Transcripts
1. Intro: GarageBand iOS is an incredible tool for all musicians because it allows you to create high-quality music worthy of Grammy nominations without tons of equipment, studio space, and extensive music theory knowledge. You're free to just create and having that power is a game changer. Hi everyone, I hope you're doing well. Thank you so much for joining me here for my GarageBand iOS guide. My name is Mike. I am a full-time musician and music instructor from the UK. I've been playing, writing, and producing music for the last 12 years and I also co-run an organization and charity called Time Therapy In Musical Expression. We run music workshops for people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. In this course, I'm going to show you how to use GarageBand iOS to produce incredible pieces of music. This course is going to be for beginners who are completely new to producing and recording music even if you can't play an instrument or use music theory. Together, we're going to go step-by-step through the process of producing a track. We'll start with the anatomy of GarageBand and we'll find our way around the program. We'll look at how we can use virtual instruments to build and write our song. You'll become a master of making beats using sequences and smart drums. We'll explore how to use smart instruments and scales to write chord progressions and melodies, even without any music theory knowledge. You'll learn to record vocals, guitars, and other live instruments. We'll add loops and samples to add interest and bulk out our track, we'll utilize effects like compression, EQ, and reverb. I'll walk you through how to edit, mix our song to make it sound polished and professional. All of that alongside so much more. By the end of this course, you will have an excellent understanding on how to use the program, but also be giving you lots of tips and tricks on writing songs and producing music. I'm even going to be writing a song throughout the course so you can see the exact process that I personally go through to write, record, and produce a track. The only thing you're going to need for this course is your iPhone or your iPad with GarageBand installed and a pair of headphones. No matter who or where you are, you can create incredible pieces of music, and I can't wait to show you how. I'll see you in the course.
2. Class Project: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining me here on my class. I really hope it's useful for you and you take a lot of good information away from this. Just before we get into it, I really quickly want to talk about our class project. By the end of this course, you're going to have a really good understanding on how to use GarageBand to record and produce songs, and I would love to hear what you get up to. So anything you come up with in GarageBand, it could be a cover, it could be just a full bar loop that you really like, it could be a full-blown song, it could even just be a really nice selection of loops and samples that you've put together that you like. Please feel free to send anything like that in. I'll be listening and responding to every single submission sent in and if you'd like to get some feedback and critique, I would love to do that for you. To do this, all you've got to do is upload to SoundCloud or YouTube or anything similar and send it into the class project. On YouTube and SoundCloud, you should be able to create a private link where only the people with that link can listen to the track. So if you choose to, you can just have the people in this class who are able to listen to that track. I think it would just be a really inspirational thing to see what other people have done and get up to, and maybe that will give you the inspiration you need to go and start your track. When we're writing and producing songs, we often listen to the same parts over and over again, sometimes for hours and hours at a time and our ears and our mind become fatigued to that and they start to lose touch with what's going on. That's where someone else's fresh ears and fresh mind and fresh opinion on a track can be so important to help shaping that and pushing it in the right direction. Again, I'd just like to stress that I would love to hear anything you do and I'll be more than happy to act as those fresh air is for you. Thanks, guys. Let's hop on with the next lesson.
3. Gear: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. In this lesson we're going to talk a little bit about gear. Like I said in the intro, you don't need anything to partake in this course apart from your device and some headphones. This is just if you want to upgrade to some higher quality methods of recording, I think quite a few of you will be interested in. I'm going to leave links to some recommended gear down in the Resources tab if you'd like to check that out. First of all, let's talk about the main gear kit we need, and that's our headphones. Why are headphones so important when recording? The first reason we need headphones is to prevent any interference when recording. If you're recording any source of audio with a microphone like your voice or an acoustic guitar, you need to hear the song and hear the clicks so that you known when to play, when you are in time and if it's playing out the speaker, the sound of the song or the click will just come straight back into the microphone and it will just clash and make lots of horrible sounds, so we can't have that. Also, as good as iPhones and iPads are, their speakers are not the best quality, especially for anything music-related. With headphones, you're going to be able to hear what's going on way better and you're just going to be a mix and master to a level that you never would with just the speakers. The optimal headphones are ones like this, any ones that go over the air will be great. Even earbuds like this will be great and they'll be far better than the internal speakers. The next bit of gear I'm going to talk about is an interface. Again, you don't need this, this is only if you want to record using high-quality microphones or you want to plug in a guitar, this is used for that. Our interface works by connecting our microphone or a guitar into the bottom, selecting the gain, and then outputting it to the USB, which goes into our iPads. An alternative of this for guitars is something called an iRig, there is also an amazing [inaudible] if you're interested in recording guitars, definitely check that out too. Next is a microphone. Obviously, if you want to be recording high-quality vocals or acoustic guitars or anything audio-based, you'll need a good microphone to connect into our interface. I highly recommend condenser microphones, they can pretty much do all vocals, guitars, any kind of instrument, they make a great job to recording. MIDI keyboard. The stickers on are from a lesson I was teaching while ago, split them up really. What a MIDI keyboard is going to allow you to do is play our virtual instruments using the keys here. If we don't like playing a keyboard on a screen, we can get one of these, plug them in and play any instrument from our virtual library on GarageBand using the keys and the pads here. If you do have a MIDI keyboard or something else, you may want to consider a sustain pedal. When this is pressed down, it's just going to sustain the nodes that we're playing on our keyboard. Pop filter. Now, this is just going to prevent any nasty air noises. When we are singing, we naturally project our air and that can interfere with the microphone. Having one of this in front of our mouth when we record, is going to make it nice and clean and reduce any of those interfere air noises. Now, if you're using iPad or an iPhone with lightning, and you want to plug in a MIDI keyboard or an interface, you will need one of these. This is a camera adapter. What this is going to do, it's going to power a MIDI keyboard or our interface, because there's not enough power coming out of our iPhone or iPad to power them properly. However, if you're one of the lucky people that has an iPad Pro with the USB-C, you can just use a doc and the power from the USB-C will be enough to power the devices. In that case, all you've got to do is plug in a USB Hub into your iPad and then connect your Midi keyboard or interface by the USB slots on the hub. However, if you do the USB Hub, make sure you get one with a headphone jack so you can plug in your headphones while you're recording. That is our lesson on gear. I'll see you on the next lesson.
4. Anatomy: First, we're going to go through the anatomy of the program. So this is going to be where I show you how the program is laid out, what all the buttons do, and how to work our way around the program. Don't worry if you see something in the program like multi-track recording or quantizing or you hear me mention about key signatures, don't worry about that. I'm going to break all of that down in the course, this is just to give you that overview. Just before we open up the program, I will remind you to update your iOS and update your GarageBand app. If there's any problems or bugs, this should just sort all that out for you. Over to hand CAM, hello hands. I'm going to be using a pencil for this course only to make it really clear what I'm pointing at. You don't need a pencil to work with GarageBand, you can obviously use your fingers. Let's go ahead and open it up. If you've used GarageBand before, you'll probably see a screen like this, and this is just going to be all of your recent projects and songs. Up here on the top left, this is just a way we can shift through our older projects and order them with tags and go for our delete projects or that stuff. Up here, we've got our plus button, that's going to open us up a new project, what we're going to do in just a second. This little grid here, it's just going to enable us to order our older projects. Next is this microphone button, if we click on that, it's going to open up a brand new project with a microphone right there for us. This is great if you've got an idea in your head that you want come out really quickly and get it into the program, you can use that for this. Let's hit into a new project by pressing this plus button. Yeah, once we open a new project, GarageBand can ask us what instrument we'd like to start with? It's going to bring us right over to our instruments selection screen. You can see here we've got loads of different instruments and amps and audio recorders to choose from, we're going against all of these individually throughout the course, and we can also select Live Loops. Now, I'm going to go into this a little bit later because it's a bit more involved, but if you want to get to it, that's where we find it. We can also play and record third-party app. If you've got a cool keyboard app that you want to put into GarageBand, here's where we can do that. We've also got a sound library, once we click on this, it's going to show us loads of different sounds that we can add to our GarageBand libraries. We've got drums and keyboards and loads of cool stuff here if you want to expand that library. Just for now, I'm going to open up a keyboard and I'm going to show you the rest of the program from there. To open up an instrument, you just want to click on it and it's going to open up for you. Let's have a look at what's on this page. Up the top here, we've got this page button, which if we click is going to take us back to our recent projects. These three squares here are going to bring up our instrument panel again, so if you want to swap or bring in an instrument, that's where we do it. This next button is going to be our project view, so once we click on that, it's going to bring us here to our project overview screen. Now, this is going to look really familiar if you've used any recording programs before like GarageBand or Ableton or anything. You can see our keyboard is selected here, and when we record it's going to fill out this space here. You can think of this as a project space. You may have noticed where we've pressed that project view button it's now changed to a keyboard. This button is going to take us back and forth between our project screen, this one and our instrument screen. I've got our keyboard selected, so I'm going to press that button, it's going to bring back up our instrument screen. Let's head back to the project screen. Next are these three sliders, once we click on that, it's going to open up our settings for our selected instrument. We're going to get into all of these later, but this is where you're going to find your effects, your settings, your output, all that stuff. Next is our fx. We're going to go into this later and it can seem a bit confusing because you think fx is where our reverb and our echo and stuff are going to be, but in GarageBand iOS, this is actually like a DJ tool. I'll get again into this later, but it is really cool. Next, this is our Undo button, this arrow here, and we have our media controls. Let's quickly record something. When we're ready to record, we want to go back over to our instrument screen and we're going to hit record, it's going to count us in, and it's going to stop recording. Then when we're finished, we're just going to hit that stop button. You can see it's now green where we've recorded. If we head back to the project screen, you'll see a bit more of what's going on. You can see there our recorded piano has started to fill out this project space. If we play that, you can see this track header is moving through our projects and it's showing you exactly what's being played and where. You can see these white bars are basically the notes that are being played, and they're what we referred to as midi notes because they're being played on a virtual instrument. Let's say I'm happy with that part but I want to record another part afterwards, we can drag our track header anywhere we want. Say if I wanted to start recording from here, I can just drag it straight there, head back to our instrument screen. You can still see our project and header here, which just helps if you want to move that at a later date and say I want to record another beat. Awesome. Let's go back to our project screen, and you can see that it's recorded both parts there unless, say, I didn't like that take. So with our Undo button, we can undo what we last did, but let's say I hit that button by accident, you can hold the Undo button down and it's going to give you an option to redo. Next is our master volume which we can change here. That's actually going to change the volume of the device you're on as well, so keep that in mind. Now, if I can draw your attention down here, we can see another plus button, which if we hit is going to enable us to put a new instrument in. If we want to start layering up those instruments, let's try putting in a drum kit. Let's quickly just record in some drums. Awesome. If we head back to our project screen, you can see that that's been written in there too. You may notice that while we play, there's a click in the background, that is our metronome, and we can turn that on and off right here. You can see it's gray if it's off and blue when it's on. Our metronome is basically a standardized beat that is going to keep our song in time. It's the glue that pulls everything together especially when we start working on a track before we've got any drums or anything to really keep us in time. Massive top tip pair always play along to the metronome. I'm going to show you how to configure it in just a second, but