How To Mix Vocals In Garageband

Getting your vocals sounding just right can be a daunting task. It’s especially tough if you have no starting pint to work from.

 

 

For a full toutorial on how to do mix vocals in Garageband,  check out The garageband Guide

 

New Features In Garageband X

In this video…

… I look at some of the new features in the latest version of Garageband

 

For more info on Garageband X, check out The Garageband Guide

3 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About The Garageband iOS App

Check out this awesome video showing 3 things you probably didn’t know about the Garageband iOS App:

 

Want to learn more about the  Garageband App? Go to The Garageband Guide!

Free Garageband Loops

Free Garageband Loops

Follow this link to watch the video and find out how to grab yourself over 1GB of free Garageband Loops!

Introducing… The iRig HD

Is It Any Good?

The short answer? YES – VERY GOOD!

The iRig HD delivers on so many levels and replaces the original iRig as THE all in one solution for Garageband loving Guitarists, Bassists and Synth players. Not only that, it improves on it’s less refined sibling’s shortcomings, providing pro quality audio. Throw in a huge amount of free software coupled with an incredibly affordable price tag and it’s fair to say IK Multimedia have set the bar for portable instrument interfaces.

I can’t get enough of the thing…

 

Find out more about the iRig HD Right Here. Check out The Garageband Guide for more awesome Garageband Tutorials.

Create Your Own Loops With Garageband

GarageBand for Mac OS X is a complete recording program for your Mac. It lets musicians connect microphones, guitars, keyboards, and many other instruments for a completely analog recording session. It has MIDI playback as well as MIDI recording abilities as well, allowing just about anyone who has a MIDI capable keyboard to record alongside others who have instruments instruments.

One of the less talked about features,though, is the Loops section. GarageBand comes packaged with lots of pre-recorded MIDI and sampled audio snippets that can be put together in a myriad of different ways.

Without knowing how to play an instrument, anyone can come up with fantastic sounding music with GarageBand, by simply using the pre-packaged Loops.

Sound good?

First off –  bring up the GarageBand Loops browser. Open GarageBand and select a New Project.

If you already have GarageBand open and are in a project, select New Project from the File menu in the toolbar to get to this window.

Select Loops, and then click the Choose button in the right lower corner. You’ll have a chance to name your file (something memorable will help), and put it somewhere where you will be able to easily find it again. (like your desktop)

The familiar GarageBand window will open. This time, the Loop browser will show up in the right hand pane however. Notice the various filter buttons that top this browser pane.

Select a musical style, like Rock/Blues, Jazz, or Classical from the left column, or click the type of instrumentation you prefer in the column on  the right, filtering your list to show only the Loops containing particular instruments, like strings, Piano, Synths, harps, etc.

The two columns to the right are filters for tone and mood, filtering for loops Apple has categorized as Relaxed, Grooving, Melodic, Dissonant, etc.

Click the buttons to filter the list of available GarageBand Loops to your liking. For  example, click on Electronic in the filter list. If you happen to see the Column browser, or the Jingles, Stingers, or Sound Effects browser, click on the little musical notation item in the tab buttons that are at the upper left of the Loops pane.

Select Beats in the second column, and click any of the beats to get a taste of them. Once you’ve chosen one you like, click and drag the Beat’s name to the Track window. A new track will magically appear, and a big green Plus button will pop up. Make sure to drag your loop over to the far left, this way it will start on the first measure.

Drop the beat there. Hover the mouse over the right hand corner of the resulting green rectangle and you’ll bring up the extend cursor; it looks just like a round arrow. Drag the corner, and GarageBand will automatically extend the Loop, with a visual cue as to the beginning and end of each  section.

Next step, in the Filter list, Select Beats to reset the buttons. Click on Synths, rinse and repeat the above process. Mix and match loops as much as you want, making sure to create a new track for each new sound. This’ll help the editing process later.

Once you find a synth track you like, filter to Bass loops, and bring a nice grooving bassline over.

To hear your masterpiece put together, hit the Play triangle at the bottom. You’re also able to set the Cycle/Loop button so GarageBand only plays the section you’ve selected, over and over. That helps get into the groove of your project.

Give it a shot!

Want to learn How To Use Garageband? Go check out The Garageband Guide!

Share Your Garageband Projects!!!

Looking for an easy way to share your Garageband Project?

Look no further!!

This Video explains the process, step by step!

Get more excellent Garageband tips at The Garageband Guide

How To Use Magic garageband

Feel The Magic

 

 

The most recent release of GarageBand – ’11, makes coming up having a song with out ever laying hands an instrument easy – with Magic GarageBand. This can help you through the process to create an great track for YouTube video clips, ringtones, or your personal music.

 

Here’s precisely how!

 

To begin with, open up GarageBand ’11 and select the Magic GarageBand icon in the left panel. There are eight icons on the right, each one representing a musical genre.

To listen to a track, hover over the icon you want to hear and then click the Preview button that shows up.

Once you’ve selected your favourite musical genre, click the chosen icon and go to the stage. GarageBand will show all of the instruments that have been selected for that certain song.

Once it’s all loaded, hit the play in the bottom of the screen to preview the entire song. Initially, you will see that the front most instrument should be the instrument that you are playing, such as a guitar or perhaps a piano.

 

If you’re not playing an instrument, click it and select the ‘No Instrument button’ at the bottom of the panel, so it will be magically disappear.

At this moment, hover over the other instruments around the Garageband stage, and a spotlight will appear on, as well as the the specific name of the instrument.

Choose an instrument and other options for that particular track will appear at the bottom of the window.

As an example, select the drums and all the other readily available drum kit types will be shown. Just click one of them while the track is playing back and you’ll hear the difference it makes to the overall mix.

It may take a couple of moments for the completely new instrument to to drop into your mix, therefore hold your horses until it transpires.

As soon as you have selected which instruments you wish to hear, it’s time to Open in GarageBand.

Click on the button that says this, along with the full Garageband interface is going to be shown. At this moment, you are able to change the panning, volume, effects and anything else you’d typically do in your Garageband projects.

You possibly can drag the track sections around at the top of the panel, as well, by simply clicking the title bar (Verse, Bridge, Ending, et al.) and moving it to where you wish it to go.

You just produced a song in under 10 minutes! Amazing!

 

Click Share in the toolbar and select how you want to send your magnum opus out to the world. Choose a sharing options to get the song from the editing stage to the final stage, regardless of whether you wish to create a ring tone for your iCell phone or burn the song to a compact disk.

Get another awesome Garageband Tutorial soon!