most of the time and have become a de facto standard for consumer audio. iPods (and most other personal music players) and iTunes (and most other personal music-playing software not made by Microsoft) can play both uncompressed and compressed files. But most people store most of their music as compressed audio files, allowing five, eight, or even ten times as many songs to be stored in the same amount of hard drive space. The compressed file formats can encode your song at different bit rates. The higher the bit rate, the better the song will sound. Alas, the higher the bit rate is, the bigger the file will be. Choosing a compression type The quality of an AIF file is top-of-the-heap because it, by definition, contains 100 percent uncompressed audio. Nothing has been added or removed; every note, breath, harmonic, overtone, string noise, buzz, hiss, and other sound in the master recording is in an AIF file. Technically, the files on an audio CD are "Red Book Audio" files, which are slightly different from AIF files. The technical aspects aren't important; the important part is that when you shove an audio CD into your Mac, it sees Red Book Audio files and automatically thinks of them as AIF files. No conversion or translation is needed — to your Mac, Red Book Audio files are AIF files, and vice versa, even if the rest of the world says that Red Book and AIF are different. The problem is, while uncompressed audio may be the right format for shiny silver discs, it's not the right format for e-mail or the Web, because AIF files are gargantuan. Fortunately, if you have GarageBand, you also have the right tool for compressing AIF files, and in fact, that tool is already open and ready to rip. That tool is GarageBand's iLife sibling, iTunes. With iTunes, it's child's play to compress (rip or encode) AIF files into MP3, AAC, or even Apple's new high-quality lossless encoder, and it's all done behind the scenes using iTunes built-in (and very high-quality) encoders. MP3 and AAC are the two most common compressed audio file formats on the Mac. MP3 came first and has essentially been the compressed audio standard for many years. Then, a couple of years ago, when Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store, it also introduced the AAC file format, which it uses for the store's rights-protected songs. Figure 1 is worth a couple of thousand words — it shows the same song saved in all four formats and the size of each file. Table 1 is a handy reference to the different file types and the common ways in which each type is used. Figure 1: Compare the file size of the same song saved in four different file formats. Table 1: File Types Large and Small File Type Compressed? What's It Good For? AIF No Audio CDs, iTunes, and archiving music in the file format that retains the most audio information. Can be used with iPod, but files are 5–10 times the size of compressed formats. WAV No The equivalent of an uncompressed AIF file on a Mac, this format is used for sharing files with Windows users. File sizes are 5–10 times the size of MP3 files, which is the compressed file format of choice among Windows users. Apple lossless No iTunes and archiving music in the file format that retains the most audio information. Can be used with iPod but files are 3–7 times the size of compressed formats. MP3 Yes iTunes, e-mail, the Web, and sharing with Windows users. Files are much smaller than either uncompressed format, making MP3s ideal for iPods. AAC Yes Same as MP3 but is Mac-only. Slightly smaller files than MP3 and slightly better sound quality in those slightly smaller files. Most Windows users can't use AAC files.
View ArticleArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
Adding loops or recording your own music (with real or software instruments) creates a region in a track. You can cut, copy, and paste these regions or resize them to play as long as you need them to. You can also move regions to another track or another area of the timeline. The latest GarageBand adds an arrange track to help you organize the structure of your composition. You can define sections (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and more) and resize, copy, and drag them around in any order that makes sense. When you move a section, all associated tracks for that region move too. Choose Track→Show Arrange Track to get started. Regions are color-coded as follows: Purple: Real instrument regions you record Blue: Real instrument regions created by loops Orange: Real instrument regions from imported audio files Green: Software instrument loops from recordings or loops
View ArticleArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
You may want to display your composition with standard notes, clef signs, and so on. Select a software instrument region and open Track Editor by clicking the button at the lower-left corner of the screen. Click the notation view button (it has a musical note on it) in the lower-right corner of the editor’s header area and start composing. You can print professional looking sheet music of your composition by choosing File→Print in the GarageBand menu. Even though Apple makes it easy to use GarageBand, mixing or balancing all the parts of a song so that one track doesn’t drown out another can be difficult and takes practice. You can find various mixer controls and level meters under the Mixer.
View ArticleArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
You can share the music you created in GarageBand in several ways. You can send a song you created in GarageBand directly to a playlist in iTunes. You can create your own ringtone for an iPhone in GarageBand and send it to iTunes. You also can send an audio file to iTunes or burn your song to a recordable CD. To send a song to iTunes, choose Share→Send Song to iTunes and choose the compression (typically AAC Encoder) and Audio Settings (Good Quality, High Quality, Higher Quality, or Custom) you want. Then click Share. You can send a single track (or group of tracks) instead of a complete song to iTunes. Just mute all the tracks you don’t want to send before sending the ones you do want. To send a ringtone to your iPhone, choose Share→Send Ringtone to iTunes. Remember that the ringtone needs to be a repeating section of song that is 40 seconds of less; you can click the Cycle button to make it happen manually or by click Adjust to make it automatic. To send an audio file to iTunes, choose Share→Export Song to Disk. To burn the song to a recordable CD, place a blank disc in your Mac’s optical drive, choose Share→Burn Song to CD, choose the settings you want, and click Burn. You can burn only one song to a CD this way. To burn multiple songs, create or add them to an iTunes playlist first and then burn the playlist to a CD via iTunes.
View ArticleArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
Creating GarageBand podcasts on classroom iPads is a great way to blend technology and learning. Project assignments that incorporate podcasts created with GarageBand iPad app tap student's communication and collaboration skills. GarageBand has been around for a few years on the Mac and is known as a powerful tool for making music. However, it has a voice feature that can be used for adding vocals to music . . . or just as easily for recording your voice on a podcast. Even better, you can use the same tool for creating a musical opening or background soundtrack. With the range of options offered for music and voice along with the capability to export and publish your final product, GarageBand has become the popular choice for many people producing simple podcasts on iPads. GarageBand is a powerful recording tool. The following steps give you a quick-and-dirty introduction to using GarageBand for podcasting: Create a new song with a few simple tracks. You'll use this short song as a themed intro each time you create a new podcast. Of course, you may also consider adding some royalty-free music. Save your theme by tapping the My Songs button in the top right of the display. You're returned to the My Songs browser display. Make a copy of your theme music by tapping and holding your Theme in the My Songs browser and then tapping the + copy icon. Tap Done and then select your copy to use for your podcast. You’ll find yourself back in TrackView, where you can tap the Instruments button on the top toolbar. Tap the Audio Recorder to begin recording the podcast. Tap the Record button, and speak clearly and directly into the iPad microphone. The iPad mic is located in the top-left corner when the iPad is facing you (with the Home button at the bottom). You could also use an external microphone attached to the iPad to record your podcast. Using an external microphone may help you improve the sound quality of your podcast. Press the record button at any time to stop. Listen and re-record as often as needed. Tap and hold the podcast in your My Songs view and then tap the Share icon above it to select how you want to share it. Your options include uploading to a SoundCloud account, taking it into iMovie if you want to add images or video, or sharing it via iTunes or e-mail. You can publish your GarageBand podcast via iTunes. Tap iTunes from the Share menu, and save your podcast as an iTunes file or as a GarageBand file for editing on a different computer. To publish, select iTunes. Start iTunes on your computer with your iPad connected wirelessly or by cable. Click your iPad in the source list and select your iPad’s Apps pane on the top tabs. Scroll to the File Sharing options at the bottom of the window and select GarageBand. Your podcast should be listed, and you can drag it to your desktop or any folder. Now you’re ready to submit to iTunes. Go to Apple's website for all the details of podcast submission. You can also publish your podcast by uploading to a blog-based website such as Posterous or WordPress. Apple also provides Podcast Producer as part of its Mac OS X Server installations; you may want to look into it as an option for publishing your podcasts. Keep things moving if you want to maintain interest. Try to keep topic segments around seven minutes or less. Using guests or recorded interviews is a great way to mix the conversation flow and tone. You should also consider incorporating musical backgrounds and little jingles as a way to transition between topics in a longer podcast.
View ArticleArticle / Updated 03-26-2016
If you’re a perfectionist, you can keep recording part of a composition on your Mac until you feel that your performance is just right. Choose the section of the song you want to work on by clicking the Cycle button. A yellow cycle region appears in the upper part of the beat ruler. Drag and resize it so that its left side aligns with the area you want to start recording and the right side aligns with where you want the region to end. This process works only if you deselect the check box labeled Automatically Merge Software Instrument Recordings When Using Cycle Mode. The check box is found under GarageBand Preferences→General. If that checkbox is selected, all the audio layers into a single track. Click Record to start recording the appropriate track. The playhead moves across the region and then starts over again and again. Click Play when you want to stop recording. When you’re finished, a number appears in the upper-left corner of the cycle region, indicating the number of the active takes or the last take you recorded. So if you recorded five takes, the number is 5. Click Play to hear that take, or click the number and choose another take from the Take pop-up menu. After auditioning all your takes, you can delete the ones you don’t want. You can take the best performance from one take and combine it with another. To do so, select the cycle region and move the playhead to the point where you want to seamlessly transition from one take to another. Choose Edit→Split Regions at Playhead and then assign each take as before. You may want to display your composition in notation view, with standard notes, clef signs, and so on. Select a software instrument region, and click the Editors button on the upper-left corner of the toolbar. Click the Score View button (it’s labeled Score and is adjacent to the Piano Roll button), and start composing. You can print professional-looking sheet music of your composition by choosing File→Print in GarageBand.
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