it's basically to make our lives way easier when it comes to editing and configuring our track. Yeah, it's just going to make sure everything's in time, everything is together. So yeah, always play along to the metronome. Next up here is our loops. Basically, what loops are is they're a massive library of different sounds and samples, riffs, drumbeat, it's just about anything you could think of, there's a loop for. You can actually see down here there's over 3,000 loops. These are used for bulking out our song, we can use drum beats from the loops in our song or guitar riffs, we can use them to create cool effects. In fact, there are so many loops in here, you can actually make a whole song just using the loops. I know a lot of people like to do that, but again, we're going to go into that a little bit later. Next are our settings, there's going to be loads of important stuff in here. We've got our metronome and our counting. If you noticed before when we hit record, it gave us a 1, 2, 3, 4 counting, so we can turn that on and off here. We can turn off the visual counting, we can change the sound of the metronome if you'd like. We can change the metronome level down here so if you want it really loud. I often recommend having a rimshot quite really loud, so it's really clear to hear. Next is the tempo. This is just basically the speed of the song, so the higher that number, the fast the song is going to be, and the lower that number, the slower the song's going to be. We can use the arrows if we want to be really specific or we can drag up and down if we want to make more dramatic movements. For example, if I take this down to 60 beats a minute, it really slowed it down. If I take it up, it'll be a bit quicker. What we can also do is use this tap tempo setting. If you'd prefer to vibe and hit that at a soft speed you're looking Sco, it's going to match it to what you've set. Next is our key signature. If you don't know what this is, this is basically like the rhythm of our metronome and the beat of our song overall. The main one really is 4/4 and if you're a beginner, honestly just hit 4/4, it'll probably be the one you want anyway and 4/4 is actually called the common base because it's used basically all the time like, every pop song, every rap song pretty much uses 4/4. It's going to be that 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. If we change that to 3/4, so that's going to be 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Our 6/8 is going to be quite similar to 3/4, but it's going to sound more like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. That sort of thing. I hope you liked that little bit drum kit there. Next is our key signature. Please don't worry about this too much. I know as soon as anything this comes up, it can seem really scary and overwhelming. I'm going to go more into how to use this in our smart instruments and our Scos lesson. But what we use this for is actually making our lives way easier in terms of music theory and knowledge. GarageBand's asking us, what key signature would you like to write in? We would say, I'd like to learn C major please and GarageBand would the say, ''Here's those records that work, here's just scales that work, so you don't need to know how to put them all together.'' That's all going to come together using this follows on key. I do recommend leaving out on for now, but you can always turn it off later date. We have our time ruler. When we have that ticked on, it's going to change our project screen between beats and bars and time, so in seconds and minutes. I recommend leaving this on our beats and bars, so our standard one. But bouncing between that and the Time Ruler is really great. If we want to write to about three minute mark, we can just turn it on to see how long our song's lasting. We have our fade out, because this is just going to automatically fade out our song when that's ticked on. We have our Note Pad, this is just where we can jot down any ideas or any lyrics. Next is jam session, so this is going to be where you can hook up with other people in the room. We've also got GarageBands on their or iPad and you can jam together, which is really cool. In our advanced, we've got multi-track recording and it comes that bit more later, 24-bit audio resolution. This is just going to slightly up the audio quality of our recordings. I don't necessarily that ticked off if you're trying to save space on your device. I'm personally going to tick that on because I want the highest recording quality possible. Run in background, that's just going to let GarageBand run while you use other apps. You can connect your Bluetooth MIDI Devices here and then we're going to send MIDI clock. That's just going to connect up to external media devices if they wanted to share like a BPM and the timing of your song. But I don't think many devices use that, so don't worry about that. Next is this Help button, which is so useful, if you ever get lost in the program or you forget what something does, just click on that and it's going to give you all these helpful little hints and tips and just give you a little description of what each thing does. Next down here, we've got this plus button and that's going to extend our track. If we click on it, it's going to break our song down into sections. We can either extend the one section and write over one big section, which is what I like to do. If you maybe say like 50, it's going to extend that track way out, so you can see we're going to have a longer sun. Or we can just set it to automatic. This is just going to extend the track as we write and record, so we don't even need to think about it. But what we can also do is break down our project into several sections. Let's break this down into little 8 bars. Let's add Section B. In this case, we could have Section A, it could be our verse and then Section B could be our course. When we have it like that, it basically uses one section at a time on the screen. This is really useful, particularly on iPhone. If you're trying to work on a four minute track and you want a bit more room to see what's going on, so what we can do is slide between sections like that. For now I'm going to make this first section about 25 bars. Then if I want to get rid of any of those sections or move them around, I can do that like that. We can also duplicate those sessions. Let's say you want to have a very similar structure from your first verse to your second verse, you can duplicate them and it's going to basically copy and paste with those instruments for you. That's really handy. Next, if we come over here, we can pull out our instrument screen and we've got a couple of different options here. This slider is going to be where we adjust the volume. This button is going to mute the track, so if we want to hear what the song sounds like without that piano, we can do it like that or we can solo and instruments, so just hit that one on its own by hitting this headphone button. This is going to be really useful when you come to mixing and you just want to hear one instrument at a time so you can play around with those effects and just hear what's happening is that instrument alone. We can use that solo bump for that. If we tap on our instrument, we've got some more settings here too. We can delete it, we can duplicate it, so if we want to make an exact copy of that instrument, we can do that, we can rename it, merge and automation will come to a bit later. Showing grids, that's going to be more to do with our Live Loops, I guess that's later. We can also change the icons of what this little picture here looks like. We're nearly there. Let's look at a couple of things we can do with our recorded sound. Once we click on it, we can shorten it down to say if I didn't like those two chords and I wanted it to end, say there, equally I can lengthen it back out. If we tap on our recorded sound, it's going to give up some options here to cut, copy, and delete or we can loop it, so if we've recorded this four-bar drumbeat, and we just want that to carry on throughout the whole verse, we can hit loop and it was going to enable us to loop here for as long as we want, so it's just going to repeat everything in that first bar. It's worth noting whatever we do to this first section that we've chosen to loop, so say if I cut this down, it's also going to cut our loop. Just keep that in mind. We can also split it. Say if I wanted to half this drum section here, I can bring this little scissor button to where I want it split and then I just pull it down. If I move that, you can see they're now two separate sections. So this I can move around or trim it, and this is an independent little file. We can edit it. I'm going to go into this a little bit more later because it's a bit more in depth. We can rename it. If we go into settings, we can also change some of the bits here. But again, I'm going to get into that a bit later. Hopefully, that gives you a bit bear inside into GarageBand and how to work way around it and with that sort of opening scraped seem really intimidating and bands so much going on, but hopefully you've started to break it down there. Next we're going to start building our song with some drums. I'll see you on the next lesson.
5. Virtual Drums: Next we're going to talk about virtual drums. To access the drums, we're going to come and press this "Plus" button, and we're going to find drums here. There's a couple of different options of what drums we can play. This lesson, we're going to go into the acoustic drums, so let's click on that. I'm going to start this song with drums because I feel like that often gives the song a lot of rhythm and direction and after find it results in a slightly more upbeat track. Everyone is different. some people like starting with lyrics. Some people like starting with guitars or melodies. There's no right or wrong answer and it's totally dependent on what song you want to make too. If you're feeling a little bit confused about how to write drums, don't worry because in the next couple of lessons, I'm going to show you how you can input drums without any knowledge of how drums really go together. We can play the drum kit quite intuitively with our fingers. Then if you want to change that drum sound, which click up here. It's going to give us a lot of different options on different drum kits we can use. Let's go for blue bird. Awesome. We can get a lot of different sounds out of our drum kit. This made really clear when we press on our "Help" button and its going to give us a lot of information on how we can alter the way these drums are played. For example, down here on the snare drum, we've actually got three different kinds of snare sounds we can access. We've got our regular snare drum, a side stick, and a rim shot. Also goes from different options on our ride cymbal. We've got our ride and our bell. We've got closed hi-hat, open hi-hat, and our pedal for our hi-hat. You notice up here on the crash cymbal, when we click on that, it's going to play not only the crash, but the bass drum too. But if you want to just play the crash on its own, we can use two fingers, or, if we come into our track settings, go down to Recording, we then have an option to turn that off if we just want to hit the cymbal on its own. It is worth noting on our drum kits as well, if we put two fingers down, it's going to play that drum for us. Now, the further I pull my fingers away, the quicker it's going to become. We could try that with the snare too. Again, the further my finger comes away, it's going to play it quicker. When we're ready, we can just play a beat. Let's hit "Record". Let's get how this would go. Now, we can also change to an electronic drum kit if we'd like. It's going to change up of you a little bit, but the idea is going to be very much the same. You can see here we've got some kicks. We've got a maraca and a snare, and loads of cool stuff here. This works just like the other drum kit, just that we're going to be pressing pads instead of those virtual drums. Let's try writing a beat with this electronic kit instead. What you'll notice with the electric kits is that we've got some options for different effects here. What I love of the virtual instruments that we find in garage-band, they're going to be similar dials for these effects. Now they all do completely different things and if I tried to explain every single one, this course would be so boring and probably be really hard to understand. I often feel like the best way of learning what an effect does is to just turn it all the way up and see how that affects the sound. For example, you can see what that crystal does, low cut. There's a ton different sounds we can make using those effects, but don't get too bogged down in, what does this do? What does that do? I don't know how this works. This is all too confusing. Play with them if you want, and leave them if want. It's all good. We can also go to percussion and we've got some really cool kits here too. How cool is that? Each of these kits works a little bit differently. Again, if we click the "Help" button, we can see exactly how we can alter these drums and how they are played. For example, this gong. I can hit it on its own. It is going to make that lovely resonant sound. Or I can drag my pen to make that swelling sound. Awesome. Another top tip here. If you don't like playing along with the metronome, I know some people find it a little bit unnatural and sometimes you get off putting. If you record a drum kit to that metronome, and as long as it's perfectly in time, you can then leave out that metronome or turn it off if you'd like to. Because what our drum kit is doing, is it's basically taking the role of the metronome, which is to keep us in time and glue everything together. That's pretty much it for our virtual drums. Next, I'm going to tell you about how you can merge and overlap recordings to layer up a load of sounds. Then I'm going to get into the rest of the drum sounds shortly after. I'll see you in the next lesson.
6. Merge/Multi-take Recordings: Next, we're going to talk about overlapping and merging recordings. What does that mean? I hear you ask. Recording virtual instruments in GarageBand is amazing. However, it can be clumsy and hard to get in exactly what you're thinking. For example, if I want to play this drum kit and I want to have a kick, a snare, and a high hat, all going at the same time. As quite involve my fingers and can be really tricky to pull off, and it's the same with piano or the guitar, is hard to do everything at once and record it all perfectly. What we can do is use our merge tool to basically merge together two different recordings into the same track. For example, this drumbeat we programmed in last lesson is great, but I really like to have a high hat on top of there as well. If I click on the track that I want to merge those recordings, here are settings, track settings, recording. We have two options here. We have merged recordings and multi-take recordings. Now, when merge recordings is on, it's going to do that thing that I spoke about a second ago where it layers up and multi-take recordings are going to create new takes every time we record over our previous [inaudible]. Let me show you how that works. I've got merged recordings on. I'm going to come back to our instrument screen. I'm going to go back to the beginning of our track. Hit record, I'm going to put some high hats in. If we come back to our project screen, now you may notice that there's way more MIDI information on here, and that is our high hats, and we added a crash in there as well. You can do this with any virtual instrument in GarageBand. It doesn't work quite the same with audio. For guitars and vocals, that's got to be completely separate tracks. But because this is all virtual based is so in the program, we can layer up those sounds so we can create really complex tracks using this. Now, if I want to change this to multi-track recordings, I have to switch that off first because they can't work both at the same time. I'm going to turn multi-take recordings on if I record. If I come back to our project screen and you can see there that it's rerecord it. But our road take is still there. If we click on here, go to "Takes", you can see that our raw take is still there. This is where if you're recording vocals and you want to do lots of different takes and then pick out the best one later, you can just record over and over again and then select from those takes later, and that is pretty much it. Nice and easy, but super, super powerful for creating lots of different takes, but also to layer up our virtual instrument sounds. I'll catch you guys in the next lesson where we're going to take another look at those drum kits. I'll see you there.
7. Smart Drummer: Next up, we're going to look at another way of inputting drums, and that's really smart drums. Smart drums are really great if you're not too sure about how drums work, or they go together, or you do not know how to create beat yourself, it basically does it for you automatically, but you still have lots of control over the sound and the dynamic of the instrument. We're going to click on this plus button as always, and we're going to go to Smart Drums. Smart drums are really simple. We've got this grid here, and as you can read, we've got quiet, simple, loud, and complex. Now we have different parts of our drums over here, and we can drag them into this grid. Depending on where we placed them, it's going to start making a sound. If you want a more simple and quiet sound, we can drag our kick down here. If you want a more loud and complex sound, you drag it out there. Then if you want to stop that beat, we just turn off with this button here. Let's say we have loads of stuff in, and we get a bit confused, and we're like kind of in a second worries at this, we just click that button down there, and they will go away. It's worth noting that the smart drums are going to work in conjunction with the tempo that we set on our song, so that if you want a faster sounding song, we just need to change that tempo in our settings again. Yeah, we can just get experimenting with some sounds. Cool, that sounds good. If we wanted to change up the drum kit sound, we just go off click over here, and we've got a couple of different drum kit sounds we can choose from. Awesome. If we want to just play around with the load of different beats, we can press this dice looking button down here, and that's going to just randomize where all the drums are placed. We can just try those different random ideas. Then if we come to one that we liked the sound of, we can say just make that kick a bit quieter. Maybe that a little bit quieter and less complex. Yeah, you can still customize it from there. When you're ready to record your kit, you've just got to come up here, click that Record button, and it's going to record it all for you, hands free. There you go, really straightforward way of putting in drums. I'll see you in the next lesson. We'll begin to talk about beat sequences. See you there.
8. Beat Sequencer: Next, we're going to talk about beat Sequencer in GarageBand, another really cool way of making drum beats. Let's bring it up with our instrument selection screen, go into "Beat Sequencer", and it's going to bring up this screen. Then the easiest way to explain this is if I play our track, you can see these white boxes come across the screen. Now, if I start drawing in, it's going to go from left to right and it's going to play those drum sounds I've selected. We got a kick, snare, claps, hi-hats, and some toms. If we come down here, we can actually add some more if you'd like. Let's put Conga in there, that'd be cool. There's tons of possibility with this. You can really get in-depth with what beats you make and exactly how they all go together. Let's, for now, delete these. Let's put some hi-hats in instead, see what that sounds like. What if I want to make a more chill beat? Cool. That sounded nice. This, just like the smart drums, is going to reflect our speed of our songs. That BPM that we spoke about earlier, the tempo of the song is going to just fall perfectly in line with that. We have a couple of different tools down here. We have our step on and off, that's what we use for drawing in our beats. We can select the velocity. This is how hard those drums are being played. Now, if I want to change the velocity, I can just move this line on the box. The lower I have it, and the lower that number, see that number there, the quieter it's going to be played and vice versa. If I take that up, it's going to be played even louder. You can turn on and off the Beat Sequencer using this "ON" button. Let's just have a play around. You can see, with just that velocity alone, we can really give a good bit of feeling to our drum kit so it sounds a bit more varied. Next down here we've got Note Repeat. That's going to allow us to repeat our given notes. If I press here, and then I can drag that up or down, depending on how many more notes I want to add. Then let's play that again. You see how that's played it three times? We can turn that up to eight. But you can make some really cool sounds using that Note Repeat function. Next, we have Chance. This is going to dictate how likely it is that the drumbeat we select is going to play. If we tap on the box, we can make this square in the center smaller or bigger. Hopefully, you better see there, that percentage is how likely that drum is going to be played. Let's use it on the snare instead because it's a bit more obvious. Let's make that 30 percent chance. Hit there, hit there again, hits it there. You can make really varied, interesting beats using that. When using Velocity, Note Repeat, and Chance, if we press for a little bit longer, it actually makes it a bit easier for us to select the exact percentage that we want to go for. We've got our loop, start, and end. If we want to, say, make this half, it's just going to play the snare the same each time. We can do that. We can also slide across this instrument panel and solo and mute some of these tracks. Down here on this "Info" button, we can change the length of this. If we wanted to make it 32 steps rather than just 16, you see we've got this whole new section over here. If you want to make this second section more varied, we can do that. Next, we've got step length. This is basically how fast is or if we want to change it to triplets. Let me show you. If we select 1/8, it's going to be much slower. We run 1/16 before. Then we've got 1/32, which is just going to be crazy fast. Then we can also change it to triplets too. Actually, we like that in 1/8 triplet. Awesome. Here, there's just loads of things to play around with there. I know a lot of people love this Beat Sequence, particularly people who are into trap music and rap and stuff, this is amazing for that. Hey, everyone, Mike from the future here. Mike from the past forgot to explain a couple of things. I'm just here to sort that out for him. No worries, Past Mike. If we come back to this "Info" button, you'll see that there is a playback mode. This is where we can change how those white bars move across the screen. In forward, they look like they did before, or we can go reverse, so they can go from right to left, ping pong, which is back and forth or there's random, which just looks crazy. I don't know how you work with this, but in case you want to use it, that's how you do it. Also here, we have an option to adjust the swing of the beat. This is where we can adjust the looseness of the playing. If I turn the screen off, it's a very straight, tight-sounding beat. But if I change that to some heavy 1/8 swing, it starts to loosen up a bit. But I can change that to light swing if I'd like it a little bit less. You can add a bit more of a human, looser feeling to the drums if you feel like they're a bit robotic and a bit tight. The 1/8 and 1/16 is referring to the closest note you want it to be dragged to, or there's light and heavy swing depending on how intense you want the swing to be. But basically, just choose whatever one sounds best. Okay. Bye. We've got this sort button again. What that's going to do is completely randomize the selection of beats here. You can see it's just totally random and we can go for a ton, have a listen. I find this really useful to just randomize. find a beat that I like the sound of and then I can just tweak it and change it to my liking. Or I press this button here, there's a load of pre-made patterns that we can choose from. You can see here there's tons. Again, we can select one of these, and then we can change it to our liking. Say, if I wanted to get rid of these, make this a bit crazy, and add some more of these in there. I've just put my own little personal touch, as much as it was not very good. If you come up with a pattern that you really like, you can just hit the "Save" button and you can make a custom beat so you can come back to it if you'd like. We can also change the drumbeat that's being played. You can select from acoustic, percussion, and electric. Let's have a listen to a different kit. How cool is that? So many different options there. So much possibility to create amazing beats. Again, even if you're not really sure how drums go together, but then there's so much depth in this that those of you who really like getting the most out of these beat sequences, you've got tons to work with. Then lastly, when we're ready to record, we're just going to hit that "Record" button and it's going to play for us. That is our Beat Sequencer. Next up, I'm going to show you how to use Auto Drummer, which is one of my favorite ways of inputting drums into GarageBand. I'm really excited to show you. I'll catch you guys on the next lesson.
9. Auto Drummer: So welcome back. Next we're going to look at auto drummer. Auto drummer is one of my favorite ways of inputting drums into [inaudible] band. It's really really easy, but there's loads a complex drumbeats we can make for this. It's perfect because you don't have to have any knowledge about how drums work or go together. To work on a drummer, as always, we're going to click this plus button. We're going to actually go outside of this drum section. We're going to find our auto drummer who should be there. Once we click on that drummer, it's going to bring up this screen. So you can see it's already written in some drums into our track. Again, this maps the BPM and the tempo of our song, and it's written in some drums there for us. So that's written in an electric, modern beat. You can see here, our drummer's name is Dez, all right Dez? If we click on Dez you see that we can actually change him up. We've got loads of different drummers here. So you can see we've got acoustic and electric, so here are some electric ones, Magnus, Leah, Jasper, Kyle, Logan, Darcy, loads and loads of drummers here. They're all going to have their own style and their own different kick. So have a good play around with a lot of these drummers. I'm going to go for more of an acoustic kick with my sound today. So let's go with Curtis to start. Cool, so that sounds good. What else have we got? I really like the sound of that kick. So I'm going to go with Mason, which is his name. Once you've chosen the drummer that you're happy with, we've got loads of options here to change up how he plays. So to start, we've got some presets here, so these are going to just be pre-set different beats. Let's try King's Mountain. There're just loads of variation in those presets. Let's just start off with that really basic Back Roads preset. What we can do here, really [inaudible] to our smart drums earlier, we've got a little grid with soft, simple, loud, and complex. Depending on where we move, this yellow dot is going to reflect the drumbeat is being played. Again, if you want something loud and complex, we can bring it more into this corner. Equally, if you want something simpler and softer, we can bring it back down there. Lets for now bring that right into the center. So next we've got swing. So if you don't know what swing is, it's basically a looser way of playing the instrument. It's not going to be quite perfectly in time, it's always going to be sleepy and really loose, and I'll give you an example. We have some options here on how intense we want the Swing to be. We've got light and heavy for our 1/8, and light and heavy for our 1/16. Let's try first without any swing. Now let's add some heavy swing. You see how it's really loosened up and lazied up there. So let's try that again but with a light swing instead. See that? We can also change to the 1/16th note, we're just going to change up a bit more. Cool, so this just gives it a real human, lazy feeling. Now you don't need to use swing. Don't worry about having it on or off it's totally just dependent on what you like the sound of. Then we have some options on how the drum kit is being played, so we can select what parts of the drum kit we want him to play. I can turn the Hi-Hat off, if I'd like. I can make him play the Toms. I can take away that kick. I can add some cymbals. Then we've got some more percussion up here. So we've got some tambourines, some rackets, and some claps. Then what we can actually do is change how he's playing the pieces of the drum kit. So we've got three options for percussion here. So that's going to be our tambourines, shakers and claps. If I just play the percussion, you can hear exactly what's going to happen. It's just going to change the beat of that piece of percussion. So we can do the same with our Toms, and that changes if we select it to Hi-Hats, we've got loads of different options here. The same with our kick and our snare. Awesome. There's loads of stuff we can do with that, and we can create a drumbeat that's really tailored to our preferences and our sound that we like. Then we can also select how frequent and how intense we want his Fills to be. So if I turn that all the way down, you're going to hear that he doesn't play any Fills really. But equally, we can turn that right up, and he's going to go a bit crazy. Cool little Fill there and another one there. So lastly, what we can do, and this is one of my favorite things, make sure that you use this, is our Follow button. What this is going to do is make our kick and our snare follow another instrument on our track. For example, I recorded a bit of keyboard earlier, and it sounded like this. It's a really basic bit of piano there, but with our drummer, we can make him follow how that piano's being played using this. So we tick on that Follow and then we can select here what instrument we want the kick and the snare to follow. If I click on Grand Piano, and then I play them both at the same time. He's accenting where those chords are being played and this can get really intricate if you've got a more complicated guitar piece or piano piece, It's going to really nicely follow the way the other instrument has been played. But yeah, big Top Tip here, use that Follow, Kick & Snare. It makes such a big impact on your songs and it's just so cool. It's literally like having your own personal little drummer writing on your track for you. I'm going to use the auto drummer in this song I'm going to write. I'm going to really have a play around now with the sounds that I want that drummer to make. So I think I'm going to make it slightly loud and a bit more complex. I'm going to turn the fills down to about a medium. I want him to play the Hi-Hats in the verse, I thought that that suits really well. So let's just have a listen to those different Hi-Hat sounds. So once we've got a piece that we like, we can then add on another section, which is actually done here already for us. So if we go back to the project screen, you'll be able to see that it's just written in low to jumps for us. Now we can obviously delete these and take any out and cut them and edit them however we'd like. I'm just going to delete these for now, and I'm going to change it as we go through. For now, let's say this is going to be our verse. So I've got our vertices quieter, more reserved drums there. Then for the chorus, I want it to be picked up a little bit maybe be played on the ride. Maybe it'll be a bit loud. If I head back into my drummer screen and then let's have a play around with this. So, yeah, I want it on the cymbals, that sounds good. So for the chorus, I wanted to focus on the melody. I'm going to turn these fills down because I don't want the fills and the drums to interrupt what's going on with the sort and the guitars too much. We'll change the presets that Back Roads again, add those cymbals. Yeah, let's leave it about there. Turn down those Fills a little bit. Let's maybe add some claps. Awesome. We've got a verse and a chorus drum structure there, which I'm really happy with. So don't worry if at any point you want to come back to this because you can change this anytime if you decide later on that you want to change something up. If you want to insert a new drummer section, we just got to come up here, tap "Create" and it's going to make a new drummer region for us. I'm going to go back into auto drummer once we start developing our song and I can get a more of a feel what the guitars and other instruments are doing. But this has made a really nice foundation for us to work. So that is our auto drummer. Next, we're going to look into how we can build upon these drums and add things like keyboards, guitars, and other virtual instruments. So I'll see you on the next lesson.
10. Virtual Keyboard: Welcome back. Next we're going to look at our virtual keyboard. So to find that we're going to come to plus, and here is our keyboard. You can see at the bottom here we've got Smart Piano, Alchemy Synth and Sampler. Now, we're going to come to each of these individually but first let's just tap on the keyboard and it should bring up something like this. It may seem really obvious, but to play this, we're just going to press down with our fingers. To change the sound of our keyboard, which we got to press up here and we've got tons of different sounds. Loads of cool like organs, electric pianos. Then we've got loads of Synths over here, which we're going to look at in a sec. Let's start with our Classic Grand, because that was a good place to start. Over here to the left, we've got our octave selector, so it's going to just take a down the octave or further down the piano. We can go further and equally, we can go up and another one up, but it does stop at about four. Then we've got our sustained toggle here. We can switch that on and this is going to sustain those notes for us, or if you'd like a bit more control over your sustain, once you press it down, it can sustain and whenever you take off is going to act like a piano pedal would. We can get a bit more control over our sustain in that way. We've got a scale of selection here. I'm going to come to this in a separate lesson because it's going to take a bit more explaining, so don't worry about that for now. This next button here gives us a couple of different options for our keyboard. This is really cool. We can select a double keyboard if you want to play like this. I'm not much of a keyboard player, as you can probably tell. You can also change how many keys are displayed. It might be a bit easier on this setting where the keys are a bit bigger. But if you're an absolute mad man and you want to go for a set up like this, you You do that too, although I don't know how you'd do that because they're so tiny. Let's just go back to our standard view and I'm going to change it to the nice, thick ones, so it's nice and easy. We have a couple of different options here as well. We've got our velocity controls. Once we switch that on, you will notice that this pops up on the left. This is going to give us more control over the velocity of the instruments. If we tap it nice and gently, it's going to make us quieter note, but if we tap it harder it's going make a louder note. This is really good, but it can be quite easy to accidentally tap a bit too hard, because it's not quite as good as playing on a real keyboard, so we can select the velocity we want to work within. So if you want it to be quite quiet, we can take the top end right down and it's going to be more controlled in the mid zone. Be clear if we want to make every note really loud, we can bring it up like this. You can just narrow down the kind of playing you want to achieve. Then we have our key controls. Once we switch that on, you're going to see here, it's going to give us some different options as to how we move up and down the keyboard. In Glissando, we're going to just be static, but if we press it again it's going to go on to scroll. Now we can move the keyboard up and down manually, and you can see there where we are on the keyboard. Next here we have our arpeggiator. Let's turn it on and see what that does. What an arpeggiator does, it's going to play the notes that we have pressed down, it's going to match it to the tempo of our song, and it sounds a little bit like this. How cool, right? This can be as complex or as simple as you want. We can do a load of things to change how that arpeggiator works. If we press on that again, you can see we've gotten some options here, so we can change the note order, we can have the notes play as I've played them. If I go up here first and then down here, and then in the middle, it's going to play them in the order that I've pressed but if I want them to just go up, I can select that here, and then no matter what order I press them down on, the notes are always going to ascend up. Equally, I can go down. It can go up and then down, or we can make it random, which gives us a really cool varied riff. Awesome. So I'm going to leave it on as played for now, and then we can also change the note rates. This is just basically how quickly those notes are being played. Then [inaudible] you can be crazy, and we've got dotted, so this is just going to be a bit varied. Then we've got triplets. Lastly, we've got our octave range. You may have noticed, as I was playing there, it wasn't only playing the notes I've pressed down, it also plays them in an octave above. We can change how many octaves our arpeggiator runs through here. So at the moment it's on two, if I select one, it's going to be really clear, by I'm pressing down. Then if I want to make it two octaves. I can make it three, four. Hi everyone, Mike from the future back here again. One last thing about the arpeggiator. If we have it on, you'll see there's a latch control over here. If we switch that on and then play our arpeggiator, it's going to lock in place, once we press the notes down, so that means that I can just press over here or press down over there, and it's going to play it for me hands-free. Once we say play a chord in, so like this, it's going to loop around, and then I can change the pitch of that chord by just pressing one note at a time. You see the chords become lower. We can play around with the pitch of that chord. Okay, bye. You may have noticed when I was switching around the keyboard sounds earlier, that there's a couple of different options when we click on some different pianos. You can see here on this electric piano, we've got a pitch control and we've got some awesome effects over here. Like I said earlier, there's going to be tons of effects on these virtual instruments. Just have a really good play around with them. There's really no right or wrong answer to a lot of these effects, they're purely just to add character to the instrument that's being played. The best way of finding out what each effect does, it's just to turn it right up. Don't be afraid to experiment, there's really, like I said earlier, no right or wrong, and it's just about having fun as well. I think you'll often come up with cool little riffs and cool little ideas just from playing around with the effects and having fun with it. That's going to be a bit different on every instrument we select. Again, I'm not going to go into them too much because it'll just be really dense and a bit of a intense lesson. Apart from more traditional sound and keyboard sounds, we've also got our Alchemy Synth. These are going to give us a load of different effects and options to muck around with it. As you can see here, screen looks a little bit different. We've got a pitch and a modifier, and then we've got some different preset effects here. I can just move this blue box around, and you can see over here, depending on where I move them, it's just going to change all those effects for us. It makes it nice and simple, rather than have to play with all those dials. So in this one keyboard standalone, we've got tons of cool effects there. Now if you wanted to go a bit more in depth into controlling those effects, you can slide over that top screen and you can get into the nitty-gritty with all these controls. It's worth noting on our Alchemy Synth, and with a couple of the different keyboard sounds, we have another option here now. So we've got Glissando, our Scroll, and we've also got Pitch. With this we can basically use it almost like a Kaoss Pad or a touch pad. Let me go back to one of the more basic sounds. It's that blue dot, as you move it up and down it's going to change the pitch of the note, and we could do this with multiple fingers. It creates some really cool stuff like that. You may have noticed, when we switched to our Alchemy Synth, it just brought up another button here. