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Take Control of v1.0
Making Music
GarageBand s r e Cov 1 1 ' c a M X OS ION VERS with
Jeff Tolbert
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Table of Contents
Read Me First
Updates and More .....................................................................4
Basics .....................................................................................5
What’s New in This Edition .........................................................6
Introduction Making Music with GarageBand Quick Start Configure GarageBand Upgrade to the Latest Version ...................................................12
Launch GarageBand .................................................................13
Set Preferences .......................................................................13
Make Your First Tune
Get Acquainted with the Interface..............................................16
Add Loops ..............................................................................18
Add Melody Instruments...........................................................29
Learn Editing and Mixing Basics .................................................31
Make a Great Song
Plan the Song .........................................................................35
Consider What Makes a Song Work ............................................37
Work with Regions and Loops ....................................................40
Mix Your Song .........................................................................64
Transform a Magic GarageBand Song
Create Your First Magic GarageBand Song...................................79
Customize Your Magic GarageBand Song ....................................81
Rearrange the Song .................................................................84
Change the Instrumentation .....................................................89
Add the Finishing Touches ........................................................96
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Learn More Loop Techniques
Create a Drum Fill ...................................................................98
Add Chord Changes to Loops...................................................102
Add Effects to Loops ..............................................................104
Put It All Together..................................................................110
Force a Loop to Keep Its Original Tempo ...................................123
Use Loops from Other Sources ................................................125
Import MIDI Files ..................................................................128
Create Special Projects
Score a Video .......................................................................129
Fashion a Ringtone ................................................................135
Share Your Project
Export Your Song...................................................................140
Export Your Movie .................................................................142
Send a Ringtone to Your Phone ...............................................143
Learn More
Web Sites .............................................................................145
Books ..................................................................................145
Videos..................................................................................146
Appendix A: Improving Performance Glossary About This Book Ebook Extras.........................................................................155
About the Author ...................................................................155
About the Publisher................................................................157
Copyright and Fine Print Featured Titles
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Read Me First
Welcome to Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand ’11, version 1.0, published in March 2011 by TidBITS Publishing Inc. This book was written by Jeff Tolbert and edited by Caroline Rose. GarageBand is an exceptional way for musicians and nonmusicians alike to unleash their musical creativity. This ebook shows you how to use loops, assemble them into a composition, mix the song, and use basic audio effects in GarageBand ’11 (also known as GarageBand 6) on a Mac. Even if you have no musical ability or instruments, you can create an impressive song quickly and easily. Copyright © 2011, Jeff Tolbert. All rights reserved.
If you have an ebook version of this title, please note that if you want to share it with a friend, we ask that you do so as you would a physical book: “lend” it for a quick look, but ask your friend to buy a new copy to read it more carefully or to keep it for reference. Discounted classroom and Mac user group copies are also available.
Updates and More
You can access extras related to this book on the Web (use the link in Ebook Extras, near the end of the book; it’s available only to purchasers). On the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy a subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF and—usually—EPUB and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading this ebook on handheld devices at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/device-advice.) • Read postings to the ebook’s blog. These may include new information and tips, as well as links to author interviews. At the top of the blog, you can also see any update plans for the ebook. • Get a discount when you order a print copy of the ebook. 4
Basics
In reading this book, you may get stuck if you don’t understand Take Control syntax for things like working with menus or finding items in the Finder. Please note the following: • Menus: I describe choosing a command from a menu in the menu bar in an abbreviated way. For example, the abbreviated description for the menu command that deletes a track from a song in GarageBand is “Track > Delete Track.” • Path syntax: I occasionally use a path to show the location of a file or folder in your file system; for example, the default GarageBand installation puts the GarageBand demo songs in the /Library/ Application Support/GarageBand folder. A slash at the beginning of a path tells you to start from the root level of the disk. Some paths begin with ~ (tilde), which is a shortcut for the current user’s home folder. For example, if a person with the user name joe wants to install fonts that only he can access, he would install them in the folder ~/Library/Fonts, which is just another way of writing /Users/ joe/Library/Fonts. • GarageBand’s preferences: I sometimes refer to preferences in GarageBand that you may want to adjust. To display GarageBand’s preferences (not to be confused with the systemwide settings found in the System Preferences application), choose GarageBand > Preferences (Command-,). Within the Preferences window, click a button at the top to display a pane with that category of preferences (for example, the Audio/MIDI button). Instead of giving detailed directions each time, I sometimes use an abbreviated notation such as “go to the Audio/MIDI preference pane.” Listen as you learn! I occasionally give an audio example by linking to a song in the iTunes Store. You can click the link to connect to the iTunes Store and then double-click the song in the album list to play a 30-second preview of it.
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Note: You’ll see under GarageBand > About GarageBand that
the program’s full name is GarageBand ’11 and that its latest version number (as of this writing) is 6.0.2. I refer to the full name or the version number only when necessary for clarity; for the sake of brevity, I call it simply GarageBand the rest of the time.
What’s New in This Edition
This book is a new edition of Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand, which I first wrote for GarageBand version 1.0 and have updated for each major version so far. For this edition, I updated the book to cover new features in GarageBand ’11, also known as version 6. Here’s what’s new in this edition: • The default Apple loops are great, but they can get old. In Learn More Loop Techniques, I’ve added new ideas for expanding your stock loop palette, including adding effects, combining drum loops, and extending notes with the new Flex Time feature. • In the same chapter, I’ve added a new tutorial demonstrating many of the advanced loop techniques I discuss. See Put It All Together. • I’ve added details about each of the Apple Jam Packs and a short list of third-party loop dealers, in case you want to expand your loop library. See Use Loops from Other Sources. • A new section describes how to create Movie projects to add music to your movies. See Score a Video. • In previous versions of this book, I touched briefly on creating ringtones for your iPhone; in this edition, I expand on that topic in Fashion a Ringtone. • I’ve added links to the GarageBand project files for each of the major tutorials in the book. That way, if you get stuck, you can see exactly what I did in each project. • I’ve enhanced the chapter Share Your Project with details on exporting Movie projects and ringtones, including ringtones for non-Apple phones. 6
• I’ve added small updates and tips throughout the book to reflect wisdom I’ve gleaned and tricks I’ve learned since writing the previous edition, and I’ve updated many screenshots to reflect changes in the GarageBand ’11 interface.
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Introduction
GarageBand makes it easy for someone who isn’t a professional musician to create music that sounds professional. It’s inexpensive, and because it was developed by Apple, it’s pretty to look at. The program does provide online Help, but this book goes beyond what you find in the Help and walks you step by step through a number of common (and not so common) procedures. Even if you have some familiarity with other music editing software, the tips and tricks in this book will help streamline how you work in GarageBand. This book shows you how to create a song in GarageBand using the loops that ship with the product as well as using Magic GarageBand. You’ll learn tricks for customizing the built-in loops and Magic GarageBand tunes, and ways to use mixing techniques and audio effects so that your songs will sound unique. Whether you’re new to GarageBand or have already played around with it, plenty of audiorelated goodies await you within. I won’t, however, cover recording a guitar or vocals or setting up a MIDI keyboard; I cover those topics in my second book, Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11. I’m also passing along some of the musical knowledge I’ve amassed over the years writing film scores and recording with bands, to help you create an interesting and effective composition. This information is oriented toward nonmusicians, so don’t worry if all you know about music is that a grand piano is bigger than a ukulele; I’ve presented the concepts in plain English. You don’t need to know what a diminished seventh chord is or how to sight-read an orchestral score to make a song that will impress your friends. If any of the terminology stumps you, you can look it up in the Glossary; if a term appears in blue in the text of the ebook, you can click it to move to its definition. This book follows a step-by-step approach. I walk you through the creation of five songs: four using loops—three fairly simple and one more complex—and one using Magic GarageBand. I point out exactly which loops, effects, and settings to use where. This specific, sequential approach keeps the book from being a dull and dry reference manual. I suggest that you follow the instructions as closely as you can.
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At least skim: I recommend that you at least skim all five song tutorials, since I mention different techniques in each of them. Even if you don’t plan on ever using Magic GarageBand, for example, note that I cover some more advanced GarageBand features in that chapter. After you’ve worked through a song, it’s yours to play with. Fly, be free, create! GarageBand is a tool to unleash your inner genius. I hope this book helps you to do just that. Note: This book covers the Mac version of GarageBand ’11, not
the iPad version. The two versions share many features, so lots of the tips in this book apply to the iPad version, but I don’t discuss any iPad-specific features.
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Making Music with GarageBand Quick Start This book shows you how to create exciting songs using the music loops that come with GarageBand. I take a sequential approach and build on what I’ve shown in earlier chapters. If you’re a less linear person and like to jump around, you may have to backtrack occasionally if you come across something unfamiliar. Set up: • Update GarageBand if necessary and set preferences so that it will run at its best; see Configure GarageBand. Make your first tune: • New to GarageBand? Make your first song in no time! Learn what a loop is and how to work with it; see Add Loops. • Tweak your tune, make the loops work together, and give the song an ending; see Learn Editing and Mixing Basics. Make a great song: • It’s time to start making great music. Decide on your goal and find loops that help meet that goal; see Plan the Song. • Learn what it takes to make your composition interesting and exciting; see Consider What Makes a Song Work. • Crop some loops and expand others, change instruments, and move notes around, using both score view and graphic view; see Work with Regions and Loops. • Explore the basics of audio editing and effects—fades, equalization, panning and more; see Mix Your Song. Customize a Magic GarageBand song: • Create a Magic GarageBand song, extend the arrangement, change keys and tempos, and cross-fade between instruments; see Transform a Magic GarageBand Song.
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Experiment with advanced loop techniques: • Create a drum fill, add chord changes and effects to loops, import MIDI files and loops from other sources, and more; see Learn More Loop Techniques. Do more with your music: • Learn how to use GarageBand to add soundtracks to your movies in Score a Video. • Create ringtones for your phone with the advice in Fashion a Ringtone. Export your finished piece: • Send your song to iTunes, your movie to QuickTime, or your ringtone to your phone; see Share Your Project. Improve performance: • Learn how to get the most out of your CPU and minimize your chance of seeing the dreaded “System Overload” message; see Appendix A: Improving Performance.
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Configure GarageBand
I wrote this book as a series of tutorials for you to follow. GarageBand’s default configuration gets in the way of smooth workflow in a few places in these tutorials, so make sure you have the latest version of the program and adjust your preferences now, to streamline your work later in the book and minimize confusing dialogs and system slowdowns.
Upgrade to the Latest Version
If you haven’t done so already, the first thing I recommend is to upgrade to GarageBand ’11 (version 6.0.2 is the latest release at the time of this writing) by installing GarageBand—available as part of iLife ’11 or as a separate application from the App Store—and any updates to it. I assume that everyone reading this book is using GarageBand ’11, although I point out some of the differences from GarageBand ’09 so that readers who haven’t upgraded yet won’t be left totally in the dust. To see which version you have, launch GarageBand and choose GarageBand > About GarageBand. Up pops a window with a beautiful picture of an electric guitar, some copyright information, and the version number. To find out if a newer version is available, choose Software Update from the Apple menu. Do this before upgrading! Always back up your drive before upgrading any piece of software; see Joe Kissel’s excellent book Take Control of Easy Mac Backups for advice on the best options. Even after backing up, you might want to do the following (if you have about 4 GB of hard disk space available) to keep your copy of GarageBand ’09 intact before you update the application: 1. Rename your old GarageBand application file GarageBand ’09. 2. Rename the GarageBand folder in ~/Library/Application Support. I suggest giving it a name that’s similar and clear, such as GarageBand ’09 or Old GarageBand files.
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Jam Packs installed? If you have any Jam Packs installed, you must either reinstall them after you upgrade or manually move all the Jam Pack loops and instruments into the new GarageBand folder.
Launch GarageBand
If this is your first time starting GarageBand, its startup dialog appears and gives you numerous choices. There’s a column of categories on the left and, depending on which category you choose, an array of options on the right. There are three buttons at the bottom of the dialog: Quit, which does the obvious; Open an Existing File, which is also selfexplanatory; and Choose. (You also see this dialog when you close the current project with File > Close or start a new one with File > New.) You certainly don’t want to quit; you just got here! Since we’re going to be working with loops, select New Project on the left and Loops on the right, and then click Choose. The New Project from Template dialog appears—essentially a Save As dialog with a few extra options: song tempo, time signature, and key. Enter a song title in the Save As field. Click the Create button, and a new GarageBand window opens. Pick a unique title: GarageBand provides the default title “My Song” (with an incremented number following it for each subsequent default), but I recommend choosing your own title. It’s much easier to find a specific project when it’s not called “My Song 37.”
Set Preferences
Open the Audio/MIDI pane of GarageBand’s Preferences and set your audio input and output sources. If you don’t have an external audio interface, you have two choices for output—System Setting and BuiltIn Output—and your choices for input will be System Setting, Built-In Microphone, and Built-In Input. In this case, your best bet is probably to choose Built-In Output and Built-In Input. If you do have an audio interface, that will show up in the list as well, and I recommend using it for both input and output (on my computer, for example, both input and output are set to Tascam US-122). 13
If you choose to leave the input source set to the GarageBand default (System Setting), make sure that you know how your System Preferences are set and that they’re appropriate for GarageBand. For example, if you’re plugging a guitar into your computer’s audio input jack, make sure Built-in Input is selected in System Preferences (Sound pane). Changing the Default Names In GarageBand’s My Info preference pane, you can change the default names for the playlist, artist, composer, and album. The playlist name is the name of the playlist iTunes will create for your GarageBand songs. By default, the artist name is your user account name (found in System Preferences, in the Accounts pane). You may want to use your given name, or you could get crazy and call yourself Ludwig van Peppermill; it’s entirely up to you!
In the Loops preference pane, deselect Filter for More Relevant Results (Figure 1). This preference hides all the loops that are in a different musical key from the one your song is in. This can be puzzling, especially when you’re looking for a loop you know you saw yesterday. You would also have trouble finding some of the loops you’ll be using later in this book if you left this checkbox selected. The setting is often irrelevant anyway, since GarageBand automatically converts loops to the key you’re in.
Figure 1: Deselect the Filter for More Relevant Results checkbox.
You’re done configuring preferences, so close this window to continue.
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Make Room for GarageBand It will also help if you quit as many other applications as you can. Running Adobe Acrobat Reader or Apple’s Preview to read this ebook is OK, but you probably shouldn’t have a CD playing or Photoshop working on a complicated Gaussian blur in the background. (For other suggestions on improving GarageBand’s performance, see Appendix A: Improving Performance.)
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Make Your First Tune
Now that you’ve followed the recommendations in the previous chapter for optimizing your GarageBand experience, you can get acquainted with the basics of the program and start creating your first song. If you’ve already mucked around in GarageBand a bit on your own, it might be tempting to skip to the more involved song later in this book, but I’d recommend against that. The ditty you’ll work on in this chapter may be simple, but it will cover a lot of territory. You may also find it enlightening to watch how someone else works.
Get Acquainted with the Interface
The GarageBand interface, as beautiful as it is, can be daunting to the uninitiated. Figure 2, just ahead, highlights elements of the interface, which you’ll learn more about as you progress through this book. The numbers in the following list of brief descriptions refer to the circled numbers in the figure: 1. The track header section is where GarageBand puts a header for each track you create. As you’ll see later, the header contains the instrument’s name and icon, as well as Mute and Solo buttons, a pan control (to set the track’s left-to-right position in the stereo field), a volume slider and level meter, and an automation curve button (to make changes in volume and other parameters over time). 2. The timeline is where most of the action takes place. It serves as a visual representation of your song and is the canvas you’ll be working on as you add loops and so on. 3. The loop browser is where you preview and select loops. 4. The zoom slider lets you zoom in on the timeline to show more detail and smaller divisions of time. 5. You’ll frequently use the Add Track and Track Editor buttons when working with tracks.
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Figure 2: GarageBand interface (1) Track header section (2) Timeline (3) Loop browser (4) Zoom slider (5) Add Track and Track Editor buttons (6) Transport controls (7) LCD (8) Cycle and Metronome buttons (9) Master volume slider and level meter (10) Loop Browser, Track Info, and Media Browser buttons
6. The transport controls function like CD player controls, including play, record, fast-forward, and rewind buttons (Figure 3, ahead). 7. The LCD shows the playhead position in measures and beats by default, but other modes can be selected—for example, to show the playhead position in minutes and seconds or other information such as the tempo and time signature.
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Figure 3: Transport controls and their keyboard shortcuts (1) Rewind button (Left arrow) (2) Forward button (Right arrow) (3) Go to Beginning button (Return), which sends the playhead back to the beginning of the song. When a song is playing, this button changes to a Stop button (Space bar), but pressing Return still goes back to the beginning of the song. (4) Play button (Space bar) (5) Record button (R)
8. The Cycle button (keyboard shortcut C) lets you listen to one area of your song over and over, which is great for choosing loops and testing effects, and the Metronome button (Command-U) gives you a steady click while playing or recording. 9. The master volume slider is where you set the overall output level of your song, as shown on the master level meter above the slider. 6. The Loop Browser, Track Info, and Media Browser buttons show or hide the obvious: the loop browser, the details for a selected track, and the iLife Media Browser (for access to audio, photos, and movies from GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie).
Add Loops
If you haven’t already created a new music project, choose File > New (Command-N), select New Project and then Loops, click Choose, and name your song something other than My Song (I called this one Funk Morsel, but feel free to name it anything you like.) Leave all the other settings as they are and click Create. We’ll use the loop browser (Figure 4) to add loops. The loop browser can be confusing to navigate until you get used to it. There are four 18
columns of buttons, with music styles in the first column, instruments in the second (and at the bottom of all four), and sets of contrasting moods at the top of the last two. Clicking a particular button narrows your choices to loops with that characteristic.
Figure 4: Using the loop browser (1) Click the Loop Browser button to show or hide the loop browser. (2) Drag from here to expand the top or bottom section. (3) Click the keyword buttons to display loops in the results list. (4) Click “Loops” here to bring up a menu that lets you narrow your loop choices to a specific Jam Pack, to GarageBand’s default loops, or to the loops you’ve created (if any).
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Before we start using the loop browser to add loops in the process of making our tune, there’s one more thing we need to do. When you first install GarageBand, it doesn’t automatically install all the loops; we actually need all the loops, so we’ll have to install them. Extra loop copies? If you notice that you have two or more copies of all your loops, skip to the sidebar Multiple Copies of Loops? just ahead. To install the loops: 1. In the second column of buttons in the loop browser, click All Drums. A list of loops appears in the results list. We’ll shortly be adding a drum loop into our new tune; for the purpose of installing the rest of the loops, however, we could have clicked any of the buttons in the second column. 2. In the results list, look for a loop that’s dimmed and has an arrow next to its name—for example, 70s Ballad Drums—and click the arrow. 3. In the dialog that appears, choose to download the extra content now or later. (The rest of the steps assume you’ve chosen to download now.) Click OK. Software Update opens and checks for other available updates. 4. When the box saying “New software is available for your computer” appears, choose the items you want to download. If there are multiple items and you’re pressed for time, you can choose to install only GarageBand instruments and Apple Loops. 5. Click the Install button. Once the download is complete, you’ll need to quit GarageBand to complete the installation.
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Multiple Copies of Loops? If you had an old version of GarageBand installed on your computer (or if you have Soundtrack Pro or Logic Studio installed), you may see multiple copies of some (or all) loops in the loop browser. To delete the duplicates: 1. Quit GarageBand. If you’ve made any changes, you’ll be asked whether you want to save; do so if you want to keep what you’ve done, otherwise click Don’t Save. 2. In the Finder, choose File > New Finder Window (Command-N). 3. Open the /Library folder. 4. Type Apple Loops for GarageBand in the search box, and then narrow the search to the Library folder by clicking the “Library” button below the title bar. In the following steps, you’ll move some things to the Trash— but don’t empty the Trash until you’ve completed all the remaining steps and found that everything’s working OK as you continue through this chapter. 5. If only one folder appears, double-click it to open it; otherwise, click each folder, examine its path at the bottom of the Finder window, delete the folder unless it’s the one found in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple, and, when only that folder remains, double-click it to open it. 6. In the opened folder, you’ll likely see two copies of each loop, one in .caf format and one in .aif format. 7. Click the Kind column at the top of the Finder window to sort the results by file type. 8. Select all the .aif files and press Command-Delete to move them to the Trash. 9. Launch GarageBand again; your duplicate loops should be gone. If you get a message saying no Apple Loops were found, click OK and then re-index your Apple loops as follows: In the Finder, locate the Apple Loops for GarageBand folder (the one you opened in Step 5) and drag it into the loop browser in GarageBand.
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Start with the Drums Now let’s explore the loop browser further. Notice that with All Drums selected in the second column, most of the other buttons in that column are dimmed. You can’t, for example, select Piano or Guitars there, because they’re not Drums; you could, however, select Kits or Beats—but don’t do that now. Instead, take the following steps to add a particular style of drum loop to our tune: 1. With All Drums selected in the second column, click Urban in the first column. The results narrow down to loops suitable for funk, hip-hop, rap,
R ’n’ B, and so on. The other styles in the first column dim when you
do this. A drumbeat can’t be Urban and Country, for example (at
least the way Apple has categorized the loops).
2. Narrow the choices further by clicking Cheerful in the third column. We want a happy beat! Several of the buttons in the last column dim; there are no Cheerful drumbeats that are also Dark, for example, but there are some that are Electric or Processed. The choices in the last two columns are paired: Single is the opposite of Ensemble, Relaxed is the opposite of Intense, and so on. If you select a button in one of these columns, its opposite is dimmed. Expanding a loop browser section: You can drag the control (or any part of the blank area) between the keyword buttons and the results list (as shown earlier in Figure 4) to expand either section. Obviously, showing more buttons is helpful while you’re narrowing your results, but it also helps to see a longer results list while you’re looking for the perfect loop. 3. With All Drums, Urban, and Cheerful still selected, scroll through the results list until you see a loop called Vintage Funk Kit 03. 4. Click the Vintage Funk Kit 03 loop and listen to the peppy groove. Click it again to turn it off. 5. Drag it to the track header section (Figure 5). When you release the mouse button, GarageBand creates a track called Kits. 22
Figure 5: To add a loop to your song, drag it from the loop browser results list to the track header section.
Now, take a listen: 1. Click the Play button in the transport controls. Notice that GarageBand plays through the loop and keeps going, even though there isn’t anything left for it to play. Pressing the Space bar has the same effect as clicking Play. Turning the metronome off: If you hear the metronome while GarageBand is playing, click the Metronome button to turn it off. 2. Click Play again, and the playhead stops. As an alternative way to stop play, you can either press the Space bar or click the Stop button (which the Go to Beginning button becomes during play). 3. Click the Go to Beginning button (the third button in the transport controls), and the playhead jumps back the beginning of the song.
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You can also press the Return key to go to the beginning. (This shortcut works even when the song is playing.) Instead of manually going back to the beginning every time you play your song, you can click the Cycle button (or press the C key). Notice the yellow bar that appears above your drum loop; this shows the cycle region—how much of the song loops when you hit Play. The drums fill only half of the yellow bar, so you have two choices: make the drum track longer or make the cycled portion shorter. Move your pointer to the right edge of the yellow bar, and notice that the pointer turns into a vertical bar with arrows on each side (Figure 6). Drag to the left until the yellow bar lines up with the end of the drum loop. This should correspond with the number 3 on the beat ruler. Now click Play. When the playhead gets to the end of the yellow bar, it jumps back to the beginning of the cycle region. Switching the beat ruler mode: If the beat ruler shows minutes and seconds instead of bars and beats, it’s easy to change. Click the icon on the left side of the LCD and choose Measures. Likewise, to set it to minutes and seconds, choose Time.
Figure 6: Drag the end of the cycle bar to change the length of the cycle region.
Add a Bass Line No good rhythm section is complete without a bass line. Click Reset in the upper left of the loop browser. All the keyword buttons return to their default states and the loops in the results list disappear. Now click Bass in the second column, scroll through the search results to Slap Bass, and click Slap Bass 01. (Remember, click a loop again to turn it off.) It sounds OK, but it’s not quite right. Click Slap Bass o2. That’s more like it! Drag it to the track header section, under the drum kit. 24
Previewing Your Loop Choices If you want to preview your loop choices along with your song, just click Play before (or after) you click your loop in the search results. There may be a slight delay before the new loop starts playing; GarageBand tries to synchronize the two, so you may have to wait a moment for the loops to line up. You can scroll through the loops in the browser while you’re doing this as well: either click the next loop you want to hear or use the Up and Down arrow keys.
Notice that the drum track is blue and the bass is green (Figure 7). The bass also looks different in that it’s made up of horizontal lines, while the drums are two horizontal lines with jagged vertical lines crossing them. The drum track is actually a recording of a performance on a live drum set, called a Real Instrument track in GarageBand. The bass, on the other hand, is a Software Instrument: the sound comes from a sample of an electric bass guitar, but the performance is controlled by data in the MIDI format (see About MIDI, ahead).
Figure 7: Kinds of loops • Top: Real Instrument, a recording of a live instrument • Bottom: Software Instrument, in MIDI format
Real Instrument Waveforms The two jagged lines in the drum track are a visual representation of the waveforms. Each of the spikes is a peak— a loud point in the track. In this case it would be an individual drum hit. The larger peaks are the snare drum and the bass drum, and the smaller peaks are the high-hat. There are two lines because it’s a stereo recording: the top line is the left channel (which comes out of the left speaker) and the bottom line is the right channel.
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About MIDI The MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) format was developed in the early ’80s to allow synthesizers, computers, drum machines, and any other MIDI-equipped hardware to communicate with each other. Each MIDI note (called an event, since it’s not a note but bits of digital data) contains information about how to play that particular note, including what note it is, its duration, and how loud to play it (called velocity). GarageBand can read this MIDI data and play the notes, in this case using a sample of a funky electric bass sound. The cool thing about MIDI is that you can move notes around, edit them, and even play them with a different instrument. You could make the bass part sound like a synthesizer, a cello, or even a choir. The drum track, however, is already recorded; you alter it with effects, but you can’t change the recorded data.
Adjust the Tempo Click the Play button. It sounds pretty funky but seems a bit fast. Click the icon on the left of the LCD (Figure 8) to see the mode menu.
Figure 8: LCD (1) LCD mode menu (2) Display for current mode The LCD modes shown here are: • Top: The default mode (called Measures), showing the musical time—measures, beats, and beat divisions, also called ticks— corresponding to the current playhead position • Bottom: Time mode, showing absolute time (hours, minutes, seconds, fractions of a second) 26
Choose Project mode. The tempo reads 120. Hold down on the 120 and a slider appears; drag down until the tempo is 110 (Figure 9). That feels better.
Figure 9: Adjusting the tempo.
More on Modes In Project mode, you can also change a song key and time signature, and a fourth mode called either Chord or Tuner, depending on whether the selected track is a Software Instrument track or a Real Instrument track. Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11 has more on these two modes.
Set the Volume With the music still playing, look at the master level meter to the right of the LCD. This shows how loud the mix is in the left and right channels of the stereo output (left on the top, right on the bottom). If one or both dots on the right are red, then your audio is clipping (Figure 10). Clipping occurs when the audio gets too loud and the high peaks—the loudest points—are chopped off. Clipping creates nasty-sounding digital distortion (see the sidebar Analog vs. Digital Distortion, ahead).
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Figure 10: Master level meter and volume slider (1) Master level display (green is good, yellow is OK, red is bad) (2) Clipping indicators (showing clipping in this image) (3) Master volume slider
Analog vs. Digital Distortion Clipping is an example of digital distortion. We typically think of distortion as a good thing—the stuff of rock music. But that’s analog distortion, not digital. Without analog distortion there would be no Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, or Van Halen, at least not in the forms we know them in today. Analog distortion is warm, rich, and thick. Listen to Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil,” for example. Digital distortion, which is what you get when the master levels clip, is harsh and awful sounding. Avoid letting your audio clip! To hear digital clipping, listen to this sample: clipping.mp3.
Look at the drums and the bass in the track header section and notice that they each have their own level meter and volume slider. First, check whether either track’s clipping indicators are illuminated. If so, adjust the track volume so that the level meter barely pops into the orange. Then reset the track’s clipping indicators by clicking the red dots. If the indicators remain off, your track is no longer clipping. If they come back on, you need to turn the track volume down a little more. Do this for both tracks. Now check whether the master level is still clipping. If so, turn it down as well and click its clipping indicators to reset them. When you’re done adding instruments, you can check it again and see where 28
the levels are. Ideally, you want the master level to be loud enough that it jumps into the yellow or orange without setting off the clipping indicators. (And again, remember to reset the clipping indicators each time you change the level!) Tip: Your individual track levels needn’t all jump into the
orange; You can set them much lower if you want (but you can’t set them any higher). On the other hand, you probably do want the master level to be as loud as possible without clipping; otherwise, your final song will seem awfully quiet compared to the other songs in your iTunes library.
Add Melody Instruments
It’s time to add some color and melody. If the song is playing, press the Space bar to stop it. In the Search window at the bottom of the loop browser, type Horn and press Return. Then, in the results list, scroll down to RnB Horn Section 05. Listen to it if you want; it has some space in it and sounds as if it will fit with your tune pretty well. Drag it up to the track header section. Notice that it’s longer than the other loops you have there. Hit Play. It sounds fine, but the playback cycles back to the beginning before you hear the whole horn line. To fix this, extend the yellow cycle bar so that it lines up with the end of your horn part, and hit Play. You can hear the whole horn part now, but the drums and the bass drop out halfway through the cycle. You need to make them longer. Point your mouse to the end of the drum region, but don’t click yet. Watch what happens: • If the pointer is over the top of the region end, it’s a circular arrow (the loop pointer). • If it’s over the bottom of the region end, it’s a bracket with arrowheads (the resize pointer). Note that the pointer must be over the region; if you move it even one pixel past the end of the region, it reverts to the usual arrow pointer.
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What’s the Difference between a Loop and a Region? A loop is a short fragment of music that you can use as a building block for your tracks. A region is what you get when you drag a loop into the timeline; it can be the same length as the original loop, a cropped segment of the loop, or 20 repetitions of the loop.
You want to use the loop pointer now, so position your pointer over the upper-right edge of the drum region (Figure 11). Now drag until the region extends to the end of the yellow bar and lines up with the Horn part. Do the same with the bass line. Notice that the two regions have little indentations in the middle; these show you where the loop starts repeating itself—a handy visual cue.
Figure 11: To use the loop pointer, move your mouse pointer to the upper right of a region. Drag to where you want the region to end; the region repeats to that point.
Hit Play again. Now it’s starting to sound like a song. You’ll probably need to turn the horns down a little using the track volume slider. You want them to blend in and not overpower everything else. Add one more track—Edgy Rock Guitar 01—and loop it so it’s the same length as everything else. You can turn this track down a lot too. It should just be a background texture, adding a funky rhythm but letting everything else shine through. Can’t find Edgy Rock Guitar 01? Make sure you have Filter for More Relevant Results turned off in the Loops preference pane or you won’t be able to find Edgy Rock Guitar 01. See Set Preferences for more information on how to do this. 30
Learn Editing and Mixing Basics
If you’re not wearing headphones, I suggest putting on a pair at this point, because the effect of what I’m going to show you next is much more obvious when you’re wearing headphones. Find the pan knob to the left of the volume control on the Horn track (Figure 12). Grab it in the middle and move the pointer up and down. The horns travel from the left speaker to the right speaker, depending on how you set the knob.
Figure 12: To use the pan knob, either drag in a circle outside the knob or click in the outer ring to snap to the tick marks. Drag up or down in the middle of the knob for finer control.
The default position is directly in the middle, equally balanced between the two speakers. The tiny L and R next to the knob correspond to—see if you can guess—Left and Right. If you turn the knob all the way to the left, the horns come out of only the left speaker. This technique is known as panning in the audio world, and by using it you can position sounds in an imaginary space in front of the listener. I cover this in more detail under Mix Your Song, later. Now drag in a circle outside the knob. (It also works if you click in that vicinity.) The knob snaps to each of the marked notches. If you want more exact placement between two of the notches, drag up and down in the middle of the knob. Also notice that GarageBand pops up a Help tag that tells you the numeric value of the pan knob’s position. The values range from –64 to +63. Zero is the default position, equally balanced in both the left and right speakers. Tip: You can quickly restore the pan knob to its default zero
position by Option-clicking the knob.
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Move the horns to about the 2 o’clock position (+32) and the guitar to the 10 o’clock position (–32). You may notice when you do this that these two instruments seem to get a little quieter; turn them up if you like. Notice how much more interesting the mix is now that there’s some stereo feel going on. You have all the elements in place. Now you need to give the tune a beginning and an end. To give you an overview of what you’ll end up with: the song will start with just the drums and the bass, then the guitar will come in, and finally the horns. Stop playback and click the Go to Beginning button (or press Return) to return the playhead to the beginning of the song. Then click the Cycle button (or press C) to turn off cycling, so that the song will play through without repeating. Now use the loop pointer to extend the drum and bass regions to measure 17 on the timeline. (If your beat ruler is showing units of time and not measures, switch back to Measures in the LCD.) The total length of your song will be 17 measures, and the drums and bass will play throughout (Figure 13).
Figure 13: The regions extended to their full lengths and moved to start later.
Drag the horn region so that it begins in measure 9, and extend it so that it ends with everything else at measure 17, repeating it once. Finally, drag the guitar region out to start at measure 5, and loop it so that it lines up with the end of the song at measure 17.
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What’s a Measure? A measure is a rhythmic unit of organization in a song. Most songs have a regular rhythmic pulse; this is particularly obvious in the drums, but all the instruments follow the pulse and add to the song’s rhythmic drive. Tap your foot along with the song you’re working on, and chances are you’re tapping on every beat. This song (like most popular songs) has four beats in a measure. Listen to the drums and the bass; each of these loops is two measures long, but in both cases the second measure is a variation of the first. The bass plays two high notes at the start of each measure, and then drops down and alternates between two lower notes in the second half.
Listen to your song. It starts off well, but the ending is a bit abrupt. Position the playhead toward the end of measure 16 (by dragging the triangle in the beat ruler). Then, grab the triangle in the zoom slider and move it to the right so it’s between the right two tick marks as shown in Figure 14. You should be zoomed in on the end of the song now.
Figure 14: To zoom in, drag the triangle in the zoom slider to the right. Note: You can also click in the zoom slider to snap to a specific
zoom level.
Use the loop pointer to carefully extend each of the regions so that they look like Figure 15. For reference, the drum loop extends to the second beat of measure 17.
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Figure 15: The end of the song, with the regions extended. Note: Depending on how far you’ve zoomed in or out on the
timeline, what you’re seeing on your computer may not exactly match the remaining screen shots in this book.
Basically, you want each instrument to sound one final note or chord to end the song. In the case of the drums and the horns, the note is one beat long (each of the darker tick marks in the timeline is one beat). The bass is about three quarters of a beat, and the guitar gets to play for only one quarter of a beat. Listen to the result, and feel free to experiment to hear what the end sounds like with the loops are longer or shorter. Double-check your master levels again to make sure there’s no clipping. Save the tune (File > Save, or Command-S), and you’re done. You’ve created your first song in GarageBand! It’s short, but you’ve learned a lot about the program already. In the next chapter I’ll go into a lot more depth and uncover some cool techniques that you can use in your own songs. Here’s what your finished song should sound like: funkmorsel.mp3. To take a look at my GarageBand project file, download it here: FunkMorsel.zip. If you’d like to listen to it outside of GarageBand, turn to Export Your Song to find out how. Please follow the tutorials: Even though I’m giving you the project files for many of the songs in this book, I don’t recommend just downloading the project without working through the steps in the tutorials. You’ll miss a lot of great information if you don’t walk through the steps with me. 34
Make a Great Song
You’ve created a simple tune that has a beat and something of a melody, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, nor does it last long. The next song you’re going to work on will be more structured.
Plan the Song
When you start a song, it helps to consider your goal. Are you creating a soundtrack to your latest iMovie project? Intro music for a podcast? Background music for an iPhoto slideshow? Think about the mood or the effect you’re trying to achieve. The clearer you are about your goal the smoother the process will be. You might want to make a little drawing of what you want your song to “look” like. Maybe you want it to start with a bang, then alternate between quiet sections and loud sections, and end with a longer loud part that fades out at the end (Figure 16). Or maybe it should start quietly and build slowly until the end. It’s your call. GarageBand comes with a ton of loops, so you should be able to find something that fits your goal.
Figure 16: Song sketch This particular song has alternating loud and soft sections and a fade-out at the end.
With your last song still open, start collecting loops for the next project: 1. Browse through the loops and look for Deep Electric Piano 01, 02, and 05 (in the Elec Piano category). 2. For each of the aforementioned piano loops, check the box in the Fav column—meaning “Favorite”—on the far right in the browser’s results list (Figure 17). You may need to scroll to the right to see the Fav column.
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Figure 17: Check the Fav column box to add a loop to your Favorites list.
3. Reset the loop browser (by clicking the Reset button) and then click Favorites. You’ll see the loops you just checked (along with any other Favorites you may have added previously). Creating a Favorites list is a great way to save loops for later use, or to collect a bunch of loops you like and then try to fit them together into a song. The following are the rest of the loops you’re going to use in your next song, including the categories where you can find them. Find them using the loop browser, and then add them to your Favorites list. Seeing a full name: You may need to widen the Name column of the results list to see the full name of some loops. To widen it, move your pointer to the vertical line between the “Name” and “Beats” column heads and drag the line to the right. • Synths: Contemplative Synth 04 • Shaker: Shaker 01 • Bass: 80s Dance Bass Synth 01 • Kits: Upbeat Funk Drums 01, 02, and 03 • Guitars: Blues Guitar 02, Electric Guitar Swell 01, and Thick Guitar Delay 01 36
Again, reset the loop browser and click Favorites. Double-check to make sure all the loops listed above appear in the Favorites list.
Consider What Makes a Song Work
Musicians use a variety of tools to make their songs more interesting and capture what they’re trying to convey. Since you’re creating a song using only Apple loops, you won’t be dealing with lyrics or singing. But even when you create an instrumental recording, you can use many different techniques to communicate what you want to. This section aims to help you think about your song on a number of different levels. It may lead you to explore options you might not have thought of before, making your songs more interesting and effective in the process. I’ll only touch on these subjects, because it’s beyond the scope of this book to talk about the intricacies of music theory. If you’d like more information, there are plenty of books out there on songwriting, composition, and theory.
Melody Since you’re using only Apple’s loops, you won’t have a lot of choice with melodies for this project, but melody is still something to pay attention to. Without a singer, where will the melody be in your song? Melodies tend to be fairly simple, easy to sing, and, well, melodic. We also tend to hear higher-pitched tones as part of the melody, as long as they’re playing something hummable. So if all you hear is a piano playing chords, you’ll tend to perceive the top notes of those chords as the melody. If you’re listening to a rock band and the guitarist is taking a solo, the solo becomes the melody. Keep the concept of melody in mind as you put loops together. Avoid abrupt and jarring shifts in pitch, moving quickly from a fast series of notes to a much slower set (or vice versa), or creating overly complex lines. A good general rule is: the less complex, the better. Listen to some of your favorite songs. Even if the music and the chord changes are complex, the melodies are generally simple and singable. Many Steely Dan songs, such as “Deacon Blues,” are great examples of this.
Harmony Melody can be thought of as the horizontal aspect of a piece, in that it unfolds over time, as the song plays; you can follow a melody as you 37
might follow a line. In contrast, harmony is more like the vertical aspect of a song: the songwriter places chords at various points along the melody line to give the melody context and color. Even if your song doesn’t specifically include an instrument playing chords, it will generally have an implied sense of harmony. We intuitively listen to the bass line (or the lowest instrument if there is no bass) to tell what the chord structure of a song is. If you listen to the song you created earlier (or listen to my version of that song, funkmorsel.mp3), the bass line suggests a certain chord structure for the song. In this case, the note that begins each repetition of the bass loop defines the key and the main chord of the song. The bass plays other notes during the loop, but since no other instrument reinforces these notes, they function as embellishments rather than as true chord changes. Now listen to what happens when the horns come in. At the end of the horn melody, the horns play a new chord. The bass keeps playing the same notes it’s been playing, but the horns introduce a new harmony on top of it. The two work well together, and there’s musical interest created by the interplay between the two harmonies. You don’t need to understand the theory behind your harmonies to come up with something new and exciting. This is one of the neat things about GarageBand: you can throw things together quickly, and sometimes you surprise yourself with the combinations that arise. Don’t be afraid to experiment!
Rhythm Rhythm is the beat or pulse of a musical phrase. Some rhythms are groovier than others; “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” by Stevie Wonder is a far sight funkier than the “Washington Post March” by John Philip Sousa. Straight, rigid accents that land directly on the beat are not funky, but add some well-placed accents on the off-beats and people will start to dance. Remember that you don’t have to fill every beat. Trying to make your song groovier by piling on tons of percussion probably won’t work. Having a few instruments play complementary rhythms will have a much greater impact than a complicated mash of sounds and beats. Accent certain beats and de-emphasize others, and leave some holes
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in your rhythms. It’s the contrast between the accented and unaccented beats that makes a song really move. Be sure to think about the rhythmic quality of all the instruments, not just the drums and percussion. For instance, the guitars in “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by the Rolling Stones contribute just as much to the rhythmic push as the drums do. Likewise, Chris Frantz, the drummer for Talking Heads, commonly played simple, straight drumbeats; the rhythmic interest came from the other instruments. Listen to “Crosseyed and Painless” for a great example.
Texture It’s easy to describe texture when you’re talking about physical objects like clothing, food, and sculpture, but what is musical texture? Simply put, you can think of texture as the relationship between what the different instruments are doing at any given moment. Maybe the piano is playing chords while the bass is holding long notes and the drums are playing a complex rhythm. That’s one kind of texture. Another is when several instruments are all playing the same insistent rhythm. Yet another is when most of the instruments drop out, leaving one playing alone for a few measures. Keep an eye on the texture you’re creating when assembling a song. If your song is especially busy at a particular point, you may want to simplify some of the parts to create contrast and tension. Conversely, if there’s a long, slow part in your song, maybe it would sound interesting to bring in a more active element over time. You can even do this visually; if you notice a lot of short, choppy waveforms and busy Software Instrument loops, try swapping one of them for a loop with more space or longer notes. Look at the song you created earlier for an illustration of this: the drums and the guitar are quite active, and the bass is slightly less so. Most of the contrast comes from the horn part with its long rests (the flat lines) and held notes.
Dynamics If you listen to your favorite songs, you’ll notice that few of them stay at one volume level or one level of intensity all the way through. The quietest, most tender ballad generally has a chorus that is more emotional and energetic than the verses, and most have a crescendo of feeling at the end. Conversely, the most head-banging, amps-to-11 heavy metal song will usually have a quiet moment or two as a break from the mayhem. 39
These differences in dynamics provide variety and contrast, making the song more interesting. The loud and exciting parts accentuate the quieter moments and vice versa. Without its slow, strange verses, the chorus of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” wouldn’t be nearly as exciting.
Timbre Timbre (pronounced TAM-ber) can be described as instrumental tone color or sound quality. Imagine a piano, a guitar, and a bagpipe all playing the same note. Timbre is the color of the sound that enables you to tell the instruments apart. Sometimes you may find a loop you like but the wrong instrument is playing it. If it’s a Software Instrument (that is, if the loop is green), you can easily change it to a different instrument or to a subtle variation of the existing instrument. If the loop sounds like an acoustic guitar, for example, you can change it to an electric guitar, a piano, or any number of other instruments. You may want to think about doing this in the middle of a song: have a part that starts on flute and switches to organ partway through. (The later section Add Bass and Percussion discusses how to switch instrument sounds.) One possible way to add excitement to a song is to change the timbre in the middle of it. Notice this as you work on your next song. It starts with a round, mellow electric piano as the main instrument; then, about halfway through the song, the piano drops in prominence and guitars become the primary focus. The piano pops back in later to tie the two halves of the song together, but it never quite regains its spot as the primary instrument until the end.
Work with Regions and Loops
Figure 18 shows a sketch I made of the song you’ll be working on. I want the song to start quietly and gradually build. Once all the instruments are playing and the song has gotten exciting, all the instruments except one will drop out for a few measures. This is called a breakdown, and it should create a sense of surprise and anticipation; the listener will wonder what’s going to happen next. Then you’ll bring everything back with even more intensity to take you to the end. The song will end as it began, with just a couple of instruments playing quietly and slowly fading out. 40
Figure 18: A sketch of the next song you’ll be creating.
It may help you to draw sketches like this or to write an outline of how you want to structure your song. You can refer back to it as you put the song together to make sure you stay on track. Or maybe you’ll find the song’s not working the way you intended and you need to reevaluate your plan. That’s fine too.
What to Do with All Those Loops Now you’re ready to begin creating your song: Create a new project and double-click Loops (a shortcut to selecting Loops and clicking Choose), and in the dialog that appears, set the tempo to 100 beats per minute (using the Tempo slider or the “bpm” field) and change the key to B minor. You can also enter a name for your song and choose where to save it. Dare to Be Different! Changing the default tempo and key of your GarageBand tunes keeps them from sounding like everyone else’s. If you listen to the songs on Web sites like MacJams.com, where GarageBand users upload songs, and you’ll notice that a lot of them are in the key of C with a tempo of 120 bpm. http://www.macjams.com/
This song should start quietly. In the loop browser, bring up your list of Favorites that you chose earlier (under Plan the Song) and listen to the three called Deep Electric Piano. They’re very quiet and mellow. Notice how the first two are almost identical but the third (Deep Electric Piano 05) is much lower and has less of a melody. It might be interesting to start with the more melodic, ethereal piano part and switch to the lower one later. Drag Deep Electric Piano 01 to the track header section. Loop it until the region ends at measure 21 on the beat ruler. Instead of dragging a loop to the track header section, which creates a track with the region starting at the beginning of the song, you can drag the loop into the timeline to start the region at a specific point. Try that now: drag Contemplative Synth 04 into the timeline 41
underneath the electric piano region—but before releasing the mouse button notice the vertical line that appears under your pointer (Figure 19); this shows where the new region will begin. You want the synth to start at measure 5, so align the start of the region with the “5” on the beat ruler.
Figure 19: Adding the synth loop at measure 5.
Listen to what you have so far. The two loops sound good together. Now listen to the Contemplative Synth alone. You can do this by button on the Electric Piano track (Figure 20). clicking the Mute
Figure 20: Mute and Solo buttons • Mute: Click to silence a particular track. •
Solo: Click to silence all tracks except the soloed track (or tracks).
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Notice how the second half of the synth loop is almost identical to the first. Also listen to how the harmony changes when the lower note comes in at measure 9 (the first of the thicker blobs in the waveform). This may be a good place to use that second Electric Piano part. Listen again to the Contemplative Synth alone, and preview Deep Electric Piano 02 at the same time. It fits well, especially when the low note comes in the synth part. Unmute the Electric Piano track. Then drag Deep Electric Piano 02 into the timeline at measure 9 on top of the Deep Electric Piano 01 region (Figure 21). When you release the mouse button, the new loop is inserted in that spot: you should now have Deep Electric Piano 01 looping from measure 1 to 9, Deep Electric Piano 02 from 9 to 11, and 01 again from 11 to 21. Listen. Moving loops into existing tracks: Moving a loop to an open part of an existing track adds the loop to that track. Moving a loop over a region in an existing track places it in that spot, but the existing region is deleted where the two overlap (so you need to be careful, or you can inadvertently do strange things).
Figure 21: To replace part of a region, drag the new loop over the existing region (top). The new region replaces that part of the existing one, which has been separated into two regions surrounding the new one (bottom).
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You could repeat the same sequence for the second half of the synth part, but I suggest you try something different. Instead of placing another instance of Deep Electric Piano 02 at measure 17 (the analogous position in the second half), we’re going to place one at measure 13 for variety. But don’t do it yet—I want to show you another technique for adding loops: 1. Move the playhead to the beginning of measure 13. Quick move: To move the playhead quickly to a specific point in the song, you can click the beat ruler at that spot. 2. Click the Electric Piano track header to select all the electric piano regions and choose Edit > Split (Command-T). 3. Move the playhead to measure 15, click the region under the playhead to select it, and split the region again. 4. Click the arrows in the upper-left corner of the new region in measures 13 and 14, and select Deep Electric Piano 02 from the popup menu (Figure 22). This will replace Deep Electric Piano 01 in the new region.
Figure 22: Selecting a new loop from the same family.
This method lets you choose between different loops in the same family. A loop family typically contains variations on a theme, and using several variations in a song helps add variety to your piece. Listen to what you have. Play with the levels if you wish, but keep them fairly low (say, with the piano track at about 40%, or –9.8 db, and the synth part at about 25%, or –15.4 db).
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Now you need to lengthen the song. When GarageBand creates a song, it sets the length to 33 measures, and our song will be 129 measures when all is said and done. To add measures at the end: 1. Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the timeline to scroll to the end of the song. 2. Drag the triangle at measure 33 on the beat ruler (the end-ofproject marker) to measure 131 to allow for 129 measures plus a little room at the end. Then loop the synth part two more times (stopping at measure 53) so that it will continue playing as the song develops. Finally, drag Deep Electric Piano 05 from the loop browser to the end of the piano track and loop it to measure 45.
Add Bass and Percussion Things are about to get interesting. You have a mellow, laid-back introduction. The electric piano drops into a lower register at measure 21 and starts playing a more textural, less melodic part. This makes the listener want more melody and gives the song a sense of anticipation— anticipation that you’re not going to satisfy quite yet. Drag the Shaker 01 loop into the timeline starting at measure 29, and loop it to measure 61. That adds a little excitement, but it isn’t quite enough; bringing in the bass at this point would help ground the tune and ramp up the energy. Drag 80s Dance Bass Synth 01 into the timeline so it starts with the shaker. Listen to the bass part. Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? It doesn’t fit at all. You’re about to fix that. First, click the Cycle button and set the cycle region so that it loops the bass part you just added. Do this by dragging the yellow bar in the beat ruler over the bass part and making it the same length as that region (Figure 23). If you can’t see the cycle bar: You may not see the yellow cycle bar after clicking the Cycle button; this happens if the cycle region is somewhere outside your current view of the timeline. In that case, just scroll to the left or right in the timeline until you see the cycle bar. Also note that if you drag the yellow cycle region up, it turns off cycling and makes the region disappear.
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Figure 23: Cycling the new bass part.
Click the Solo button on the bass track so that you’ll hear only the bass. Click Play, and then double-click the track header around where it says “Syn Bass” (Figure 24) to open the Track Info pane.
Figure 24: Double-click the track header to open the Track Info pane. Tip: You can solo several tracks at once, by clicking the Solo
button on each track you want to hear.
In the Track Info pane (Figure 25), click Bass in the list of instruments on the left, and the right side of the Track Info pane will list a bunch of different bass types. Try clicking a few to hear the differences. When you’re done, select Upright Jazz Bass and hide the Track Info pane by clicking the Track Info button (now highlighted in blue) in the lower right of the GarageBand window.
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The Full Timeline This may be the first time you’re seeing the entire timeline, without the loop browser or Track Info pane on the right. Unless you’re actually using them, it’s nice to keep them hidden so that you have more space to work in. To get either of them back, simply click the appropriate button in the lower-right corner.
Figure 25: In the Track Info pane, select an instrument type on the left and a specific instrument on the right.
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Edit Notes to Improve the Bass Line The bass part sounds better, but it’s a little too busy. It would be great if the notes were held longer and the part had less decoration. With the bass track still selected, click the Track Editor button. Feel free to expand the track editor by dragging it up (just as you can with the loop browser). You’re going to edit the notes of the bass line so that it plays a simpler part. Figure 26 shows what the part will look like before and after editing. See something different? You won’t see notes like the ones in Figure 26 if you’ve zoomed the track editor in to a different part of the song. In that case, use the scroll bar along the bottom of the track editor to find the green highlighted region. You may also need to scroll up or down in the track editor to find the notes. You can also zoom in and out in the track editor just as in the timeline: slide the zoom control in the lower-left corner of the track editor until you can see the entire bass region in the editor.
Figure 26: The bass line before editing (top) and after editing (bottom). 48
Here’s how to edit the bass notes:
1. In the track editor, move the pointer over the first note in the loop. 2. Drag the right end of the first note as far to the right as you can without having it touch the next note. You want to lengthen the note, not move it; if you drag from anywhere other than the right end of the note, you’ll move the entire note. 3. Leave the second note, and drag the third note so that it almost touches the next note on the same line. It should end one tick mark away from measure 30. 4. Delete the two notes below note 3. To delete a note, click to select it and then press Delete. 5. Delete note 5, and then extend note 4 as you did the others. 6. Delete what is now note 7 (the last note in that row). You should see something similar to Figure 27.
Figure 27: The bass line after Step 6.
7. Extend note 6 until it lines up with the beginning of the note above it. 8. Listen to your new bass line. If the bass track is still in solo mode, click the Solo button again to disable it so that you can hear the bass with the rest of the tracks. You just took a bass part that didn’t work with the song at all and made it fit the mood perfectly. The bass line was much too frantic, but you removed notes and extended others to change the texture of the bass part and make it rhythmically work with the rest of the tracks. Not only that, but the instrument sound was completely wrong; you changed the timbre of the bass to one more appropriate to the laid-back vibe you’re creating.
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Tip: Creatively altering the loops you use helps keeps your piece
different from everyone else’s. For more ideas on getting creative with your loops, see Learn More Loop Techniques.
Now loop this new bass part out to measure 61 (to end at the same place as the shaker). Finally, finish this section of the song by adding some drums. Go back to the Favorites list in the loop browser and drag Upbeat Funk Drums 01 into the timeline so that it starts at measure 37. Repeat it once so that it ends at measure 45 with the electric piano. Listen to what you have so far. Tweak the volumes if you need to. The shaker should be fairly quiet, so set the level to –15.4 db. The bass can be at about 1.5 db and the drums at about –4.1 db. Warning! Watch the playhead as the song plays. If it’s clear, everything is cool and you have plenty of processor speed left over. If it turns yellow, you’re in the warning zone, but you shouldn’t have serious problems yet. If the playhead is red, you’re in danger of maxing out your processor. When GarageBand runs out of processing power, playback will stop and you’ll get a warning. If you’ve followed the instructions in Set Preferences and you’re still having problems, I have another suggestion. GarageBand automatically assigns Echo and Reverb to every instrument, whether it’s in use or not—a tremendous waste of system resources. To turn this off, double-click each track header and click the Edit tab below the image in the Track Info pane. At the bottom of the pane are sliders for two send effects, labeled Master Echo and Master Reverb. If one of the sliders is at zero, the effect isn’t being used, and you can turn it off by clicking the green light by the name. Do this for all tracks that don’t use Echo or Reverb and you’ll avoid the dreaded red playhead for longer. For more tips on keeping GarageBand happy and interruption-free, see Appendix A: Improving Performance. Figure 28 shows what the song looks like at this point. If you haven’t done so already, turn off Echo and Reverb on the shaker, the bass, and the drum tracks (as noted in the preceding warning).
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Figure 28: The song so far.
Shift into a New Gear In the next part of the song, you’re going to add a few new parts and continue to ramp up the energy level. The emphasis will shift subtly from the electric piano to electric guitars that are less spacey and mellow than the piano part, changing the timbre by creating a corresponding shift in energy. First, find your new guitar part. It’s not in the list of favorites because I want to show you another way of finding loops. In the loop browser, click the first view button to show the column view (Figure 29), and click By Instruments in the first column, Elec Guitar in the second column, and Processed in the third column.
Figure 29: The Column View button is highlighted here in blue. The other two buttons correspond to button view (which we’ve already used to browse for loops) and podcast sounds view (which shows sound effects and jingles).
Drag Echoing String 02 from the results list to measure 45 in the timeline, loop it to measure 57, set its volume at about –15.4 db, and turn off Echo and Reverb. 51
It’s also time to add a new drum part—actually, a variation on an existing drum part. In the loop browser, click the middle view button to change the loop browser back to button view, and click Favorites. Then click Upbeat Funk Drums 01 and give it a listen. This is the drum part you’ve already used. Now listen to Upbeat Funk Drums 02; the difference is subtle, but it’s a bit busier, and conga drums have joined the mix. Add this part to the drum track between measures 45 and 61. Beware when adding loops to existing tracks! Adding a Software Instrument loop to an existing track resets the track volume to 0 dB; because of this, you may need to move the drum track volume back to –4.1 dB. This seems to be a bug, so be aware of it whenever you add loops to Software Instrument tracks. Note, however, that it doesn’t happen if you Option-drag to duplicate a region that’s already in the track (as you’ll do later), so use that technique where possible. Finish this section of the song by reintroducing the electric piano in two spots. Add Deep Electric Piano 01 between measures 53 and 57 and (in the same track) Deep Electric Piano 05 between measures 57 and 61. Listen to your handiwork so far. Notice that everything ends at measure 61. Remember that the earlier sketch (Figure 18) has a break in the middle—but what to put there? Listen to Electric Guitar Swell 01 in your Favorites. It’s a bit long, but it would work well in that spot. Drag it into the timeline so it starts at measure 60. Turn off Echo and Reverb and set the volume at –10.5 db.
Add More Loops With one exception, the loops you’ll add at the end of the song are loops you’ve used before. Following is a list of the loops to add, showing the measure numbers where they go. Refer to Figure 30, ahead, to see what the end of the song should look like. Zoom and copy: You might want to zoom out to add these loops; if you can see the entire end of the song, you won’t have to scroll as you extend the loops. Also, you may find it easier to copy a loop rather than drag it from the loop browser. Select the loop, choose Edit > Copy (Command-C), move the playhead to where you want the loop to start, and choose Edit > Paste (Command-V). Also see “Beware when adding loops to existing tracks!,” a few paragraphs earlier, about track volume when adding Software Instrument loops. 52
Add these loops:
• Deep Electric Piano 01: 69–73, 75–77 (add this and the next two loops to the Electric Piano track) • Deep Electric Piano 02: 73–75 • Deep Electric Piano 05: 81–101 • Contemplative Synth 04: 65–129 (add to the Synthesizer track) • Shaker 01: 65–97 (add to the Shaker track) • Upbeat Funk Drums 03: 65–89 (add to the Drum Kit track) • Echoing String 02: 73–81 (add this and the next loop to the first Electric Guitar track) • Thick Guitar Delay 01: 65–73, 81–93 You can also copy the bass part you created and add that on the bass track between measures 65 and 93.
Figure 30: The end of the song with all loops added.
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Playback Difficulties Your song now has a lot of tracks, and if you have an older Mac you may start experiencing playback difficulties. You can solve this problem by locking tracks. This protects the track from accidental edits or deletions and renders the track to disk, saving lots of processor power. Software Instrument tracks are especially good candidates for locking. Locking a track is simple: 1. If you don’t see the Lock button in the track header, choose Track > Show Track Lock (Command-Option-L). The Lock button is hidden by default. 2. Click the Lock button in the track header. Notice that the Lock button is now highlighted green. 3. To render the track to disk and complete the locking process, click the Play button. A progress bar pops up, telling you that GarageBand is locking the track. You can still adjust the track volume and panning when a track is locked. If you want to make other changes to the track, you need to unlock it first by clicking the Lock button again.
Map Out the Arrangement The song is getting complicated. It would be nice if we could break it into sections to better see what’s going on. Guess what? We can! The arrangement track lets you name song sections and swap them around to try new arrangements. Let’s give our song some structure: 1. Choose Track > Show Arrangement Track (Command-Shift-A). 2. Click the Add Region button, marked by a plus sign in the arrangement track (Figure 31).
Figure 31: Click the plus sign to add a new arrangement region. 54
3. Drag the right edge of the untitled arrangement region to measure 29 (Figure 32).
Figure 32: Drag the end of an arrangement region to extend it.
4. Click “untitled” in the arrangement region and name it Intro. Click right on the letters: If you don’t end up selecting the name the first time, carefully click right on the letters. It can be a little frustrating, but unfortunately this is the only way to rename arrangement regions. Note: Renaming an arrangement region requires that the region
first be selected. As a shortcut to renaming an unselected arrangement region, just double-click its name.
5. Add another arrangement region, extend it to measure 61, and name it Verse 1. This song doesn’t have a traditional verse/chorus structure, but I’m using “Verse” because I couldn’t think of anything better. 6. Add three more arrangement regions with these names and lengths: • Break, from measures 61 to 65 • Verse 2, from 65 to 89 • Outro, from 89 to 129
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Figure 33 shows the song with all the arrangement regions added.
Figure 33: The song with all arrangement regions in place.
Add the Final Few Loops Listen to the end of the song. The tracks stop fairly abruptly at the end, don’t they? You’ll take care of that in a minute. First, you have another loop to add. Preview the loop Blues Guitar 02. The first part of the riff sounds cool, but the second half doesn’t quite fit the aesthetic you have going in this song. Let’s do some severe cropping to make this part work: 1. Drag the Blues Guitar 02 loop into the timeline so that it starts at the beginning of Verse 2. 2. For this step you’ll probably need to zoom in quite a bit. The entire Blues Guitar loop should just about fill the timeline. Crop the region so it’s one measure long (Figure 34): position the pointer over the region’s lower-right corner (where the pointer changes to the resize pointer, a bracket with arrowheads) and drag to the left.
Figure 34: The one-measure blues guitar riff.
3. Copy this cropped region (Command-C). 4. Move the playhead to measure 67. If it doesn’t seem to be snapping to the measure, look in the Control menu to make sure Snap to Grid is checked, and choose that command to check it if not. 56
5. Paste the region (Command-V). 6. On this copy, crop out the last guitar chord. (The region should have two big chords, each followed by a “click”; the chords are the fat portions of the waveform, and the clicks are the narrow vertical lines.) 7. Hold down the Option key and drag the second Blues Guitar region to measure 69. The original will remain where it is as you drag a copy of the region. Crop the copy down to one big chord. Warning! GarageBand is finicky about your holding down
Option before you start dragging. If you do these two actions
at once, you’ll end up dragging the loop itself and not a copy.
8. Using either Copy and Paste or Option-drag, copy the single chord to measure 70. 9. Copy the two-chord loop (from Step 6) to measure 71. Figure 35, ahead, shows the completed Blues Guitar section. 10. Copy this entire section (all five guitar regions) to measure 81. To select multiple regions, Shift-click each region or, alternatively, press the mouse button down in an empty part of the timeline and drag a marquee around the regions you want to select (Figure 35).
Figure 35: Using a marquee to select all the regions in the
completed Blues Guitar section.
With all these guitar tracks, it’s getting hard to tell them apart. It would be a good idea to change their names. Doing this is a cinch: 1. Select the first guitar track (the one containing Thick Guitar Delay and Echoing String) and click the track name. (Don’t double-click the name or you’ll open the Track Info pane; just click it once—and as with the arrangement regions, be sure to click right on the letters of the name.) 57
After a second, the track name will change to an editable field (Figure 36).
Figure 36: The track’s name field, ready for a new name.
2. Change the name to something you’ll recognize, like Delayed Guitar. 3. Change the names of the other guitar tracks. Use Track Icons for Even More Clarity You can make it even easier to tell the tracks apart by changing their icons as well. Open the Track Info pane for any of the guitar tracks and click the icon on the lower left to display other choices; click an icon to select it. Notice that this also changes the image at the top of the Track Info pane. Be careful when doing this. As you hover over the left edge of a track header, a star will appear, and clicking it enables Groove Matching, a feature we’re not using. There’s no harm in enabling it—you just click the star again to disable it—but first you have to wait while GarageBand analyzes every track in the project.
Create a Track in Score View The next track you’re going to add doesn’t use a loop at all. You’ll create it in score view, which lets you view and edit Software Instrument tracks using music notation. The following steps walk you through creating a simple synth part in score view: 1. Click the Add Track button or choose Track > New Track (Command-Option-N).
The New Track dialog appears.
2. With Software Instrument selected, click Create. A new Grand Piano track appears in the timeline. 3. If the Track Info pane doesn’t open automatically, click the Track Info button in the lower-right of the GarageBand window. Select Synth Basics in the left pane and Circuit Dialog in the right pane. 58
Circuit Dialog is a cool instrument. It uses what GarageBand calls the Digital Stepper synthesizer. Basically, an oscillator pulses the synthesizer on and off in sync with the tempo (similar to the throbbing intro to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”). 4. Close the Track Info pane. 5. Scroll to measure 73 in the timeline and Command-click the gray line at measure 73. This creates a new empty region. If it’s not lined up with the beginning of measure 73, move it so that it is (and again, if the region doesn’t snap to the measure markings, make sure Snap to Grid is checked in the Control menu). 6. Double-click the new region to open it in the track editor, and click the Score button at the top of the track editor (Figure 37).
Figure 37: The Score button in the track editor.
7. From the Insert pop-up menu, choose the whole note—the circular note without a stem in the upper-left corner. 8. Hold down the Command key and hover the pointer over the middle line of the music staff (Figure 38). Click to add the note.
Figure 38: Adding the first note.
GarageBand plays the note, which in this case is a series of blips and beeps—very techno. 59
If you accidentally place the note in the wrong spot: Just drag the note where you want it. If you drag it left or right, GarageBand will change the whole note into a combo of other notes, so be sure to place the note at the beginning of the measure. You’ve created one region. Now you need to duplicate it and change the notes slightly. Here’s how: 1. Select the region in the timeline, and choose Edit > Copy (CommandC). 2. Click the beat ruler at the beginning of measure 75 to place the playhead there, and choose Edit > Paste (Command-V). 3. Double-click the new region to open it in the track editor. 4. In the Insert pop-up menu, choose the half note (Figure 39).
Figure 39: Selecting a half note.
5. Add a half note in the middle of the measure, in the bottom space (Figure 40).
Figure 40: Adding a half note. Make sure the note is in the bottom space.
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6. Drag the first note down so that it matches Figure 41, to lower it an octave. It will jump down to the bottom space, which is OK. If the original whole note is still where it was, select it and delete it.
Figure 41: Lowering the first note in an octave.
More on Using Score View To change the duration of a note in score view, drag the note’s green bar left or right. The Align To pop-up menu at the bottom of the header area shows the snapping value of the score view grid. With 1/4 Note selected, the grid size is 1/4 notes—the equivalent of one beat if your song is in the default 4/4 time. button in the upperTo change the grid value, click the Grid right of the track editor. You can make it as small as a 1/64 note (one sixteenth of a beat). For a complete discussion of score view, see Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11.
Now you have two regions that are the building blocks of your synth track. It’s time to duplicate them and arrange them so that they work nicely with the song. You’ll use the Circuit Dialog to add some interest in the eight measures between 73 and 81. Then, at measure 81, the Blues Guitar riffs will come back in, and the Circuit Dialog will do a call-and-response with the guitar to take the song home. Place the regions as follows: 1. Duplicate the first region with the one whole note, and place it at measures 77, 82, 84, and 88. 2. Duplicate the second region with the two half notes, and place it at measure 79. 61
Adjust the volume of the Circuit Dialog track so that it’s nicely audible but not too dominant.
Add a Sound Effect GarageBand offers a lot of content in the form of jingles, stingers (accent sounds), and sound effects. Although Apple intended these for use in podcasts, you can use them in songs as well. For our final track, let’s add some quietly chirping crickets at the end of the tune: 1. Open the loop browser, and then click the Podcast Sounds View button (Figure 42).
Figure 42: In the loop browser, click the third view button to view the podcast sounds.
2. Select Sound Effects in the first column and Animals in the second. Then click Crickets to preview the loop. It sounds like crickets! 3. Drag the Crickets loop into the timeline so it starts at measure 105. 4. Loop the Crickets region so it ends at measure 129, with the Contemplative Synth part. 5. Notice that the track is named Animals; change it to Crickets. Syncing Sound Effects with the Song’s Tempo The loops don’t line up with the tick marks on the timeline and there’s only a fraction of a loop at the end because the sound effects loops don’t automatically adjust to the tempo of the song. Since they’re sound effects and not musical parts, they don’t need to sync with the song’s tempo. You can make any loop or audio region play at the tempo at which it was originally recorded—see Force a Loop to Keep Its Original Tempo.
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Finish Up All the regions are in place. The end of the song now has some exciting twists. But what if we want to juice it up a notch? The song has some nice melodic elements, but harmonically it’s not terribly interesting. What if we changed the key at the end of the Electric Guitar Swell? GarageBand makes this easy: 1. Open the master track (choose Track > Show Master Track or press CommandB). The master track is a place where you can control things like the master volume, effects that you can apply to the whole song, and the master pitch. 2. From the pop-up menu in the master track’s header, choose Master Pitch. The automation curve for the master pitch appears as a purple line in the timeline. 3. Scroll to measure 65 in the timeline and click the master pitch curve to add a control point. 4. Drag the control point up until the Help tag reads +2 (Figure 43). This raises the pitch of the entire song one whole step, a musically pleasing interval.
Figure 43: Raising the master pitch two half steps (or one whole step).
You’re done with the song! You need to do some final tweaking to make it sound great, but you’re in the final stretch.
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Mix Your Song
You have all your regions in place, and now it’s time to mix. Mixing refers to taking the audio you’ve recorded (or the loops you’ve placed, in this case) and making it sound its best. The goals of mixing are to: • “Balance” all the instruments so that nothing obscures anything else and all the parts can be clearly heard. This doesn’t mean they are all the same volume, but nothing should be overly dominant or outright inaudible. • Make each track sound its best in the mix—that is, when surrounded by all the other instruments. A track may sound great on its own, but combined with the other tracks it may not fit. • Give the song a sense of depth and space. In a great stereo mix, you get the impression that the instruments surround you in space. • Give the song a balanced range of audio frequencies. It should have powerful and solid lows, strong midrange frequencies, and clear and crisp highs. • Enhance the song with effects, if necessary. Be delicate here; it’s tempting to go crazy with all the effects that are available, but resist that urge. Subtlety is the name of the game, unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise. Tip: You may remember the early days of desktop publishing,
when suddenly we had all these snazzy new fonts and font styles to choose from, and it was tempting to use as many as possible in one document. Overusing effects is the aural equivalent of this temptation.
GarageBand offers several tools to help you mix your song: • You can not only set the volume of an individual track but also change the volume over the course of the song. You can fade tracks in and out, and raise and lower the volume so parts get louder and softer over time. For more information, see Adjust Track Volumes, just ahead. • You can pan tracks in the mix so that they sit more on the left or right side of the stereo spectrum. I’ve touched on this already, but I show you some more tricks in Pan Your Tracks. One useful feature 64
is the capability to change panning over the course of the song, just as you can do with the volume. • You can change the equalization (EQ) of a track—give it more bass, tone down the treble, boost the midrange, and so on. See Adjust Equalization and Set Bass/Treble Reduction. • You can add a vast array of effects to the tracks. I tell you how in Set Other Effects.
Adjust Track Volumes You’ve already played with using the volume sliders to adjust the volume of individual tracks, but GarageBand also lets you change the volume over time within tracks. This is useful for fading tracks in and out, so instead of having a guitar appear suddenly, you can ease into it a little more—start it quietly and gradually build the volume. You can also fade out tracks at different rates at the end of a song, so some parts play for longer than others. Check track volumes: Listen to the song all the way through to make sure the track volumes seem right. If anything is too loud or too soft, now is the time to fix it. It becomes trickier to adjust volumes after you’ve created fades. Follow these steps: 1. Select the synthesizer track. 2. To show the automation curve for the volume, click the automation curve button to the right of the track volume slider (or press the A key). Then, with Track Volume chosen in the pop-up menu, click the rectangular button to its left (turning it blue; see Figure 44) to enable the volume curve.
Figure 44: Click the automation curve button to show or hide the volume curve. If Track Volume is chosen in the pop-up menu and the button next to it is blue, the volume curve is enabled. 65
3. Click in the zoom slider to zoom in about halfway, and scroll to measure 45. 4. Click at a point on the volume curve just before measure 45 to set your first control point. 5. Click again just after measure 45 and drag down slightly (see Figure 45). Don’t lower the level too much; you just want to fade down the synthesizer a little to deemphasize it, since this is where the song enters guitar-land.
Figure 45: The volume curve for the synthesizer. Tip: You may be able to drag only left and right, but that’s OK;
GarageBand constrains your movement based on what you seem to be doing when you start to drag. If you can drag only from side to side, release the control point and try again.
The next task is to fade the electric guitar swell in and out so that the transitions are smoother: 1. While still zoomed in, scroll to measure 60. 2. For the track containing the electric guitar swell, show the volume curve. 3. Click the volume curve one beat before measure 61. Don’t drag; just click to create a control point. 4. Click just after the loop starts at measure 60, and drag this point all the way down. 5. Press Return to go to the beginning of the song. Drag the control point there all the way down as well. 6. Solo the track to hear how it sounds. If you want to compare it with the unfaded original track, click the blue button next to the Track 66
Volume pop-up menu; the volume curve dims and the track plays at the volume set by the track volume slider. Now for the fade-out: 1. Deselect the electric guitar’s Solo
button.
2. Click the volume curve just after measure 65, when everything else comes back in. 3. From about measure 67, drag the curve down to zero. That’s your fade-out (see Figure 46). Listen to the entire part in context.
Figure 46: The finished guitar swell with fades.
Feel free to play with other fades in the middle of the song. For example, I brought the synth track back up between measures 76 and 77. Tip: Notice that the volume curve control points show a numeric
value when you hover over a point. This is especially handy if you want to line up two control points at the same volume level.
The last thing to do is to create fade-outs at the end of the song: 1. Fade out the Thick Guitar Delay track between measures 89 and 91. I also did a quick fade right at measure 89 to bring the level down a bit before the longer fade; this makes the longer fade sound more like an echo (Figure 47).
Figure 47: The guitar track faded in two stages: quickly and then more gradually. 67
2. Fade the Upright Jazz Bass between measures 89 and 93. 3. Fade the Shaker between measures 91 and 97. 4. Fade the Electric Piano between measures 95 and 101. 5. Fade the Synthesizer between measures 105 and 129. Now for the crickets. You’re going to do something a little different with them. We want them to be subtle, so let’s fade them up from silence: 1. Move the track volume slider for the Crickets track all the way to the left (to –144.0 db). 2. Show the volume curve for the Crickets track. 3. Click the curve just after measure 105 to add a control point. 4. At measure 113, drag the curve up to –21.5 db. The last fade you need to do is a master fade, which fades the entire mix. Here’s what to do: 1. Choose Track > Show Master Track (Command-B) to display the master track (if it’s not already showing). 2. Choose the Master Volume pop-up menu item. 3. Create a fade-out between measures 113 and 128. That’s all there is to it!
Pan Your Tracks You did a little panning on the last song (see Learn Editing and Mixing Basics), but you have more room to play in this song: it has more tracks and more interplay between tracks, with instruments coming in and dropping out throughout the song. The following are a few rules that, like all rules, should be thought of more as guidelines than as laws. They can be bent or even broken, but make sure you have a good reason for doing so. • Lower-frequency instruments like basses and bass drums are often placed close to the center of the mix. Midrange instruments like pianos, horns, and some guitars can be further out to the side.
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High-frequency instruments like tambourines, high guitars, and backing vocals can be far out to the sides. • Lead instruments and lead vocals are usually placed dead center. • If your song has two instruments with similar tone or timbre, it helps to separate them (left and right). This is often true of bands with two guitars: one will be panned left and the other right. • Similarly, if something is panned far to the left or right (often called hard left or hard right), it’s important to balance it on the other side with an instrument of similar frequency to keep your mix balanced. A tambourine and a shaker would balance each other well, but a tambourine and a djembe would not. • Many mix engineers recommend never panning anything all the way left or right. This puts all the energy of that sound into just one speaker, so the sound is somewhat diminished in power. And if there’s anything wrong with one speaker, that sound would disappear completely. It’s better to pan a few degrees shy of the extreme. • Try to keep the song as a whole balanced between the left and right speakers. Of course, there will be short periods when there’s more going on in one speaker than the other, but overall the sound should be equally distributed. • It’s easier to hear the effect of panning in a pair of headphones, so much so that you’ll probably want to exaggerate the instrument positions a little in the headphones. If you don’t do this, the stereo effect will be much less noticeable with the headphones off. Use these suggestions as a guide when you create your mix. If you put on headphones and close your eyes, you can almost see the instruments arrayed on an imaginary stage. Try to play with this threedimensional feel as you tweak your mix. It’s also helpful to listen to your favorite songs and try to pick out where each instrument is placed; this is a great exercise, and it can give you interesting ideas. Now you’ll start applying some panning to your song: 1. If you have headphones, plug them in. 2. The first track to pan is the electric piano: using the pan knob, pan it to +48, noticing as you do this that the sound seems to stay pretty 69
close to the center. This is because of the heavy echo on that track. The piano itself moves but the echo stays centered. In this case it’s OK, since the piano is your main instrument and you want it pretty close to center. 3. Pan the synthesizer to –32. 4. Listen to the intro, and notice how you can hear the stereo effect. Some suggestions for the rest of the tracks follow. Feel free to do what sounds good to you, though. • Shaker at +32 • Leave the Bass at the center • Drum Kit at about –7 • Electric Guitar (the track with Echoing String and Thick Guitar Delay) at +24 • Blues Guitar at –32 • Crickets at +16 I didn’t say what to do with the Electric Guitar Swell because you’re going to do something special. Not only can you change volume dynamically during the song, but you can also change the panning. Each track has a pan curve in addition to a volume curve. With the pan curve, you can make the guitar swell travel from one speaker to the other: 1. Select the track that contains Electric Guitar Swell 01, and set its pan knob to –60. 2. Show the track’s pan curve by clicking the automation curve button and choosing Track Pan from the pop-up menu. 3. Scroll to measure 61 in the timeline. Add a control point to the pan curve at the beginning of measure 61. 4. Add another control point about a beat before measure 65 and drag it down to +60. You may not be able to drag precisely enough to get to +60 on the nose, but anywhere between 58 and 62 or so is fine (Figure 48).
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Figure 48: The finished cross-fade.
5. Hide the pan curve by clicking the automation curve button again. 6. Listen to your handiwork. Pretty cool, huh? Tip: With a little more work, you could make an instrument
bounce back and forth between the speakers, have a sound effect swoosh around the listener, or move an instrument to a different pan location partway through the mix.
Adjust Equalization Equalization (or EQ for short) is essentially a fancy version of the treble and bass controls on your stereo. With EQ, you can add punch to a bass part, thicken a weak-sounding instrument with midrange, or remove the low end from a guitar so it floats ethereally above the mix. EQ can be used to make your tracks sound clearer and more realistic, to separate the instruments sonically so that they fit together better in the mix and don’t obscure each other, or purely as a special effect. GarageBand gives you several ways to adjust EQ. The most straightforward is the new Visual EQ effect. To use it, follow these steps: 1. Double-click the Drum Kit track’s header to open the Track Info pane. 2. Click the Edit tab to show the track’s effects settings. 3. The bottom effect is Visual EQ; click the wave image between the green light and the name “Visual EQ” to open the Visual EQ control panel (Figure 49).
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Figure 49: The expanded Track Info pane with the Visual EQ control panel opened.
You’ll see four EQ bands: Bass, Low Mid, High Mid, and Treble. The lower frequencies are to the left in the window, and the higher ones to the right. The blue line through the middle is the current EQ setting, which is flat (no frequencies boosted or cut).
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The best way to see how the Visual EQ effect works is to play with it: 1. Solo the drum track. Take care! Soloing a track while you adjust EQ makes it easier to hear what you’re doing, but beware: you’re listening to the track out of context, and when you add the other instruments back in you may be surprised that the mix doesn’t sound the way you thought it would. It’s good to switch back and forth between solo and normal modes so that you don’t surprise yourself. 2. Create a cycle region anywhere in the song, as long as there’s a drum region there. Measures 65 to 69 is a good spot. 3. Press the Space bar to play the song. Drag one of the EQ bands up or down to change the EQ curve and alter the timbre of the track. (Make sure your speakers aren’t up too high before you do this; extreme EQ boosts can harm your speakers!) 4. Click the Analyzer checkbox to show a visual representation of the frequencies in the track. Notice that as you play with the EQ bands the Analyzer reflects your changes. This is extremely helpful when you’re trying to identify a problem frequency or see where the track might have too much energy. Warning! Be sure to uncheck the Analyzer when you’re done with it. Leaving it on wastes system resources. 5. Click the Details triangle to reveal a numeric display of each frequency band. You can adjust any of these parameters as well, simply by dragging up or down on the numbers. 6. Option-click each band to undo your changes. Alternatively, you can choose Flat from the pop-up menu of presets. Tip: Adding midrange to a track can give it body and oomph,
but be sparing. Midrange frequencies can muddy a mix quickly. I recommend cutting frequencies more often than you boost them; this keeps your mix from becoming a giant wall of sludge and preserves more audio quality.
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Now that we’ve had a chance to test-drive Visual EQ, follow these steps to adjust the EQ of the drum track: 1. Unsolo the drum track. 2. Move the cycle region to between measures 57 to 61, in which the drums are present but there’s not much else happening. 3. Hit Play. 4. Set the High Mid frequency slider to 1360 Hz and turn up the level (the lower number) to 2.5 dB. Make sure the details panel is open so that you can see the numerical values (Figure 50). Notice that these changes bring out the congas and the ring of the snare drum.
Figure 50: Adjusting the Visual EQ effect.
Isolating Frequency Issues You may find that a track has a certain frequency that bugs you. You can adjust the EQ to cut that frequency, but here’s a trick to help you find it: Boost Low Mid or High Mid (being careful not to blow out your speakers!). Open the Details pane and drag up and down on the frequency (the number with “Hz” after it) until you find the area that sounds awful. Then drag down on the level (the number with “dB” after it) to cut it. 74
Set Bass/Treble Reduction GarageBand has other EQ controls; one that’s slightly more esoteric but extremely useful is bass or treble reduction, often called hi-pass or low-pass filters. These drastically reduce all frequencies above or below a certain point. If you have annoying clicks in your bass track, you can cut them out with treble reduction; if you want a xylophone to sound airy and thin, you can use bass reduction. Let’s try it on one of our tracks: 1. Move the cycle region to measures 81 through 85. Select the Blues Guitar track and hit Play. 2. Click the Edit tab in the Track Info pane. 3. Directly above the Visual EQ effect are four empty effect slots. Click the first and choose Bass Reduction from the pop-up menu. 4. Click the image next to the blue light to reveal the effect settings. 5. The slider should be set about halfway, and you should hear the lower frequencies of the blues guitar disappear. If you like, adjust the slider a little to get a better sense of how the effect works. Set the slider at about 360 Hz. Deselect the On checkbox if you want to compare the before and after sounds. This is a good example of making something work in the mix. Solo the Blues Guitar track for a moment. With bass reduction applied, the guitar track sounds a little thin and anemic on its own, but it fits in the context of the song as a whole. The lower frequencies are well covered by other instruments, and the guitar track can stand out without adding mud to the mix. You probably wouldn’t want to use bass or treble reduction on every track, but it’s a neat effect, and it helps keep the all-important midrange frequencies uncluttered.
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Applying Bass Reduction It’s usually a good idea to apply bass reduction to tracks that don’t need a lot of low frequencies. Things like acoustic guitars and pianos commonly have a lot of low frequency information that isn’t necessary in the context of a full band. Removing some of these frequencies can open up the sound and make a mix sound much clearer. Even instruments like tambourines and shakers can have unnecessary low frequency data like subtle background noise or hum from the recording process. If you have a spare effects slot, I recommend applying bass reduction to any track that isn’t a bass or a drum kit. Adjust it in the mix until the sound quality suffers, and then back it off a bit.
Set Other Effects GarageBand ships with many effects for you to play with, most of which are found in the same four slots that hold the bass and treble reduction filters. Some are specific special effects, and some can be used for more general purposes. You’ll now add reverb, a common effect used in professional recording, to your tune. Reverb is essentially a simulation of an acoustical environment. Think of it this way: When you make a sound in a room—any room—the walls, ceiling, floor, and all the items in the room reflect the sound back to you. Some surfaces, such as glass, tile, and hardwood, are bright and reflective, while others, such as carpets and acoustical tiling, are sonically darker and absorb many of the sound waves. With reverb you can simulate these characteristics. Sounds without reverb usually feel dry and artificial. Adding reverb to a voice or instrument is a great way to lend it a sense of space and make it seem more natural. A little reverb can go a long way, smoothing over rough edges in a dry recording. Reverb can also be a great special effect or a way to separate one track from the others. Here’s how to add some reverb: 1. Cycle the section of the song with the electric guitar swell (measures 61 to 65). 2. Hit Play and click the Guitar Swell track you created. If the Track button. Info pane isn’t showing, click the Track Info 76
3. Click the Edit tab and click the (currently dimmed) light to turn on the Master Reverb effect. Set the slider at about 40%. You should hear the guitar become full and rich. The sound seems to blur and shimmer a bit; that’s reverb in action. Warning! Be careful when using reverb on a lot of tracks. Calculating the variables necessary for the acoustical simulation can use up processor power. It’s a good practice to disable the Master Reverb if you’re not using it on a track. If you’re experiencing playback difficulties, see Appendix A: Improving Performance. In addition, using too much reverb or using it on lots of tracks can make a song seem washed out and blurry. Make sure you have a balance between tracks that are close and intimate and those that are pushed back using reverb. Even on tracks you do want in the background, it’s easy to use too much reverb. A good rule of thumb is to add it until you can hear it and then back it off a touch. Tip: Professional reverb controls are far more sophisticated than
just a slider. They can simulate different-sized rooms, with different reflective properties and different absorption rates for different frequencies. To play with more reverb parameters, choose AUMatrixReverb in one of the effects popup menus.
Among other effects in the effects pop-up menus, you’ll find Distortion, Chorus (which adds a short delay to the signal to simulate several instruments playing together), Bitcrusher (digital distortion that can create some wild sounds), and AUDelay (a more complex version of the Echo effect). I don’t have room to discuss them here, but feel free to play with them. You can find more information about standard studio effects online or in most books on audio recording. Tip: For a detailed discussion of all of the GarageBand effects,
see my book Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11.
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Finish Up The song should be pretty much done at this point. Give it a listen or two to make sure everything sounds balanced. Often, adding effects and changing EQ makes a particular track seem louder or softer. Also remember to check the master level for clipping, adjusting it as high as you can without going into the red. Play the entire song through after your final adjustment and watch the red dots. If you notice clipping, move the slider left until the level nudges into the orange. Play the song through again. If the clipping indicators stay off, you’re golden. The finished song should sound something like this: gasgiant.mp3. To download my GarageBand project file, click here: GasGiant.zip. Once everything sounds good and you’re happy with your work, it’s time to Export Your Song.
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Transform a Magic
GarageBand Song
Suppose you’re not feeling very creative, yet you need a song for a project you’re working on. Or perhaps you just don’t feel like wading around in a bunch of Apple loops hoping to find something that strikes your fancy. Have no fear, there’s another way to make a song, and it sounds professional right out of the gate! Magic GarageBand first appeared in GarageBand ’08. It’s not really magic, but it is pretty clever: you get nine genres to choose from (Blues, Rock, Jazz, Country, Reggae, Funk, Latin, Roots Rock, and Slow Blues) and a choice of instruments within each genre. You get some flexibility in the instrument choices, but I’m going to show you even more techniques to customize your creation, and at the same time explore some of GarageBand’s more advanced features.
Create Your First Magic GarageBand Song Creating a Magic GarageBand song is simple: 1. Launch GarageBand or close the current project (or choose File > New). Then select Magic GarageBand on the left. 2. On the right, pick a style of music—let’s say Funk. Hover your pointer over the Funk icon and click Preview to hear a sample. You’ll hear a nifty little James Brown–style groove. 3. Click Preview again to stop playback. 4. Suppose that on second thought we want to try a different genre. Hover over the Latin icon and click Preview to sample it. 5. Let’s go with this style. Click Choose. After a moment, the curtain opens and you’re looking at your virtual performers arrayed onstage.
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6. Make sure the switch at the bottom of the window is set to Entire Song, and then click Play. The cool part about Magic GarageBand is that you can remove or change the various instruments, as we’ll do in the next few steps. 7. To remove the piano in the center—the instrument you could use to jam along with the band—click it to make sure it’s selected and click No Instrument in the lower-right corner. 8. Move your pointer over the horns on the right side of the stage and you’ll see that that’s the melody instrument; click to select it (Figure 51).
Figure 51: The Magic GarageBand stage upon selection of the melody instrument—in this case, the horn section. (The spotlight highlights the instrument that’s currently under the pointer.)
9. Notice the row of instrument icons now appearing beneath the stage. Click through them to hear each one take a turn playing the melody, and stay with the one you prefer.
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Having trouble hearing an instrument? When you select an instrument, the text label showing the name of the instrument expands into a small window. If you click the disclosure triangle next to the instrument name, you see a collection of simple mixing controls, including Mute, Solo, and Track Volume. If you’re having trouble hearing one instrument over all the others, you can either solo it or turn it up. 10. Try Steps 8 and 9 with each of the other instruments on the stage until you find a combo that you like. Note: Click on a blank part of the stage to deselect all the
instruments. Notice the Shuffle Instruments button that appears below the stage; click it to randomize all the instruments—a fun way to shake up your band!
11. Once you’ve found a good arrangement, click Open In GarageBand. GarageBand will churn for a while and then open your song in the standard GarageBand window. Now you’re free to save it as is or you can play with the individual tracks just as in any other GarageBand song. Change levels, panning, add effects—it’s your song now!
Customize Your Magic GarageBand Song Magic GarageBand is a fun and easy way for nonmusicians to create a complex song without much sweat or tears. However, one drawback is that although you get a lot of instrument options in each genre, there’s no way to mix and match and have, say, horns and violin play the melody in your Latin tune. Or is there? With a little extra work and creativity, you can customize your Magic GarageBand song so that it doesn’t sound like everyone else’s: 1. Launch GarageBand or close the current project (or choose File > New). Then select Magic GarageBand on the left. 2. Pick a style of music. In this case let’s go with Roots Rock; select it and click Choose. The curtain opens and you’re looking at your virtual performers arrayed onstage. 81
3. Select the following for these instruments on the stage: for My Instrument, select No Instrument; for Drums, pick Simple; for Keyboard, Suitcase Electric; and for Melody, Glassy. Leave Guitar and Bass set at their defaults (Electric Rhythm and Picked, respectively). 4. Click the Open In GarageBand button. GarageBand opens a new song project with our instrument choices and with the name “GarageBand - 08. Roots Rock” (followed by a number if this isn’t your first Magic GarageBand project in this genre). The song is even conveniently split up into handy arrangement sections (which we’ll put to good use later). Listen to the song if you want. Note: The “08” in the name refers to the Magic GarageBand
genre; Roots Rock is the eighth style in the list.
5. Choose File > Save As (Command-Shift-S) and save it as a project named Roots Rock Comp 1. This saves a copy of the project with the new name, which we want to use to avoid confusion later. There’s no real reason to save the original project—08. Roots Rock—so you can delete it in the Finder if you like. 6. Close the project. GarageBand may ask if you want to save an iLife preview; it doesn’t matter for now, so click No. Now we’ll choose our second batch of instruments and create tracks that we’ll add to those we just created: 1. Once again in the GarageBand startup dialog, click the Magic GarageBand button and double-click Roots Rock (a shortcut to double-clicking it and selecting Choose). 2. This time when the window opens, select the following instruments: for My Instrument, No Instrument; for Guitar, Pedal Steel; for Bass, No Instrument (since we already have a good bass track in the previous file); for Drums, Active; for Keyboard, Organ; and for Melody, Harmonica.
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Keep it real: One thing to keep in mind while you’re choosing instruments for your song: it sounds totally natural to have a piano playing chords in one part of the song and a guitar in another, but most bands have only one bass player and one drummer. If you want to have the bass or drums get more active or start playing a different part, you can, but make sure the two choices sound similar or your song may seem pasted together. In this case, the Active and Simple drums sound very similar, so we won’t have a problem swapping between them. 3. Click Open in GarageBand and save this file as Roots Rock Comp 2. 4. Choose Edit > Select All (Command-A) to select all the regions in Roots Rock Comp 2. 5. Choose Edit > Copy (Command-C) and close the file. 6. Open Roots Rock Comp 1. 7. Make sure the playhead is at the beginning of the song, by clicking the Go to Beginning button in the transport controls (or pressing Return). 8. Click the Electric Rhythm track header to select the entire rhythm guitar track. 9. Choose Edit > Paste (Command-V). This part is a little wonky; the only thing it will do is paste the harmonica over the Electric Rhythm track. This is not what we want, so choose Edit > Undo Paste Selection (Command-Z). Four new tracks magically appear in the timeline, called Picked, Electric Rhythm, Simple, and Suitcase Electric. These are the names of four of our existing tracks, but don’t worry about that for now; we’re going to change them in a minute. As I said, none of this is ideal behavior on GarageBand’s part, but we’re sort of hacking Magic GarageBand anyway, so it’s not too surprising that there are a few glitches. 10. Click the Go to Beginning button, and select the first new track. Now paste again, and everything shows up in its proper location (Figure 52).
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Figure 52: All tracks from both roots rock versions, together at last.
All your new tracks have their proper volumes and pan positions set, and they all have the appropriate track icon—but unfortunately, as I noted earlier, their names are now wrong. 11. Select each of the track names of the four new instruments and rename them to match their regions (Active, Pedal Steel, Organ, and Harmonica). Remember that it’s sometimes difficult to select the track names; you have to click right on the letters.
Rearrange the Song
If you click Play at this point, you may get a headache; there’s an awful lot going on at once in our ditty. I believe overkill is the correct word. The song also has exactly the same structure as the original Magic GarageBand song—something we want to change so that we can distance ourselves from what every other Tom, Dick, and Harry will be cranking out. We’ll add some originality to our creation.
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Change the Tempo First, let’s make the song faster: 1. Click the note icon on the left side of the LCD and choose Project. 2. Click the tempo (which should be 76 bpm to start), and move the slider up until it reads 85. 3. Change the LCD to Measures. Weird tempo? When working with Real Instrument loops (like most of the regions in our song), you may find that some tempos sound a little weird. To hear this problem, solo the bass track and change the tempo to 61 bpm (but don’t forget to change it back). Often a tempo a few bpm away will sound better, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. Avoiding drastic tempo changes is the only real solution.
Duplicate Arrangement Sections Now we’re going to use the arrangement track (introduced earlier under Map Out the Arrangement) to copy a few sections of the song to make it longer: 1. Select the sections to copy: in the arrangement track, click Chorus and then, holding down the Shift key, Bridge and Verse 2. 2. Holding down the Option key, drag the selected sections until you see a space open up between Verse 2 and Outro. When you release the mouse button, you should see Chorus copy, Bridge copy, and Verse 2 copy before the Outro (Figure 53).
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Figure 53: Our Magic GarageBand song with three sections copied.
3. Let’s change the names of our new sections to keep things clear. Double-click “Chorus copy” in the arrange track and type Chorus 2; then do the same with the Bridge copy and Verse 2 copy, changing them to Bridge 2 and Verse 3, respectively. While you’re at it, change Bridge to Bridge 1 to avoid any confusion. Warning: There’s a bug when renaming arrangement regions.
If you rename a region and then drag the scroll bar with the name
still selected, a copy of the name remains in its unscrolled location.
If you click anywhere in the timeline, this copy should disappear.
We’re now going to trim Bridge 2 by half, to keep the sections from becoming too repetitive. 4. Zoom in on the timeline a little more than halfway. 5. Scroll to Bridge 2 and click the beat ruler at the beginning of measure 46. 6. Drag in the timeline from below all the tracks upward, to select all the regions in Bridge 2. 7. Choose Edit > Split (Command-T).
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8. We just split all the regions in the Bridge 2 section, but the section is still in one piece in the arrangement track; select it there and again choose Edit > Split. 9. With the first half of Bridge 2 selected, press Delete. All the tracks disappear, but the arrangement region is still there. Select it in the arrangement track and press Delete again (Figure 54).
Figure 54: The final version of Bridge 2, half as long as Bridge 1.
Add a Key Change Key changes are always fun, and since we just almost doubled the length of our tune, this will help keep it from getting boring. Here’s how to add one: 1. Scroll to the end of Verse 2 and click the beat ruler midway between measures 33 and 34. The LCD display should read bar 33, beat 3, and 1.001. 87
2. Choose Track > Show Master Track (Command-B). 3. Choose Master Pitch from the pop-up menu in the master track’s header to show the automation curve for the master pitch. 4. Click on the purple line where it intersects the playhead, and drag the resulting control point up until the value reads +2. This transposes the entire song up a whole step (a common transposition amount). Let’s listen to what we have so far—but first, to avoid the cacophony we button heard earlier, mute the last four tracks by clicking the Mute in the track header for Active, Pedal Steel, Organ, and Harmonica.
Add a Ritard Tempo is another parameter that can be changed with an automation curve for the master track, making it easy to speed up or slow down your song as it plays. Since it’s fairly common for a song to slow down (ritard, in musical parlance) at the end, let’s have ours do the same: 1. Choose Master Tempo from the pop-up menu in the master track’s header. 2. Click at measure 52 in the beat ruler to move the playhead there. 3. Click the master tempo automation curve at measure 52 to add a control point. Hover over the control point until a Help tag with the tempo appears. If it’s not 85 bpm, drag the control to 85. Better precision: You may need to hold the Shift key down after you start dragging, to enable more precise movement. 4. Add another control point at measure 54, and drag it to 75 bpm (Figure 55).
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Figure 55: Adding a ritard with the master tempo automation curve.
5. Listen to the end of the song, and hear how the ritard works in context. Feel free to adjust it to taste. 6. Hide the master track with Command-B. Tip: You can use the master tempo automation curve for other
effects as well, such as having slow and fast sections of a song (like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”) or having the song speed up subtly over time (like “Brand New Cadillac” by The Clash).
Change the Instrumentation
The next step is to use some of those extra tracks we created to add variety. We don’t want more than five or six instruments playing at once, so we’ll delete certain regions and bounce around between players so that the arrangement stays fresh and surprising. Consider saving a copy: I’ve made the decisions for you in this section, and I suggest following them as is so that you understand the process; however, feel free to do a Save As to copy the file. That way you can open the original file later and try your own variation.
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Switch the Drums We’ll let the first two tracks—the Electric Rhythm and Picked bass tracks—stay in for the entire song, so we’ll first adjust the drums. Remember, we created two drum tracks: Simple and Active. We’ll start the song with the Simple track, and switch to Active at the key change: 1. Zoom out in the timeline so that you can see the whole song. 2. Drag the Active drum track (by dragging the drum icon in its header) upward, until it’s directly under the Simple drum track. Don’t click the star! Again, be wary of clicking the star that appears if you hover over the left edge of the track header. If you do you’ll turn on Groove Matching. 3. Select all the regions in the Simple track from Chorus 2 to the end, and press Delete. 4. Select all the regions in the Active track from Bridge 1 to the beginning and press Delete. Make sure you get the Intro as well. The only section the two drum tracks should now have in common is Verse 2; you’ll see why in a minute. 5. Unmute the Active track. 6. Zoom in a bit so that you see mostly Verse 2, and position the playhead one beat before measure 34 (that is, on the last longer tick mark before 34 on the beat ruler). 7. In the Simple track, hover over the bottom half of the Verse 2 region until the pointer changes to the resize pointer. Drag back a beat so that the end of the region lines up with the playhead (Figure 56).
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Figure 56: Dragging the drum region back one beat.
8. Select the Active track’s Verse 2 region, and choose Edit > Split (Command-T). Then select only the first region in the Active track and delete it. Your drum tracks shouldn’t overlap anymore (Figure 57).
Figure 57: The two drum tracks, no longer overlapping.
9. Zoom way in and look at the Simple track around measure 34. The beginning of the next drum hit is visible at the end of the Verse 2 region; this is not good. If you solo the Simple track and listen to this area, you can hear that the end of that cutoff hit is audible and sounds unnatural. (The Active track also has a hit near there, but it starts a teeny bit later.) We need to get rid of that cutoff hit. 10. Click the Grid
button and set the grid to 1/64 Note (Figure 58). 91
Figure 58: Click the Grid button in the upper-right corner of the timeline to change the grid size.
11. Hover over the lower-right corner of the Simple region until you see the resize pointer, and drag back one tick mark on the grid (you may need to zoom in or out until you see something similar to Figure 59). This should get rid of the cutoff hit and a little more, but you should still clearly see the preceding drum hit.
Figure 59: Fixing the end of the Simple drum region.
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12. Extend the Active drum region by the same amount, so that the ends of two drum regions meet. Now you can solo the two tracks and listen to the smooth segue between the two!
Alternate the Keyboards Right now, the electric piano and organ are playing through the entire song. This is a bit much; we can instead use the two to differentiate the sections of the tune—having the electric piano play for the majority of the song and then switching to the organ for the bridges. I had thought about bringing the organ back for the end, but let’s pretend we have only one keyboard player who can play only one instrument at a time. (The electric piano part is definitely two-handed, but with simpler parts it’s possible for someone to play both at once.) Since we’re working by section, this process is extremely simple: 1. Unmute the Organ track and move it directly beneath the Suitcase Electric track, so that we can see what we’re doing more clearly. 2. Delete all the Organ regions except Bridge 1 and Bridge 2. 3. Delete the Suitcase Electric on the two bridges. There should now be no overlap between the two instruments. I told you it was simple!
Fade the Rest of the Instruments In and Out My plan is to have the remaining three instruments—the lead guitar (Glassy), Pedal Steel, and Harmonica—dance in and out through the piece. The lead guitar and the harmonica will be the main melodic instruments, with the pedal steel jumping in from time to time to add accents and fills. To do this, we won’t chop out regions as we did earlier. In this case it would result in abrupt appearances and disappearances of instruments, which is jarring and would sound unnatural. Instead we’ll use track volume curves to fade the tracks in and out more gently. (See Adjust Track Volumes for more on volume curves.) Here’s how: 1. Click the automation curve button (to the right of the track volume slider) in the Glassy lead guitar’s track header.
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2. Make sure the pop-up menu under the track header says Track Volume; if not, choose Track Volume from it. 3. Zoom in a little more than halfway and scroll to measure 10. Notice that the last note from the verse extends a bit into the chorus and that the next note starts between beats 2 and 3 of measure 10. We want to hear the end of that held note but fade it out before the new note starts. 4. Click the volume curve at the beginning of beat 2 to add a control point. Make a note of the level. 5. Add a second point just before the next note starts, and drag it all the way down. The Help tag should read –144.0 db (Figure 60).
Figure 60: Fading out the Glassy guitar.
6. Scroll ahead to measure 16. Add a couple of control points before the note on beat 4 of measure 16. Drag the second point up to the level you saw in Step 4. 7. Add another fade-out between beats 2 and 3 of measure 34, and add a fade-in between beats 3 and 4 of measure 40. The next instrument is the pedal steel. There are a few more fades to create, but the principle is the same: 1. Unmute the track and move the track volume slider all the way to zero (to the left). 2. Click the automation curve button, and choose Track Volume from the pop-up menu.
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3. Fade in the pedal steel right before measure 13: set the volume at approximately –3.4 db (and remember you can use the Shift key to make finer settings). Fade it out again in the second half of measure 15. Since there isn’t an obvious place where the pedal steel stops, make it a slow fade that fills the last beat of the measure. 4. Fade back in right before measure 17, and out again at the end of the measure. 5. Scroll to measure 21, and fade in at the beginning of the measure. Add another long fade-out on beats 2 and 3 of measure 26. 6. Fade in before the last beat of measure 33, and out at the end of measure 41. 7. Scroll to measure 45 and find the two notes leading into measure 46. Fade in right before this, and stay in for the rest of the song. Where to fade: In general, you want to fade in and out where there’s less going on in the track (in other words, where the waveform is thinner). This isn’t as crucial in fade-outs, since you can fade out a note as it’s trailing off. But fading in a note as it’s playing will tend to sound unnatural. It may help to solo the track and see if any of your fades sound funny. Last but not least, let’s deal with the harmonica. I want to do a similar thing with the lead guitar and harmonica as we did with switching off the organ and electric piano. The guitar will play in the verse and the bridge, and the harmonica will take over for the chorus. However, I want these two to transition more organically, occasionally overlapping each other and dancing in and out more: 1. Unmute the harmonica track. 2. Make a note of the track volume, and set the track volume to zero. 3. Show the track’s volume curve. Fade the harmonica in just before measure 10 and out again just before measure 18. Use the level you noted in Step 2. 4. Bring the harmonica back in for a little fill in the middle of measure 23, and create a longer fade on the second beat of measure 25. 5. Fade in at the middle of measure 31, and fade out again at the end of measure 41. 95
6. Scroll to measure 53, and fade in just before the beginning of the measure. Leave the harmonica in for the rest of the song. It has a fun little solo at the end after the other instruments are done, which adds playfulness to the ending, but it ends somewhat abruptly, so give it a short fade on the last couple of beats of the song.
Add the Finishing Touches
We’re in the home stretch, folks. Listen to the song all the way through and note anything that jumps out at you, especially instruments that sound too loud or too soft. Remember, if you’ve done anything with the track volume curve you can no longer use the slider in the track header; you need to adjust all the high spots in the track volume curve, which can be a lot of work. Use a Compressor to Change Track Gain Instead of adjusting all the volume curve sliders, you can use the Compressor effect to adjust a track’s overall gain. If the compressor is already enabled on a track, you can use the Gain slider to change the track volume; if it’s not enabled, open its settings and set the Threshold to High, the Ratio to Low, and the Attack to Fast. With these settings, the compressor isn’t actually compressing, and you can use the Gain control to adjust the track volume. Beware, however: if you’ve got any effects in line after the compressor that are volume-dependent (such as amp or distortion effects), their sound may be affected by the change in input volume.
Adjust the Panning The original Magic GarageBand track had some panning preset: the rhythm guitar was slightly to the left and the keyboards slightly to the right. That’s not all that exciting, so let’s make it more interesting: 1. Move the rhythm guitar and the keyboards out a touch more. Set the Electric Rhythm track to –22, and the Suitcase Electric and Organ tracks to 20. 2. Set the Pedal Steel at –40. It’s fairly quiet and we want it to stick out more. 96
3. Set the Harmonica at 32.
Listen again and see if the instruments sound more separated and the mix seems more sparkly.
Fade the Ending The last thing to do is to create a tiny fade at the end so that the harmonica doesn’t end so abruptly: 1. Show the master track by choosing Track > Show Master Track (Command-B). 2. From the pop-up menu in the track header, choose Master Volume. 3. Add a control point at measure 55. Add another at measure 56 and fade it to zero. 4. Add a third point in the middle, and drag it up so that it looks like Figure 61. This slows the fade a little and sounds better (to my ear, anyway) than a flat fade-out. Feel free to try both and see which you prefer.
Figure 61: The master fade-out at the end of the song. Note: There’s also a feature in the Track menu called Fade Out,
which (no surprise here) adds a fade-out to your song. However, it’s too long a fade for our purposes.
We’re done! You can hear my version here: mymagicroots.mp3 and download the GarageBand project file here: RootsRockComp.zip. If you’re happy with what you have, it’s time to Export Your Song. 97
Learn More Loop Techniques Now that you’ve created some tunes and learned how GarageBand works, here are some tricks and advice for those of you who want to take your loop work a little further. One of the great things about GarageBand is how prevalent it is. If you bought a new Mac anytime after 2003, you got a free copy of GarageBand preinstalled on your hard drive. The downside of that is that everyone who bought a Mac since 2003 has a copy of GarageBand and the same loops that you do. The chance that you’ll hear a piece containing “your” loops is incredibly high. I’ve even heard GarageBand loops in television commercials. One solution to this is to buy Apple Jam Packs or third-party loops, and I give you some ideas and recommendations here. But buying additional loops can be expensive, and this may not be an option for some of you. So I also suggest what can you do to spice up the loops you do have and make them more “yours.”
Start fresh: Save your song and create a new GarageBand project (double-clicking Loops in the dialog) to try these techniques. They’re easier to follow in a fresh song file.
Create a Drum Fill
GarageBand ships with an excellent set of drum loops, but using the same beat over and over again can get monotonous. It helps to throw in some fills to break up the repetition. Unfortunately, the basic GarageBand drum loops don’t come with many fills or breaks. You could buy Apple Jam Packs or various third-party loop sets (see Use Loops from Other Sources later in this chapter), but you can also make drum fills yourself.
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To make your own fills: 1. Using the loop browser, drag Effected Drum Kit 02 into the timeline to create a drum track. Note: Some loops work better than others for this type of
dissection. Look for loops that are two measures or longer and that have just a drum kit. Some GarageBand drum loops—such as Exotic Beats, Funky Latin Drums, and Percussion Combos— include congas and other percussion, making it harder to create a realistic fill.
2. Duplicate the drum track by choosing Track > Duplicate Track (Command-D). 3. By copying and pasting or Option-dragging the region, copy the drum region into the new track so that the beginning of the new region lines up with the end of the original one. 4. Click the Cycle
button to turn on cycling (Figure 62).
Figure 62: Cycling the two drum regions.
5. Zoom in on the second drum region so that it mostly fills the window. This makes it easier to slice up the region, which is what we’re going to do next. Then we’ll rearrange the resulting regions to make a cool-sounding break. 6. Position the playhead in the middle of the region by clicking the beat ruler at the beginning of measure 4. (If the playhead doesn’t snap to the measure, make sure Snap to Grid is checked in the Control menu.) 7. Choose Edit > Split (Command-T).
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You should now have two regions of equal length (Figure 63).
Figure 63: Splitting the drum region.
8. Continue to split the second half of the region before each major drum hit. The second half of the loop should be in five parts (Figure 64).
Figure 64: The regions after splitting the second half of the loop.
9. Now comes the fun part: rearrange the regions into a funky break. Here are some tips: ‣ Sometimes I rearrange things randomly first, see what I end up with, and then fine-tune it so that it flows naturally. Other times I have a specific idea in mind and try to recreate it. Either way is valid, and both work in different situations. ‣ It helps to drag regions between the two drum tracks so that you can overlap regions without inadvertently deleting portions of them. 100
‣ If the break sounds weird and doesn’t flow well, line up some of the regions with beats or half beats. You don’t have to do this with all the notes, but lining up one or two with a beat will help keep your fill sounding as if it was played by a real drummer. Figure 65 shows what I came up with. (You can hear my version here: drumfill.mp3.)
Figure 65: The drum regions before (top) and after (bottom)
repositioning. Notice that I used region 5 twice.
‣ To create a paradiddle (a set of four sixteenth notes played on the snare drum), duplicate a few snare hits and then shorten them to sixteenth-note slices. Line them up, but be sure not to use more than two of the same hit in a row. There should be some variation so that it sounds like a real drummer. To create even more variation, play with the volume curves. The first hit should be the loudest (Figure 66).
Figure 66: The paradiddle with volume curves.
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Add Chord Changes to Loops
No one could deny that GarageBand comes with some great loops; however, everyone else has the same loops, and if you use loops to build your songs, they may sound like everyone else’s. One way to separate your tunes from the pack is to use the Region Pitch feature to create unique chord changes: 1. Select the region you want to alter. In this case, I’m choosing an acoustic guitar loop: Picked Steel String 03. 2. Drag two regions into the timeline and place them one after the other. Turn on the cycle region, making sure it encompasses all four measures. 3. Move the playhead to the beginning of measure 4, and then split the second region into two one-measure chunks. 4. Here’s where it gets cool. Double-click the first half of the split region to open it in the track editor. Move the Pitch slider down five half steps (Figure 67).
Figure 67: Use the Pitch slider to transpose a region up or down.
This is the equivalent of a major fourth, in this case going from a C major chord to a G major chord. 5. Transpose the last region down seven half steps to an F major chord. 102
6. Notice that the regions in the timeline have little indicators in the corner showing how far they’ve been transposed (Figure 68). Listen to your work.
Figure 68: Transposed regions reveal their pitch-shifted status in the timeline.
7. Let’s try a slightly different chord progression. Swap the first and last halves of the progression, so that the two one-measure chords are at the beginning and the two-measure segment is at the end. 8. Select all the regions and drag the Pitch slider up five half steps. Notice that all the regions in the timeline keep their relative pitch. 9. Select the middle region and raise it four half steps so that its pitch is Play your new chord change. Transpose with caution! Changing a region’s pitch too drastically can make things sound odd or artificial. Pedal Steel String 03, for example, sounds strange when you raise it too much. You can do interesting things with pitch transposing, and the chord changes don’t need to be rigidly on the beat. Play around with cutting up loops in different ways. There is no “correct” result; you’re limited only by what you think sounds good. Note: An easy way to alter your loops is to edit MIDI notes and
change instruments on Software Instrument tracks. We played with this in earlier tutorials, so I won’t cover it again here; for a refresher, see Add Bass and Percussion and Edit Notes to Improve the Bass Line.
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Don’t Forget about Magic GarageBand! There’s no reason you can’t create a Magic GarageBand song and just use the drums or the guitar and add your own loops around them. I suspect that many people don’t use Magic GarageBand because they don’t want something so specific, but it can be a great source of underused loops.
Add Effects to Loops
What if you find a loop whose rhythm is great, but the sound is all wrong? Here (organized by instrument) are some ideas to give new life to an old loop. Warning! It’s easy to add effects to something, but almost impossible to take them away if they’re part of the audio recording. For the techniques I describe here, it helps to choose more naturalsounding loops, with fewer effects and less ambience. You can add effects to a heavily distorted guitar, but it will always sound distorted. A clean guitar, on the other hand, leaves you a lot more room for processing.
Smash Those Drums One technique that’s become popular in recent years is to add distortion to drums (check out “Kids” by MGMT and “My Violent Heart” by Nine Inch Nails for examples). This effect is easy to achieve, and you can coax a lot of flavors of distortion out of GarageBand. Use the Distortion Effect
You want distorted drums, so what better effect to use than the good old Distortion plugin? Try it out: 1. In the loop browser, choose a drum loop to play with. I’m choosing Live Edgy Drums 09, which has a good groove and is fairly clean (not completely, but close enough for this trial). Drag it into the timeline and loop it so that you’ve got four measures to play with. 2. Enable the cycle region and drag it out so that it covers the fourmeasure region.
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3. Click the Track Info button and select the Edit tab to bring up the track effects list. 4. Click the first empty effects slot and select Distortion. 5. Click the image of the amp to bring up the effect settings. 6. Set the Drive to 29.0 dB, the Tone to 2500 Hz, and the Output Level to –15 dB. I’ve set the Distortion effect at a relatively insane level here, but you can adjust the sliders to taste. Lowering the drive and brightening the tone brings the loop closer to its original state but with an edge. Here are some additional variations: • Use the Overdrive plugin for a slightly different flavor of distortion. • Add a Track Reverb effect and set it to Drum Room 1 to make your drums even bigger. In the effect settings, adjust the Reverb Volume for more or less ambience (I tend to err on the side of less). For a different sound, experiment with placing the reverb before or after the distortion. Finding Track Reverb: There are several different reverb effects in GarageBand, and knowing which is which can be confusing. To find Track Reverb, click an empty effects slot in the Track Info pane and choose Track Reverb from the pop-up list. • Using heavy amounts of distortion on a drum loop often emphasizes the sustain of the hits, making the loop sound pillowy and fat. To tighten the sound, you can enable a compressor (as described in Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11) and set it as follows: Threshold, –34.0 dB; Ratio, 19.0:1; Attack, 2.0 ms; Gain, 7.5 dB. (These settings are optimized for the loop I used earlier, and may not work as intended on other drum loops.) When you turn off the distortion, the loop should sound much more clipped and staccato than it did before compression. The compressor is basically squashing the dynamics of the loop so that only the initial part of each hit is getting through, thereby sending less of the beat’s ambience to the distortion effect.
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Crush Those Bits
Another fun effect to try on drums is Bitcrusher, which mimics early digital audio gear and video games like Super Mario Brothers and Bomberman. It’s a much harsher type of distortion than the Overdrive or Distortion effect, but it does have its place. Take these steps to see how it sounds: 1. Delete the previous track with the Distortion plugin in it (Track > Delete Track or Command-Delete), so that you’re starting with a clean slate. 2. Follow Steps 1 through 3 under Use the Distortion Effect, choosing the Live Edgy Drums 09 loop. 3. Click the first empty effects slot and select Bitcrusher. 4. Play with some of the presets for Bitcrusher to get an idea of what this effect can do. When you’re done, set the Resolution to 5 bit and the Sample Rate Reduction to 16 x. It sounds pretty nasty, no? Again, I’m using extreme settings, so feel free to twiddle them until you get a sound you like. Or try some of the following variations: • Remove some of the harshness by dropping in a Treble Reduction plugin after Bitcrusher. Set it at around 5000 Hz to take some of the nastiness out. • If you like the effect but want to back it off a bit, try blending it with an unaffected track. Create a Real Instrument track and copy the drum loop into it. Adjust the relative volumes of both tracks to balance between them. This way, you get some of the gnarly distortion without completely obliterating your drum beat. (You can, of course, add other effects to your new, clean track as well.) Amp It Up
Try one final experiment with your drum loop. This time you’re going to run it through a guitar amp: 1. Delete any tracks you’ve created, so that you’re again starting clean. button or choose Track > New Track 2. Click the Add Track (Command-Option-N); select Electric Guitar and click Create. Make sure the Clean Combo preset is selected at the top of the Track Info pane. 106
3. Turn off monitoring by clicking the monitor Electric Guitar tracks).
button (unique to
4. In the loop browser, again choose Live Edgy Drums 09, drag it into the timeline, loop it to four measures, and cycle the four measures. Listen and notice how different it sounds from the other distortion effects you’ve used so far. 5. Go back to the Track Info pane (by double-clicking the track’s header) and click the amp to view the amp controls (Figure 69).
Figure 69: Click the amp to view the amp controls.
6. Turn the Treble and Presence controls to about 10 o’clock. This makes it less bright. 7. Turn the Gain to 3 o’clock. This roughens it up a bit. 8. Click Edit or double-click the amp to bring up the track effects. If all the effects aren’t visible, click the up arrow directly beneath the floorboards. 107
The drums still sound too bright and harsh for my taste, so we’ll fix that next. 9. Open the Visual EQ effect by clicking the image to the left of its name. 10. Click the Details triangle to reveal the numerical controls if they’re not already showing. In the Treble column, drag +2.0 dB down until it reads –2.5 dB. That helps a little, but the sound is still kind of bright. 11. Click the empty effects slot and add a Treble Reduction effect. Click the image to bring up its controls if they’re not already showing, and drag the slider to 2900 Hz. You again end up with a distorted drum sound, but one with a very different flavor from the others. Electric Guitar tracks give you a lot of options for further crunching up your drums. Feel free to play around on your own, or try some of these ideas: • Double-click the blue Delay pedal and click the stomp switch at the bottom to turn it on. Turn up the mix knob to 19%. • Turn off the Squash Compressor (labeled “Sustain” under its picture) by clicking the footswitch below its name. This gives the loop a slightly different sound. • Use a different amp model. They all sound different, some of them monumentally so. I’m particularly fond of the Large Tweed Combo, the British Blues Combo, and the Sunshine Stack. • Change up the effects pedals. The Rawk Distortion, Hi-Drive Treble Boost, and Auto-Funk pedals in particular have a cool effect. Distortion Advice You may find that if you heavily distort one or two instruments in your mix, the others might need some distortion as well to blend in. It all depends on the material: sometimes the contrast between distorted and clean sounds adds dimension to the piece, whereas other times the clean instruments stand out and sound “wrong.” Also, it’s usually best not to use the same type of distortion on everything. Use different plugins and different sounds to give your songs depth and variety. 108
Mangle Your Other Loops Drums aren’t the only kind of loops you can alter with effects. Pretty much any loop will sound different with effects applied; however, some combinations will have more of an impact than others. The following ideas are by no means all the possibilities, but they’re some of the more noticeable. Experiment on your own and find the sounds that work for you. Electrify an Acoustic Guitar
GarageBand ships with a lot of acoustic guitar loops. These might work well for certain types of music, but if you’re creating a rock tune, chances are you want something with a little more bite. Enter the magical Electric Guitar track. 1. Create a new Electric Guitar project. 2. Drag the loop Acoustic Noodling 04 into the timeline. 3. Turn the cycle region on and shorten it so it matches the twomeasure guitar loop. 4. Click the Track Info button and select Choral Stack from the presets. It sounds pretty different from the plain acoustic guitar, doesn’t it? Play with other presets too, to see how they differ. A few of my favorites are Dreamy Texture, Roadhouse Rock, Old School Funk, and Dublin Delay. Of course, you can create your own tones as well by combining various amps and stompboxes. Process a Piano
All the piano loops that come with GarageBand are Software Instrument loops—but that doesn’t mean you can’t alter them as well. Take a look at what sort of mayhem you can cause by altering a piano loop: 1. In the loop browser, find the loop Classic Rock Piano 03 and drag it into the timeline. 2. Create a cycle region that encompasses the loop and listen to it. 3. Open the Track Info pane and add an Automatic Filter effect in the first empty effects slot.
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4. Set the Frequency to 48%, Resonance to 57%, Intensity to 0%, Mode to Down, and Speed to DC (all the way to the right). Listen to the loop; it almost doesn’t sound like a piano anymore! It’s a bit piercing, though, so we’ll fix that. 5. In the next empty effects slot, add an AUGraphicEQ effect. This is one of Apple’s Audio Unit Effects, so it’s in the second group of effects, below the GarageBand Effects. 6. Make sure it’s in 31-Band mode (the pop-up menu in the lower-left corner, next to Flatten EQ). Grab the dot at 500 Hz and drag it down so that the readout in the lower-right corner shows –6.4 dB. That helps a bit. If you want to make the sound more spacious, turn on the Master Reverb and set it to 50%. You can also add Chorus (try the Smooth Chorus setting) or Flanger (the Make Wide preset sounds lovely). Get Crazy
A number of GarageBand’s built-in effects chains can accomplish some serious warping. Try the following: 1. Create a new Real Instrument track. 2. In the Browse tab in the Track Info pane, select Effects and then Zapper. 3. Open the loop browser, and drag Southern Rock Organ 01 into the track you just created. Weird, wacky stuff! Also try the other presets in the Effects category: Long Panning Echoes is cool, and Orion Vocals adds instant craziness. Other presets can have interesting effects, too. Check out Helium Breath and Mouse Voice in the Vocals category, or Old Vinyl Brass under Band Instruments. (That last one is loud, so keep your volume down while playing with these.)
Put It All Together
Now I’m going to apply some of what you just learned and create a new tune. We’ll bring in some loops, chop them up and edit them, add some effects, and end up with an original-sounding piece.
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Combine Drum Loops One trick I use a lot is to combine two or three drum and percussion loops to create a unique groove. Assuming the loops are compatible, combining them can create a rhythm that’s both a sum of its parts and something new altogether. You’re going to use two drum loops in this project: a Software Instrument loop and a Real Instrument loop. You’ll edit them and add effects as well. Add the First Loop
Add and edit the first Software Instrument loop as follows: 1. Open a new project, choosing Loops in the dialog. 2. Choose Urban and Kits in the loop browser and drag the loop Funky Pop Drums 02 into the timeline. Make sure you choose Funky Pop Drums 02 and not Funky Pop Drum 02. 3. Turn on the cycle region and zoom in a bit so that the loop fills most of the width of the timeline. Listen to the loop; it sounds OK, but we want something more urban. 4. In the Browse tab in the Track Info pane, select Drum Kits and then Hip Hop Kit. Listen and you’ll hear an old-school drum machine; perfect! Next, you’ll edit a few of the notes to beef up the beat. 5. Hide the Track Info pane, and double-click the region to bring up the Piano Roll editor. This loop uses a wide range of MIDI notes, so make the Piano Roll as tall as it will go, by dragging up the bar above the editor. 6. Scroll down in the Piano Roll to find the kick drum: it’s the bottom row of notes (at C1 on the keyboard). Option-drag one of the longer notes to the beginning of measure 1 in that same row. (Make sure you’re copying the note and not just moving it.) 7. Click the Grid button in the upper-right corner of the Piano Roll editor and change the grid size to 1/4 Note. 8. In the keyboard on the left side in the Piano Roll, click the black key directly above the kick drum. You should hear a sidestick sound (the sound a snare drum makes when the drummer hits the rim rather 111
than the drumhead). Command-click the second beat of each measure in that row (Figure 70).
Figure 70: Adding the sidestick notes. Note: If you’re curious about the other drum hits found in
the GarageBand kits, read my other ebook, Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11, for a complete list.
9. Click the sidestick note on the keyboard again to select all the notes you just added, and set the Velocity control on the left to 90. 10. Similarly as in Step 8, add notes on the same beats one whole step above the sidestick. You should hear handclaps as you add each one. Add one more note on the last beat of measure 4. Select all the handclaps and turn their velocity up to 100 (Figure 71).
Figure 71: Increasing the velocity of the handclaps. 112
11. Close the Piano Roll editor, and listen to what you have so far. The sidestick and handclaps add more punch to the beat. Now you’re going to punch it up even more by adding—that’s right—distortion! 12. In the Edit tab in the Track Info pane, add Distortion in the first empty effects slot. Set the Drive to 10 dB, leave the Tone at 2300 Hz, and set the Output Level to –6.5 dB. Take a listen. The kick drum in particular sounds much fatter. If you want to compare the sound with and without distortion, either click the On checkbox when the plugin is open or click the green in the Track Info pane when it’s closed. Process the Snaps
The only part of the drum loop that I’m not happy with now is the snapping. It feels wimpy and out of place. Here’s a way to fix this: 1. Create a new Software Instrument track, and again choose Hip Hop Kit in the Browse tab in the Track Info pane. 2. Copy the drum loop you just edited into the new track. 3. Open the Piano Roll editor again and delete everything except the snaps (top row of notes). Click the first snap and notice that there seems to be two notes on top of each other; delete the shorter one. 4. Solo the snaps by clicking the Solo
button in the track header.
5. Export the snaps by choosing Share > Export Song to Disk. Uncheck the Compress checkbox and click OK. Name the file and save it somewhere sensible. (I saved mine in the same folder as the current project.) 6. Create a new Electric Guitar track. Turn off monitoring by clicking the monitor icon in the track header. Noise alert! If you leave monitoring on, you may experience loud and unpleasant feedback. Since you’re not recording an instrument right now, monitoring is unnecessary. 7. Mute the snaps track. 8. In the Finder, locate the file you saved, and drag it into the new Electric Guitar track.
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9. Choose the Sixties Basic Blues preset and listen to the results. Turn the volume down to about –10 dB so that the snaps blend with the drum loop. 10. Double-click the amp to show the track effects, and turn off Track Reverb. That’s much better! The snaps pop out now and hold their own with the rest of the loop. 11. Delete the muted track with just the snaps. Add the Second Loop
Now you’re going to add a second loop to the mix to create a new beat. This time you’ll use a Real Instrument loop, as follows: 1. In the loop browser, click Beats. Scroll down to Electro Beat 01 and drag it into the timeline to create a new track. 2. Copy the region to measure 4 and then loop the region in measure 1 to fill the intervening measures (Figure 72).
Figure 72: The Electro Beat regions in place.
3. Listen to the loops together. The Electro Beat definitely adds something—but you’re not done yet. 4. In the Edit tab in the Track Info pane, add a Bitcrusher effect and choose the Digitizer preset. Then add a Bass Reduction effect and set the Frequency to 68 Hz.
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The Bitcrusher effect gives the loop an edge while also cutting down the high swirly sound that was there. Bass Reduction just cuts away a bit of the low frequencies so that the two kick drums don’t fight with each other. The final touch is to add a fill at the end of the loop: 1. Move the cycle region so that it just covers measure 4. Solo the Beats track. 2. Turn off Snap to Grid (Control menu) and set the beat ruler to 1/16 Note increments by clicking the Grid button at the right end of the beat ruler and selecting 1/16 Note. Then split regions as follows: a. Select the region in measure 4, zoom way in, and move the playhead right before the blob at beat 4.2 (Figure 73). Choose Edit > Split (Command-T) to split the region at the playhead.
Figure 73: Trimming the drum hits, part 1.
b. Do the same thing right before the next blob, between beats 4.2 and 4.3. Make sure the region under the playhead is selected, or nothing will happen. c. Do the same for the next blob, trimming it right before the little hit near the beginning of beat 4.3. When you’re finished, turn Snap to Grid back on. 3. Move the last part of the region to the beginning of beat 5 to get it out of the way. 4. If we call the remaining regions in measure 4 A, B, and C, respectively, copy and arrange them as follows: A, B, C, B, C. 5. Crop a sixteenth note off the end of the last region (Figure 74). A sixteenth note is one tick mark on the beat ruler. 115
Figure 74: Trimming the drum hits, part 2.
6. Copy region A to the end of the loop, and then crop it at the end of the cycle region (Figure 75). Delete the remaining region you dragged out of the way earlier.
Figure 75: The final Electro Beat fill.
Listen to your handiwork. You now have a nifty fill at the end of the loop. Make the Loops Work Together
Unsolo the Beats track and listen to measure 4 with all the tracks playing. The toms in the main drum loop kind of overpower the new fill you just made. Here’s how to fix that: 1. Double-click the top drum loop to open it in the Piano Roll editor. 2. Zoom in on measure 4 and set the grid in the Piano Roll editor to 1/16 Note. A sixteenth note is one quarter of a beat (which is one quarter of a standard four-beat measure). That’s the resolution of the smallest notes in this beat, so setting the grid to this resolution gives us an appropriate grid to snap to when moving notes. 3. Locate the five evenly spaced notes at the very end of the region. Delete the first two notes and the last note. 4. Move what is now the last note 1/16 note to the left. The two tom hits should now be right next to each other (Figure 76).
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Figure 76: The adjusted tom fill.
5. Scroll down in the Piano Roll, and copy the last kick drum hit. Place it three sixteenth notes before the end of the region (Figure 77).
Figure 77: Adding an extra kick drum hit.
Now the two loops reinforce rather than fight with each other. When you’re combining loops like this, it’s important to make sure they’re not playing competing rhythms or you risk of confusing the groove. They don’t need to play exactly the same thing—that would defeat the purpose of combining them—but they should be complimentary. You’re done with the drums. Now on to the rest of the instruments!
Add Some Synths Since you’re working on a pretty electronic groove, synthesizers are a logical choice. Add some as follows: 1. Open the loop browser, choose Synths, and drag Chordal Synth Pattern 09 into the timeline. 117
2. Copy it three times to fill the four measures. Don’t loop it with the loop pointer—you’ll see why in a moment. 3. From the pop-up menu at the top of the second region, choose Chordal Synth Pattern 10 (Figure 78). Do the same for the last region. Now measures 1 and 3 should be Chordal Synth Pattern 09 and measures 2 and 4 should be Chordal Synth Pattern 10.
Figure 78: Selecting a new synth loop.
4. Listen to what you’ve got. The tune sounds a bit static. It’s got a nice rhythm, but there’s no motion in the chords—so you’ll add some. 5. Double-click the second region to open it in the editor. Select all the notes in measure 2 by doing either of the following: ‣ Click once in the timeline in the editor and choose Edit > Select All. (If you don’t click in the editor, you may end up selecting all the regions in the song!) ‣ Click and drag a marquee around all the notes in the measure. 6. Grab the bottom note at the beginning of the measure and drag it down until the Help tag says “F2, Velocity 99.” Do the same for region 4. This is the same as moving the Pitch slider down to –7, but I wanted to show you a different way of repitching MIDI tracks. (Don’t use the Pitch slider, because you’re going to be working more with these notes later.) 118
7. Give it another listen. It sounds better, but the echo is obscuring the chord changes. 8. Close the Piano Roll editor. Open the Track Info pane, and click the image of the canyon to open the Track Echo controls. 9. Set the Echo Time to 1/16, Echo Repeat to 5%, Repeat Color to 36, Echo Volume to 10%, and Original Volume to 100%. That’s much better! This is a good time to check the master volume to make sure it’s not clipping. If it is, turn down all the tracks a little until you’re peaking in the yellow. Feel free to adjust the relative track levels too. Bring In the Bass
It’s time for some low end. The synth sounds nice, but the bass will help make things interesting: 1. Open the loop browser, click Bass and Electronic, and drag Synthbass Sequence 01 into the timeline. 2. Listen to the tune so far. The bass is undermining the chord changes you just added, and you can fix this the same way. 3. Make sure Snap to Grid is on, and use the Split command (Edit > Split, or Command-T) to chop the region up into four measures. 4. Just as earlier, move the pitch in measures 2 and 4 down to –7. 5. Listen again. It’s much better, but it feels as if there are too many notes in the bass part. The bass is stuttering when the rest of the track has a more relaxed groove. 6. Double-click the first region to open it in the Piano Roll editor. 7. Set the beat ruler to 1/32, and then set the cycle region so that it cycles only the first measure. 8. Delete the first two notes, and then move the next note to the beginning of measure 1. Extend it so that it’s 1/32 away from the following note. 9. Delete the last three notes, and then extend the new last note so that it’s six 32nds long (Figure 79).
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Figure 79: Editing the bass, part 1.
10. Move the cycle region so that it encompasses measure 2, and follow Step 8 for the beginning of this measure. 11. Delete the last and third-to-last notes in the measure, and make the remaining two notes at the end of the measure three 32nds long (Figure 80).
Figure 80: Editing the bass, part 2.
12. Close the Piano Roll editor. 13. Delete the regions in measures 3 and 4, and then copy measures 1 and 2 there instead. That’s it for the bass line. Now you have one more loop to add and you’re done.
Get Melodic There are a lot of synthesized and electronic sounds in this piece, so let’s balance that out with something acoustic. I’m a sucker for banjo in funky music (probably because my dad is from Georgia), so that’s what I’m going to use: 1. In the loop browser, choose Guitars and Country and drag Rural Banjo 04 into the timeline. 120
2. Copy it once to fill the four measures. (Again, don’t loop it with the loop pointer.) 3. In the Browse tab in the Track Info pane, select Effects and then Telephone Lines. Listen to the song. It sounds neat, but listen carefully to measures 2 and 4. There’s something weird going on there. The problem is that the synth is playing a minor chord and the banjo melody is major. The two tonalities are clashing. I like the banjo part, so let’s fix the synth part: 1. Double-click measure 2 of the Synths track to open it in the Piano Roll editor. 2. Drag a marquee around the second note from the bottom to select all the G# notes (Figure 81).
Figure 81: Selecting all the G# notes in the synth chord.
3. Move the selected notes up a half step, so that the Help tag reads “A2.” 4. Select all the C# notes in the measure (the third row of notes from the bottom), and move them up five half steps to F3. 5. Follow Steps 1 through 4 for measure 4. Now listen. It’s much better! It’s important to listen carefully when you’re combining loops, to make sure you don’t have any odd clashes like this. The banjo part is cool, but it’s repeating the same two-measure phrase over and over. I’d like to make it into a four-measure phrase. You can 121
do that by cutting off the last few picked notes to give the phrase the equivalent of a period at the end of a sentence: 1. Solo the Banjo track, and shorten the cycle region so that it covers only measure 4. 2. Turn off Snap to Grid, and crop out the last beat and a half for measure 4. The last note in the phrase should be the one that starts in measure 3. Listen to the phrase. It sounds good, but the last note is a bit clipped. I’d like it to be longer. GarageBand ’11 has a new feature called Flex Time that lets you shorten and lengthen notes in time. It’s designed to help you correct timing errors, but you can also use it to extend notes in loops to change phrasing. Here’s how: 1. Extend the region a little so that it now ends on beat 4 of measure 4. The part you previously cropped will reappear. That’s OK for now. 2. Double-click the region to open it in the track editor. 3. Find the long note at measure 3. Click in the upper part of the region and drag to the right a couple of tick marks. The note should have a light blue outline, and it should get longer and squash the next note (Figure 82).
Figure 82: Using Flex Time on the banjo. Tip: For a detailed discussion of Flex Time, see my book Take
Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11. 122
4. Leave the track editor open, but crop the region in the timeline so the note you just extended is again the last note in the phrase. Make sure it ends at the end of the narrowest part of the waveform. You can use the zoomed-in view in the track editor to help guide you. Play the resulting track. The last note should now sound much more natural. In some cases when cropping loops like this, you might need to add a small fade at the end of the note to smooth out any glitches, but since there are so many effects on this track it should sound fine without it. Close the track editor and extend the cycle region to its full four measures. Listen to the complete piece and enjoy your handiwork!
Finish Up As you listen to your complete mix, adjust levels so that all the instruments sound balanced. Pan the synth to the right +8 and the banjo left –6 to give the song more of a stereo image. In general, this mix sounds good. One thing I’d recommend is to add Bass Reduction on any tracks that don’t really need bass frequencies. In particular, the snaps and the synth tracks could both use it. Try 180 Hz on the snaps and 290 Hz on the synth. This helps to remove muddiness and leaves a lot more room for the bass and the kick drum. Finally, open the Track Info pane and click the Master Track tab at the top. Enable the Compressor and set it to Club Basic—this adds punch and body to the mix. Unfortunately, you can’t adjust the controls of the master compressor, but Apple gives you a lot of presets to try out. You’re done! Listen to my final mix here: loopalicious.mp3, and download the project file here: Loopalicious.zip. This piece could easily be extended for a minute or two by bringing in elements slowly and building to the final mix. If you’re so inclined, play with the arrangement and see if you can come up with something you like.
Force a Loop to Keep Its Original Tempo Normally when you drag a loop into the timeline, GarageBand automatically converts it to the tempo of the song you’re working on. There may be times, however, when you don’t want GarageBand 123
to do this—usually for something that has no real tempo, like a sound effect, but possibly also to create a special effect such as a weird synth drone playing oddly in the background, or a stuttering drum part to accent an important moment in a song. This is an easy effect to achieve: 1. Find the loop that you want to use in the loop browser and drag it into the timeline. 2. Double-click the new region to open the track editor. 3. Deselect Follow Tempo & Pitch. It’s that simple! Keep in mind that you can get the loop to play only in its original tempo, not in any tempo you want. Fiddling with Loop Tempo To get a loop to play at something other than its original tempo (or the tempo of the current song), you need to do some more fiddling. One way to do this is as follows: 1. Figure out what tempo you want the loop to play at (or make an educated guess). 2. Open a new project and set the tempo to the one you decided on in Step 1. Make sure you set the key to the same key as your original song. 3. Drag the chosen loop from the loop browser into the new song. 4. Drag the end-of-project marker as close to the end of the loop as you can. GarageBand doesn’t allow a song to be shorter than seven measures, so you may have some blank space at the end. 5. Choose Share > Export Song to Disk. Deselect Compress and click Export. 6. Save the song with a meaningful title, like Folk Mandolin 110 bpm.
7. Open the original song and drag the saved file back into the GarageBand timeline. Notice that it’s orange and it no longer matches the song’s tempo.
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Use Loops from Other Sources
GarageBand users have a universe of loops available to them: Apple sells five sets of Jam Packs specifically for GarageBand users, and there are a number of third-party loop vendors as well. Here are some ideas and recommendations. Importing Songs from iTunes You can also use the iLife Media Browser (via the Media Browser button in the lower-right corner of the GarageBand window) to import songs from iTunes. But be careful when you do this. Using someone else’s copyrighted material is a no-no unless you get permission from the copyright holder. Unless you’re making something purely for your own entertainment and don’t plan to distribute it in any way, I don’t recommend using other artists’ recordings in your compositions. If there’s a part of a song that you absolutely must use in your piece, talk to a lawyer or contact the record label. You never know; they just might let you use it for free.
Apple Jam Packs Apple Jam Packs are sets of loops and Software Instruments designed to enhance the basic loops that come with GarageBand. At the time of this writing, these five Jam Packs are available: • Remix Tools: Aimed at electronic and dance music creators, this Jam Pack contains beats and loops in a wide variety of popular electronic styles, including two-step, breaks, drum and bass, downtempo, hip-hop, house, techno, and trance. Remix Tools also contains many drum and instrumental loops, including bass, guitar, keyboards, horns, and even a few vocals. If electronica is your thing, Remix Tools provides more than 2,200 loops to get you started right. It also offers a variety of Software Instruments and drum kits so you can create your own dance grooves. • Rhythm Section: If you’re looking for more natural-sounding rock, blues, and jazz drums, Rhythm Section might be your thing. It includes drum loops in lots of different styles, with many variations and fills to punch up your tunes. The collection also contains
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instrumental loops—basses, guitars, and even steel drums—and you get dozens of playable instruments as well. • Symphony Orchestra: This collection is chock full of orchestral instruments and loops, for those of you who are into classical and film music. It contains a number of full pieces of music, broken up into individual instruments and sections that you can customize for your projects. You can mix and match loops or write your own parts; the entire orchestra is here for you to play with. • Voices: Not a singer, but need some vocals in your song? The Voices Jam Pack features a variety of singers belting out melodies, background vocals, and improvised lines, all ready to be dropped into your GarageBand masterpieces. Many of the recordings feel a little too Top 40 for my taste, but the singers are great. This Jam Pack also comes with some vocal Software Instruments for you to use—choirs, human beat boxes, and a few solo voices. • World Music: For the more exotically inclined, World Music contains more than 2,500 loops from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. Whether you’re looking for balalaika, didgeridoo, gamelan, or sitar, you’ll find it here. The collection also includes a bunch of playable Software Instruments to help you write your own global soundtrack.
Third-Party Loops Other companies besides Apple make GarageBand-compatible loop sets. The sets vary widely in price, but many of them are quite affordable—and many are available for instant download. Here are a few to consider: • BandmateLoops features numerous loop sets in quite a few different styles. They seem to slightly favor electronic and dance genres, but there are still some good choices here, definitely worth a look. They also tend to be on the less expensive side. http://www.bandmateloops.com/ • Big Fish Audio offers hundreds of loop collections in dozens of styles, including reggae, country, techno, and straight-ahead rock. http://www.bigfishaudio.com/ • Drums On Demand, as you might imagine, has lots of drum loops. The recordings are top-notch, and they come in song sets, with various verse, chorus, intro, and fill loops, all with the same 126
groove and sound. http://www.drumsondemand.com/ • Macloops features several hundred free loops available for download. These loops are sampled from a variety of full-priced packages, and you need to register (and agree to receive a weekly newsletter) in order to download them. But for those on a budget, this is a good way to add more loops to your library. http://www.macloops.com/ • Loopmasters offers numerous loop collections. Like BandmateLoops, they tend to favor electronic and dance styles, but they seem to have a little of everything. http://www.loopmasters.com/ • Platinumloops has lots of loop choices, many at reasonable prices. They seem to favor genres that are less electronic than what other sites offer. http://www.platinumloops.com/ • Prime Loops seems to cater to the electronic and dance communities, but their prices are quite reasonable. They’re well worth a look. http://www.primeloops.com/ • Silicon Beats specializes in drum beats, and they’ve got some good ones. Among the many different styles available are ska, country, and heavy metal. http://www.siliconbeats.com/ Check before you buy! Many of the above sites offer both loops and samples; make sure you’re buying loops if that’s what you’re looking for. Also make sure your loops are in the Apple Loops or GarageBand format. Many of the listed sites offer multiple formats, and making the right choice can be confusing. When in doubt, ask. You can also import Sony ACID loops by dragging them from the Finder into the timeline. Literally thousands of CDs worth of ACID loops are available, and all of them work seamlessly with GarageBand.
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Import MIDI Files
GarageBand easily imports MIDI files. Lots of MIDI files are available online—classical favorites, jazz standards, and rock and pop tunes— and many are free. Two good starting points are: • TheFreeSite.com http://www.thefreesite.com/Free_Sounds/Free_MIDIs/ • Classical Archives http://www.classicalarchives.com/ Many popular music applications can export MIDI files, which you can then import into GarageBand. To import a MIDI file, simply drag it from the Finder into the timeline, to either an existing Software Instrument track or an empty part of the timeline. Nothing could be easier. Some MIDI files (for example, solo piano or guitar pieces) consist of only one track, while others (such as orchestral works) have many tracks. GarageBand is smart enough to place each MIDI track into its own GarageBand track. Some MIDI files import with the correct instruments assigned to each track; however, often the tracks are all imported as piano tracks, and you must select each track and designate an appropriate instrument.
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Create Special Projects
Since GarageBand is available as part of iLife, which also includes applications such as iMovie, iTunes, and iWeb, you’d think there would be a way to create content especially for projects in those other programs—and in fact, there is. GarageBand makes it simple to create ringtones, soundtracks, and podcasts. Here I show you how to open a movie in GarageBand and create a custom score, as well as how to produce your own unique iPhone ringtones. (Podcasting is a bit outside the scope of a book about making music, but fortunately there’s a whole other title devoted to it: check out Andy Affleck’s Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac if you’re interested.)
Score a Video
The easiest way to add your own music to an iMovie video is to create a piece of music in GarageBand and then edit the movie to fit in iMovie; your video will follow the music and the two will sync up nicely. But what if you already have a video that you like and you need to write music to fit? Conveniently, GarageBand allows for that option as well.
Create a Movie Project Take a look at the options you can choose from when you open a new project in GarageBand: the last one is called Movie. Double-click it to create a new Movie project. The GarageBand window that opens looks somewhat different from what you’re used to (Figure 83). In place of the loop browser or Track Info pane, you see the iLife Media Browser, which lets you easily import audio, photos, or movies into GarageBand. The editor is open in the lower left of the window, but it too has a different appearance: instead of the piano roll or the audio track editor, you see an empty list of movie markers. I’ll show you how to use these in a moment.
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Figure 83: The Movie project window.
The first step is to open a movie, which you can do in either of two ways. The simplest way is to open your iMovie project directly in GarageBand. The advantage to this method is that you can easily go back and forth between GarageBand and iMovie and make sure the music syncs up tightly with the video. To use this method, take the following steps: 1. In iMovie, select the project you want to use and choose Share > Media Browser. 2. Select an appropriate size from the options available. The choices depend on the aspect ratio you chose for your project when you created it and on the size of your original footage. Larger sizes aren’t always available. 3. Back in GarageBand, make sure the Movies tab of the Media Browser is open, and select iMovie in the list that appears (if not already selected). 4. Locate your movie project, and drag it to the movie track in the timeline.
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The alternative method, if you’ve already exported your movie to QuickTime or iTunes, is to locate it in the Movies tab of the Media Browser; then select either Movies or iTunes in the list, locate your movie, and drag it to the timeline. (You’ll notice that there are two other tabs in the Media Browser: Audio and Photos. These link to your iTunes and iPhoto libraries. For our purposes, though, we’re concerned only with the Movies tab.) I don’t see my movie! In order for you to use a movie in GarageBand, it must be in either your ~/Movies folder or your iTunes library and must be an iMovie project or other QuickTime-compatible video file—no WMV or AVI files allowed. You’ll see a progress bar while GarageBand processes the movie and creates thumbnails for it; the resulting movie track appears in the timeline. If the movie has audio, GarageBand also creates an audio track (Movie Sound), which appears below the movie track. Note: If your movie has no audio (or contains audio in an
incompatible format), you’ll see a warning telling you that the movie doesn’t contain audio that GarageBand can play.
That’s all there is to it. Your movie is now a part of your GarageBand project. Adding and Deleting Movie Tracks Similar to the master track, every GarageBand project has a hidden movie track, even if you’re not using it. You can turn any GarageBand project into a movie project by choosing Track > Show Movie Track (Command-Option-B). To replace a movie in a movie track, drag the new movie onto the movie track; GarageBand will ask if you want to replace the existing movie with the new one. If you want to completely remove a movie from your project, select the movie track and choose Track > Delete (Command-Delete).
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Drop In Some Music If you’ve been following all the tutorials in this book, you’ve already created several different pieces of music. For this project we’re going to take a slightly different, and much simpler, tack. 1. Close the track editor and open the loop browser (using the same buttons as when working on other projects earlier). 2. In the loop browser, near the upper left, click the podcast sounds view button, which shows the sound effect and jingle loops commonly used in podcast projects. 3. In the loop browser, on the left, click Jingles, and then choose a genre on the right (or, for all the available jingles, choose All Effects on the right). Jingles are complete, prerecorded pieces that you can use in your movies, podcasts, and other projects. Since they’re finished tunes, they won’t be nearly as original as something you create yourself, but sometimes you need a piece you can quickly drop into a project. Notice that some jingles come in a variety of lengths, which is quite handy. 4. Pick a jingle that’s appropriate for your movie, and drag it into the timeline. 5. Click Play to see if the combination works. If your movie has audio (and especially if it’s important dialogue or a voiceover), you may need to turn the jingle volume way down, using the volume slider in the track header. You’ll see a tiny preview of the movie in the Movie Track header. If you want to see a bigger preview, double-click the preview to open it in a larger floating window (Figure 84).
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Figure 84: The movie preview in a larger floating window. Note: If your jingle isn’t exactly the right length, you can raise
or lower the tempo to accommodate the movie. Just doubleclick the jingle region to open the editor, and check Follow Tempo & Pitch. Then you’re free to raise or lower the project tempo, and the jingle will speed up or slow down to match.
Add Movie Markers Markers are a great way to flag specific points in a movie. These may be places where you want the music to change or react to the picture (called “hit points” in film scoring lingo), or where you want to add chapter markers (which let you use the Next button to skip to the next chapter when you view a movie in iDVD or iTunes). Either way, adding markers is a cinch: 1. If the editor is not visible, open it by double-clicking a thumbnail in the movie track. 2. In the timeline, position the playhead at the spot in the film where you want to add a marker. The easiest way is to click in the beat ruler close to where you want a marker and use the arrow keys to navigate to the exact spot.
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3. Click the Add Marker button at the bottom of the editor, or press the P key (Figure 85). A marker appears in the editor’s marker list.
Figure 85: Click the Add Marker button to create a marker.
By default, GarageBand considers the newly added marker to be a chapter marker, as evidenced by the selection of the Marks a Chapter checkbox (and by the yellow diamond before the number in the Time column). If you don’t need this functionality, you can turn it off by unchecking the checkbox; otherwise, you can change the title of the marker in the Chapter Title column. (You can change the title even when the checkbox isn’t marked; GarageBand will then assume it’s a chapter marker and check the box again.) To go to a specific marker in the movie, you can double-click its image frame in the Still Frame column. To delete a marker, simply select it by clicking its still frame and press Delete. Note: If you change the project tempo as noted earlier, your
markers will move relative to the movie.
For instructions on exporting your movie with its new soundtrack and marker, see Export Your Movie. 134
Fashion a Ringtone
GarageBand (as of version 4.1.1) allows you to turn any project into an iPhone ringtone, which is quite cool and also extremely easy. You must be running iTunes 7.5 or later and iPhone software 1.1.2 or later, including iOS 3 and 4. GarageBand ’09 and later give you the option of creating specific ringtone projects. Close the current project (or choose File > New), and click iPhone Ringtone on the left. You get three choices on the right— Example Ringtone, Loops, and Voice—each of which gets you started with a short file and some tracks already set up. But using something Apple’s already made for you doesn’t teach you how to do it yourself, so I’m going to walk you through creating your own ringtone from scratch.
Write a Simple Tune First you need a song that you can turn into a ringtone. Since I’m focusing on loop-based projects in this book, let’s create a new loop project: 1. Open a new project, choosing Loops in the dialog. Name the project Ringtone, and set the tempo to 130 bpm. 2. In the loop browser, click World and Strings and listen to Nordic Keyed Fiddle 01. It sounds as if it would make a good ringtone, so drag it into the timeline. Clicking sounds: There’s some odd clicking in the Nordic Keyed Fiddle loop that sounds like a child tap dancing in the background. It’s actually the keys of the fiddle. The keyed fiddle, or nyckelharpa, is similar to a hurdy gurdy and uses keys instead of the player’s fingers to fret notes and play different pitches. 3. Turn off the metronome and enable the cycle region. Extend the cycle region one additional measure, so that it’s five measures long. You’ll see why shortly. Listen to the ringtone so far. It sounds pretty good, except the last note is too short. Remember how you fixed that in our advanced loop project? You’re going to do something similar now, except this time the process is more involved. 135
You need more space at the end of the region to extend the last note. But since this is an Apple loop, if you try to extend the region it doesn’t work. Here’s how to fix that: 1. You’ve already created extra space in your cycle region, so choose Share > Export Song to Disk and make sure Compress is unchecked. Choose a name and a location and click Export. 2. Delete the Nordic Keyed Fiddle region in the timeline. 3. Locate the file you just exported in the Finder and drag it into the timeline on the Strings track. Notice that it’s now orange and has an extra measure at the end. 4. Double-click the region to open the track editor. 5. Move the pointer to the end of the last note and click. 6. In the dialog that comes up, select the Follow Tempo and Pitch checkbox in order to use the Flex Time feature. 7. Make sure you’re zoomed out a little less than halfway in the track editor. Click above the very end of the last note again and drag to the right about two beats (to the middle of measure 5). 8. Click just before the outlined section of the waveform, and drag to the beginning of measure 5 (Figure 86).
Figure 86: Extending the end of the nyckelharpa.
Listen to the results. Notice that I didn’t have you alter the very beginning of the note; that would alter the attack of the note and make 136
it sound unnatural. Instead, you just stretched the sustained portion of the note, which responds more realistically to being stretched. The note still fades rather quickly, though, so add a fade at the end: 1. Close the track editor. 2. Click the triangle in the track header to show the automation curves. 3. Make sure the Track Volume curve is selected and turn it on. 4. Click the volume curve one beat after measure 5 to add a control point. 5. Add another control point at the end of the last note, and drag it down to about –11 dB. Fading the note all the way out sounds unrealistic; giving it a small fadeout sounds more natural. 6. Add another point at measure 5, and make a slight fade at the beginning of the last note (Figure 87).
Figure 87: Fading the last note gradually so that it sounds more realistic.
Add Some Strings Listen to your ringtone now. It sounds much more complete than it did before, but it’s still lacking something. You can add some low strings to give it a little weight, as follows: 1. Add a new Software Instrument track. 2. In the Browse tab in the Track Info pane, choose Strings and then Orchestral Strings. Hide the Track Info pane. 3. Command-click at measure 3 in the new track to create a new region. Extend it to the end of your cycle region. 137
4. Double-click the region to open the Piano Roll editor.
5. Add a note at C1 at the beginning of measure 3, and extend it to one tick before measure 4. Do the same at measure 4 and extend it to one beat before the end of measure 5. 6. Take a listen. Ah, bass! But it still feels like it needs more weight at the end. 7. Copy the last note an octave down. 8. Click the higher note, and increase its velocity to about 90. That’s better! Add a little reverb and you’re done: 1. Open the Track Info pane for the Orchestral Strings track. 2. There already is some Master Reverb applied, but crank it up more, to about 50%. Orchestral instruments are one of the few things that benefit from a lot of reverb, since we’re used to hearing them that way. 3. Click Master Track in the Track Info pane. 4. Change the Reverb preset to Large Hall. 5. Open the Track Info pane for the keyed fiddle. Give it a little bit of Master Reverb as well, to help it blend with the orchestra. About 12% should be good. Listen to your handiwork, making sure to check the master level for clipping. My ringtone is in fact clipping a little. Here’s a new way to fix that: 1. Open the Master Track info pane. 2. Click the empty effects slot and select AUPeakLimiter. 3. Leave the attack and release times where they are and set the pregain to 2 dB. 4. Option-click the master level slider to reset it to its default position. Give it a listen. There’s no more clipping—and if you compare this with the version without limiting, it’s louder. This is what limiters do: they let you make your tracks louder while clamping down on any excessive peaks to keep them from clipping. 138
Still clipping? If your levels are still clipping, you may need to lower the master level a bit. Remember, you can use the Shift key to make finer adjustments. A Helpful Workaround I wish GarageBand would let you reorder the master effects chain (or give you another empty slot at the end). In Logic Pro, GarageBand’s more professional big brother, I always stick a limiter at the end of my master effects chain so that I can make my tracks loud without overloading. (This also works in Logic Express, the more limited version of Logic Pro.) The master compressor in GarageBand is nice, but without a limiter after it, it’s too easy to overload the master bus. The only solution is to export your tracks at a lower level and then open your mix in a program like Audacity and apply limiting there to bring up the volume. I cover this in Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11.
You’re done with your first ringtone! Listen to my version here: nyckelharpa.mp3, and download the project file here: Nyckelharpa.zip. You can augment it to your heart’s content, but for now it’s time to export it. See Send a Ringtone to Your Phone for instructions.
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Share Your Project
The final step for any project is to export it so that you can listen to it in something other than GarageBand. GarageBand has a lot of export options, and figuring out which one to choose can be confusing. In this chapter I’ll walk you through the options and help you get your music out to your adoring public.
Export Your Song
You’ve finished your masterpiece and you’re ready to share it with the world. If you want to put it on your iPod or use it in another iLife application, your best bet might be to send it to iTunes. Alternatively, you might want a CD to listen to at home or in your car. On the other hand, if you’re using your song on the Web or in a non-Apple application, you might be better off if you Save Your Song to Your Hard Disk. I cover all your choices here.
Send Your Song to iTunes Here’s how to send a song to iTunes: 1. Choose Share > Send Song to iTunes. 2. Enter the name of an iTunes playlist and, if you like, change your artist and album information. 3. Choose whether you want your file compressed or not (see To Compress or Not to Compress, ahead). If so, leave the Compress checkbox selected and then choose a compression scheme and audio setting; if not, deselect the Compress checkbox. 4. Click Share. When GarageBand finishes processing your song, iTunes launches and the song starts playing.
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To Compress or Not to Compress? Compressing your song as an MP3 or AAC file will make it much smaller (typically about 1/10 the size of a CD-quality AIFF file). With this size decrease comes some quality loss as well; however, at the higher quality settings you may barely notice the difference between compressed and uncompressed. The consensus is that AACs sound better than MP3s at the same file size. Nevertheless, MP3 is still the de facto standard, so if you’re putting the file up on the Web and you want to make sure everyone can listen to it, stick with MP3. Tip: To find the original file that GarageBand created, Control-
click the song title in iTunes and choose Show in Finder; iTunes will open the folder that contains the original AIFF file. All your other GarageBand songs should be in there as well.
Burn Your Song to CD If you want only the one song you’re working on to go on a CD and you want it fast, GarageBand can accommodate you. You can easily go straight to CD from GarageBand: 1. Choose Share > Burn Song to CD. 2. Insert a blank CD in your CD drive. 3. If you have a couple of extra seconds, click the triangle in the corner of the Burn dialog to set a few options (burn speed, whether you want the CD verified after burning, and whether you want to eject or mount it when it’s done). 4. Click the Burn button. GarageBand shows a progress bar while it exports your song and copies it to the CD.
Save Your Song to Your Hard Disk If you’d rather not go through iTunes, you can export your song to your hard disk. This is an all-purpose option, so if you’re not sure what you want to do with your song, this may be the choice for you. You can always import it into iTunes or burn it to a CD later if you select this route. 141
Here’s how to export your song to your hard disk: 1. Choose Share > Export Song to Disk. 2. Choose whether you want a compressed file (MP3 or AAC) or an uncompressed one (CD-quality AIFF). If you chose a compressed file, choose a compression scheme and audio setting. 3. Click Export, navigate to the folder on your hard disk where you’d like to save the file, and then click Save. GarageBand shows a progress bar during the export process and saves the file to your disk.
Export Your Movie
When you’re working with a Movie project (see Score a Video), most of the options in the Share menu refer to “Movie” rather than “Song.” Here I explain the common options for exporting a movie. Show the movie track! Exporting your project as a movie requires the movie track to be visible; if it’s not, choose Track > Show Movie Track. (If you want to export only the music from your movie project, hide the movie track before exporting.)
Send Your Movie to iTunes Sending your movie to iTunes is great if you want to export the movie to your iPod or iPhone, or watch it on your Apple TV. Do the following: 1. Choose Share > Send Movie to iTunes. 2. Change the playlist, artist, composer, and album details if they’re not to your liking. 3. Chose an appropriate option from the Video Settings pop-up menu. The Email option produces the lowest quality and the smallest file; as you’d expect, Full Quality produces the highest quality and largest file. 4. Click Share.
Your movie opens in iTunes and begins playing.
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Open Your Movie in iDVD If you’re ready to burn your movie to a playable DVD, sending it to iDVD may be your preferred choice: just choose Share > Send Movie to iDVD. The movie immediately begins exporting. (There are no compression options, since iDVD requires a specific quality and resolution for proper DVD playback.) iDVD opens a new project containing your movie. You can then choose a theme and set up your menus as you normally do in iDVD.
Save Your Movie to Your Hard Disk Exporting your movie to your hard disk is the method to choose if you’d rather not go through the other iLife applications. Do this: 1. Choose Share > Export Movie to Disk. 2. Choose an appropriate option from the Video Settings pop-up menu (from the lowest-quality option, Email, to the highest, Full Quality). 3. Click Export, navigate to the folder on your hard drive where you’d like to store your movie, and then click the Save button. 4. GarageBand shows you a progress bar while it exports the movie.
Send a Ringtone to Your Phone
If you’ve constructed a ringtone, you have only one choice for exporting it: choose Share > Send Ringtone to iTunes. iTunes opens and plays your new ringtone. Notice that the ringtone is stored in your iTunes Library in the Ringtones category. The next time you attach your iPhone to your Mac, you can select the iPhone in the iTunes sidebar and then configure copying the ringtone to the phone through the Ringtones pane in iTunes. Once you’ve synced the ringtone to your iPhone, in the Settings app on the iPhone, tap Settings > Sounds > Ringtone. Any ringtones you’ve created will be at the top, in the Custom category.
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Ringtones for Other Phones You can also use GarageBand to create ringtones for other phones. For smartphones like the BlackBerry or Android phone, the easiest method is to follow the earlier instructions in Save Your Song to Your Hard Disk (turning on compression and saving the ringtone as an MP3). Then attach your phone to your Mac using whatever method you normally use to sync your phone, and copy the ringtone file onto your phone. The exact location varies depending on the type of phone you have, but lots of tutorials are available online; in Google, search for “GarageBand ringtones for” followed by your type of phone (for example, “GarageBand ringtones for BlackBerry”). If you don’t have a smartphone, you may still be able to get GarageBand ringtones to work. Again export your ringtone to your hard disk as an MP3, but then send it as an email attachment to your phone number. You must format the outgoing email address in a particular way for it to work with MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service); check with your carrier for details. Once the audio is in your phone, it’s usually possible to save it as a ringtone. You may need to check your phone’s manual for specific instructions.
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Learn More
For more information, consult these Web sites, books, and videos.
Web Sites
Apple’s GarageBand Discussion Board: One of the best sources for GarageBand information, tips, and answers. The archives are extensive and extremely useful. I learned a lot from the forum when I started using GarageBand. No question is too tricky, too unusual, or too stupid, and users are for the most part helpful and courteous. http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=127 The Garage Door: Hosted in part by Hangtime, a man familiar to anyone who frequents Apple’s GarageBand discussion board. The site is full of tutorials and resources for GarageBand users, including news about free loops and links to other GarageBand-related sites. http://www.thegaragedoor.com/ MacJams.com: One of several sites where GarageBanders can post songs and share tips and tricks. They have forums, articles, a buyer’s guide, and a resource library, but their main strength is the huge library of user-contributed songs. http://www.macjams.com/ MacIDOL.com: Another place to hear unique GarageBand compositions. Songs are rated by total number of plays, so popular songs rise to the top. See if you can be number 1! http://www.macidol.com/ iCompositions: Another site for sharing tunes. http://www.icompositions.com/
Books
GarageBand ’11 Power!: The Comprehensive Recording and Podcasting Guide, by Todd Howard, published by Course Technology PTR. Due to be published on April 21, 2011, this book promises to be a detailed guide on getting the most out of GarageBand ’11. 145
Apple Training Series: GarageBand ’11, by Mary Plummer, published by Peachpit Press. Available only as a digital download for Kindle, it’s similar to this book in that it takes a step-by-step approach to teaching GarageBand basics. Harmony and Theory: A Comprehensive Source for All Musicians, by Keith Wyatt and Carl Schroeder, published by Musicians Institute Press. This book features straightforward explanations of chords, scales, basic notation, and more advanced subjects as well. If you enjoyed the theory sections of this Take Control book and want to learn more, Harmony and Theory is a good source. Melody in Songwriting: Tools and Techniques for Writing Hit Songs, by Jack Perricone, published by Berklee Press (Hal Leonard). If your interest lies more in the realm of songwriting, this book has a lot of advice on crafting great melodies and analyzes a number of hit songs to explain why they “work.” Home Recording For Musicians For Dummies, by Jeff Strong, published by For Dummies. An easy-to-use primer on setting up a home studio, recording and editing your music, and distributing your songs. While not geared specifically toward GarageBand users, it’s aimed at beginners and should have plenty of useful tips for newbie GarageBand recordists.
Videos
MacProVideo.com GarageBand Training: MacProVideo offers several GarageBand video tutorials, including an overview (called Core GarageBand ’09 and a Magic GarageBand tutorial, both by J.F. Brisette, and a video specifically covering effects (called DSP Filter Factory), by Paul Garay. http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorials/garageband-application Lynda.com GarageBand ’09 Essential Training: This tutorial, by Damian Allen, is four and a half hours long and gives a good introduction to many of GarageBand’s features. http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=46311
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Appendix A:
Improving Performance
Although its performance has improved in recent versions, it’s not uncommon (especially in larger or more effects-heavy projects) for GarageBand to stop in the middle of playback and greet you with confusing messages like “System Overload” or “Disk Is Too Slow.” If this happens to you, here are some suggestions: • Quit all other programs: Especially quit programs that perform background tasks such as checking for email. GarageBand is greedy; it wants all your computer’s attention. • Turn off FileVault: If you use Apple’s FileVault to encrypt your data, either turn it off or store your song files outside your Home folder. Remember that the Documents and Music folders are in the Home folder, and GarageBand automatically stores song files in the Music folder. • Lock your tracks: Locking tracks greatly reduces the processor drain. When you lock a track, GarageBand renders it to disk, meaning that instead of having to generate instrument sounds and effects on the fly, the program only has to play the rendered track. It’s much easier for your poor little overworked processor. If you see the dreaded red playhead or get system overload messages, you can make the problem go away by locking a couple of tracks. Tip: Software Instruments (the green tracks) are particularly
CPU-hungry, so consider locking those first. The Mac synthesizes the sound on the fly, using software algorithms for the timbre of the instrument and MIDI data for the actual notes played. In Real Instrument tracks, on the other hand, all the Mac needs to do is play back previously recorded audio—much easier on your processor, but potentially more work for your disk.
To lock a track, make sure Show Track Lock is enabled in the Track menu, and click the Lock button in the track’s header. The next time you hit Play, GarageBand makes you wait while it renders the newly 147
locked track (or tracks) to disk, and then it plays the song normally. After you lock a track, you can still change its volume and panning, but to make other changes you must unlock it first. • Reduce the load on your computer’s graphics processor: GarageBand’s beautiful interface comes at a cost; your Mac must render all those beautiful pixels on the fly, while simultaneously crunching all the data needed to create Software Instruments and real-time effects. Try the following to reduce the graphics load: ‣ Reduce the size of the GarageBand window. The less the Mac has to draw, the less work it has to do. ‣ Zoom out so that you can see the whole song. Having to constantly draw the next part of the song as the playhead scrolls requires a lot of computational power. ‣ If all else fails, minimize the GarageBand window by clicking the yellow minimize button in the upper left of the window. That way your Mac doesn’t have to draw anything at all. • Turn off unused effects: Examine your tracks carefully to see if any effects are turned on but set to zero. If so, turn the effect off by deselecting its checkbox. GarageBand uses resources to process active effects even if they’re not affecting the sound at all. Reverb in particular is especially processor-intensive, but it’s a good idea to turn off Echo as well if you’re not using it. • Convert Software Instrument loops to Real Instrument loops: Since GarageBand lets you lock tracks to conserve processing power, this trick isn’t essential, but it still deserves mention. If you hold down the Option key while dragging a Software Instrument loop into an empty part of the timeline, GarageBand converts the loop into a Real Instrument track. You can also drag a Software Instrument track into an existing Real Instrument track and it will automatically be converted. But beware, once a Software Instrument loop has been converted, you can no longer edit the individual notes. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to convert an existing Software Instrument track into a Real Instrument track. Your best bet at this point is to lock the track.
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• Bounce down to fewer tracks: Bouncing down refers to the practice of consolidating a number of tracks to just one or two, originally to free up additional tracks for overdubs (see Bouncing Down to Fewer Tracks, a few paragraphs ahead). With GarageBand, we’re no longer limited by space on the tape but are instead limited by processor power. Bouncing is a bit redundant since GarageBand has track locking, but it’s still a viable technique for large projects. To bounce down a group of tracks, first save a copy of the song, just in case. Then pick a group of instruments—say, all the percussion tracks. Make sure you like the balance among all the instruments in the section; you won’t be able to go back and turn the maracas down once you do this. Mute all the tracks other than the percussion section and choose Share > Export Song to Disk. Locate the song in the Finder and drag this song file back into GarageBand into a new track. Your percussion section will take up only one track, and (if you dare) you can delete all the tracks you used to make it. (To be safer, make a new copy of your project and use your bounced tracks in that the copy; you can go back to the originals if necessary.) Do this as often as you like. You can also use this method to convert a Software Instrument track into a Real Instrument track. In this case you would export only the one track you want to convert and reimport it into GarageBand. It will use up fewer of your precious CPU cycles, but again, you won’t be able to edit the individual notes. Bouncing Down to Fewer Tracks Bouncing down to fewer tracks is a practice that was used often in the early days of multitrack recording. Through most of the 1960s, top-of-the-line recording consoles had only four tracks. A band would record backing instruments—drums, bass, guitars, or keyboards—onto these four tracks, which the recording engineers would then mix onto two tracks on another machine (one for the left channel of a stereo mix, one for the right). This left two open tracks for vocals or additional instruments. This process could be repeated several times, but after a while the sound quality would begin to degrade, much like making a photocopy of a photocopy. With digital recording this degradation is no longer a concern.
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Glossary
In this glossary, you’ll find definitions for a number of GarageBandrelated terms, which may also appear in the text of the book in blue.
AAC: A compressed audio format, designed to be the successor to MP3. It generally has better sound quality than an MP3 of the same size. AAC is Apple’s default file format for iTunes and the iPhone. AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format): A sound file format developed by Apple. Most Macintosh audio software can handle the AIFF format, and AIFF is one of GarageBand’s export options. Expect a GarageBand-exported AIFF file to consume about 10 MB of disk space per minute of song. See MP3. bass: The low frequencies of human hearing (not to be confused with the instrument, which can be acoustic, electric, or even a synthesizer). See midrange, treble. breakdown: Frequently found in dance music, a short interlude in the middle of a song where most of the instruments drop out. chord: Any combination of two or more tones sounded simultaneously. See harmony. clipping: Digital distortion caused when output levels are set too high. Every track, as well as the master output levels, has clipping indicators: red dots that light up when your output goes “into the red.” Clipping is bad, even if you think you can’t hear it. dynamics: Variations in volume in a piece of music. For examples, see Dynamics. effects: Sound-altering devices that are added in the Details section of the Track Info pane. These include reverb, echo, and EQ. For more details, read Mix Your Song. EQ (equalization): A set of filters that lets you balance the bass, midrange, and treble frequencies of a track. It also includes the bass reduction and treble reduction filters, which cut all frequencies above or below a certain adjustable cutoff point. I cover setting EQ in Adjust Equalization, and Set Bass/Treble Reduction. 150
fill: A short musical passage or riff that adds interest between melodic phrases. Drummers in particular often add fills at the ends of phrases and during transitions to new sections of a song. Listen to Ringo’s drum fills in the song “Rain” for some great examples. gain: The amount that volume is turned up or down on a signal. In GarageBand, gain controls can be found in many places, including amp models, the compressor, and the Visual EQ effect. half step: The smallest interval commonly used in Western music; the distance between a black key and the adjacent white keys on the piano (or the distance between two adjacent white keys if there is no black key in between). harmony: The vertical dimension of music; the interaction of notes sounded simultaneously to produce chords. Harmony also refers to the progression of chords over the course of a piece of music. For details and examples, see Harmony. high-hat: A pair of cymbals, one face up and the other face down on a stand, arranged so that the drummer can control the space between them using a pedal. interval: The vertical distance between two pitches. The interval between a white key on the piano and the adjacent black key is called a half step. key: A selection of tones that gravitates toward a root note, or tonic. A song in the key of C is based on the notes of the C scale (all of the white keys on the piano) and naturally gravitates toward C. Keys are commonly divided into major keys, which generally sound happy, and minor keys, which sound more melancholy. level: The volume or loudness of an audio signal. Earlier in this book I walk you through the basics of setting levels. See Set the Volume. loop: A short segment of music that can be repeated seamlessly over time. GarageBand ships with more than 1,000 professionally produced loops. See region. You’ll find lots of loop-related information in Add Loops, and Work with Regions and Loops. major key: A key based on the major scale, whose third note is natural (as opposed to flat). Major keys tend to sound bright and happy. See minor key. 151
measure: A rhythmic unit of organization. Most popular songs have four beats per measure, and in general the snare drum accents the second and fourth beats of the measure (the backbeats). See also What’s a Measure?. melody: A series of notes with a pleasing and recognizable shape. In general, the most effective melodies are relatively simple and are easy to hum. Flip back to Melody, for more info. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface): A digital language used to connect synthesizers, computers, and other electronic instruments. MIDI information includes details about the note played, its velocity (or volume), and any vibrato or pitch bending that was applied. The sidebar About MIDI has more details. midrange: The frequencies between the bass and the treble frequencies. If you want to adjust your midrange, check out Adjust Equalization. minor key: A key based on the minor scale, whose third note is flat. Minor keys tend to sound sadder and darker than major keys. See major key. mix: The full output when all your tracks are blended together; the end result after you’ve finished recording, looping, editing, and mixing your song. mixing: Adjusting the individual track volumes, panning, and effects to make parts of a song fit together harmoniously and effectively. A big chunk of this book looks at mixing; see Mix Your Song. MP3: A compressed audio format. Much smaller than the AIFF format, it typically requires about 1 MB of disk space per minute of song. I look more at audio formats for GarageBand tunes in Send Your Song to iTunes. Mute: The button , found in a track’s header, that lets you temporarily disable a track. note: Any single pitch or tone produced by a musical instrument. octave: The most stable interval in Western music. An octave is the distance between two adjacent notes with the same name. These two notes sound like the same note, only higher or lower versions of each other. 152
pan knob: A knob that lets you control the apparent position of a track between the left and right speakers. For panning basics and a screen shot of the pan knob, see Learn Editing and Mixing Basics. For more advanced considerations, read Pan Your Tracks. region: A contiguous segment of recorded music in a GarageBand track. A cropped segment of a loop is a region, as is a loop that repeats 20 times. See also What’s the Difference between a Loop and a Region?. reverb: An effect that simulates an acoustical environment, such as a small room or a large arena. I discuss setting the reverb in Set Other Effects. rhythm: The beat or pulse of a piece of music, including accented notes, measures, and all other aspects of musical time. Listen to examples in Rhythm. ringtone: A custom ringer on a phone used to indicate an incoming call or text message. Many ringtones today are short snippets of a song or other melody. To learn to make your own, read Fashion a Ringtone. root: The dominant note in a chord or scale; the note from which a chord or scale seems to originate. Also called the tonic. sample: A recorded sound or musical note. Typically, samples are “mapped” to the keys on a keyboard, so they can be played like a piano or a synthesizer. A set of samples of a trombone, for example, could be played on a MIDI keyboard, and the performance would sound as if an actual trombone were playing the notes. scale: A series of notes progressing up or down in a stepwise fashion. The most common used in Western music are the major and minor scales. See key. send: A way to share an effect among many individual tracks. GarageBand has two send effects: Echo and Reverb. When Echo, for example, is engaged and set above zero on several tracks, a portion of the signal from those tracks is sent to the Reverb effect on the master track and all those tracks will exhibit the same echo effect. snare drum: A drum fitted with wires, or snares, on the bottom that produce a crisp, rattling effect when the drum is struck.
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Solo: A button in a track’s header, that lets you listen to an individual track by itself. This is useful for adjusting effects and EQ on a particular track. tempo: The speed at which a piece of music is performed. Ballads have a slow tempo; high-energy dance music often has a fast tempo. texture: The interaction of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements within a piece of music. A solo cello holding long notes is one kind of texture. A jazz band playing complex rhythms and harmonies while a saxophone takes a solo is another, completely different kind of texture. See also Texture. timbre: Tone color. A violin can produce certain musical timbres, whereas those produced by a piano are quite different. An electric guitar can produce lots of different timbres, depending on many factors (including the amplifier, the volume of the sound, and whether effects are being used). Learn more in Timbre. tonic: The dominant note in a chord or scale; the note from which a chord or scale seems to originate. Also called the root. track: In GarageBand, each track usually carries a separate musical instrument; you can independently adjust each track’s volume, pan, and effects without affecting other tracks in the song. treble: The highest frequencies of human hearing. See bass, midrange.
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About This Book
Thank you for purchasing this Take Control book. We hope you find it both useful and enjoyable to read. We welcome your comments at
[email protected].
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You can access extras related to this ebook on the Web. Once you’re on the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can: • Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy a subsequent edition at a discount. • Download various formats, including PDF and—usually—EPUB and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading this ebook on handheld devices at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/device-advice.) • Read postings to the ebook’s blog. These may include new information and tips, as well as links to author interviews. At the top of the blog, you can also see any update plans for the ebook. • Get a discount when you order a print copy of the ebook.
About the Author
Seattle musician and composer Jeff Tolbert writes music for films, advertising, and video games. His latest work includes scores for the films Walk Right In and Modern Views, as well as the video game Faerie Solitaire and numerous other smaller projects. He’s also the president of the Seattle Composers Alliance, a group of Seattle composers working in the field of film and media composition. Jeff plays bass, guitar, keyboards, ukulele, and trombone. He’s a veteran of innumerable home and studio recording sessions, and he’s played in many bands over the years, including Repulsions and Afflictions, Fine Dishware of the Lord, What Fell?, the Goat-Footed Senators, the diary of Anne Frank String Quartet, 80 Bones, the 155
Penelopes, and the Fireproof Beauties. He’s currently playing bass with Tiger Zane and in the James Howard Band. Jeff has been a GarageBand user since its release in 2004. He now mostly uses Logic Pro, GarageBand’s big brother. Hear Jeff’s work and read about his latest projects at http://www.jefftolbert.com/.
Author’s Acknowledgments First and foremost, the author would like to thank his mother. (If he didn’t thank her he would never hear the end of it.) It’s probably also wise to thank his father and his sister. Without Jeff Carlson, this book would never exist. Well, that’s not entirely true, but somebody else would have written it. Jeff is a fine officemate and is the one who introduced the author to Adam and Tonya, the wonderful and intrepid publishers of this and all the other fine books in the Take Control series. Collect them all! A special extra-huge thank you goes to Geoff Duncan, TidBITS technical editor and musician extraordinaire. If not for Geoff, much of the musical information in this book would be incomprehensible or outright incorrect. You rock, dude! The author would also like to thank a few people not named Jeff or variations thereof: Thanks to Victor Gavenda, author of Peachpit Press’s GarageBand Visual QuickStart Guide. After writing the initial draft of my other book, I did a technical review of Victor’s book, and the cross-pollination of ideas made both books better and more complete. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to Carolyn, Margaret, Anna, Tommy, Laura, Victoria, Thom, Stevie—and, of course, John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
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Shameless Plug If you don’t have it already, be sure to get a copy of Take Control of Recording with GarageBand ’11. It covers using GarageBand to record vocals, drums, guitars, MIDI keyboards, and so on.
About the Publisher
Publishers Adam and Tonya Engst have been creating Apple-related content since they started the online newsletter TidBITS, in 1990. In TidBITS, you can find the latest Apple news, plus read reviews, opinions, and more (http://www.tidbits.com/). Adam and Tonya are known in the Apple world as writers, editors, and speakers. They are also parents to Tristan, who thinks ebooks about clipper ships and castles would be cool. Production credits: • Take Control logo: Jeff Tolbert • Cover design: Jon Hersh • Editor: Geoff Duncan • Editor in Chief: Tonya Engst • Publisher: Adam Engst Thanks to Wiley the Dog for keeping us company.
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Copyright and Fine Print
Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand ’11 ISBN: 978-1-61542-133-6 Copyright © 2011, Jeff Tolbert. All rights reserved. TidBITS Publishing Inc. 50 Hickory Road Ithaca, NY 14850 USA http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/ Take Control electronic books help readers regain a measure of control in an oftentimes out-of-control universe. Take Control ebooks also streamline the publication process so that information about quickly changing technical topics can be published while it’s still relevant and accurate. This electronic book doesn’t use copy protection because copy protection makes life harder for everyone. So we ask a favor of our readers. If you want to share your copy of this ebook with a friend, please do so as you would a physical book, meaning that if your friend uses it regularly, he or she should buy a copy. Your support makes it possible for future Take Control ebooks to hit the Internet long before you’d find the same information in a printed book. Plus, if you buy the ebook, you’re entitled to any free updates that become available. Although the author and TidBITS Publishing Inc. have made a reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. The information in this ebook is distributed “As Is,” without warranty of any kind. Neither TidBITS Publishing Inc. nor the author shall be liable to any person or entity for any special, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including without limitation lost revenues or lost profits, that may result (or that are alleged to result) from the use of these materials. In other words, use this information at your own risk. Many of the designations used to distinguish products and services are claimed as trademarks or service marks. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features that appear in this title are assumed to be the property of their respective owners. All product names and services are used in an editorial fashion only, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is meant to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this title. This title is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Because of the nature of this title, it uses terms that are trademarks or registered trademarks of Apple Inc.; to view a complete list of the trademarks and the registered trademarks of Apple Inc., you can visit http:// www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html.
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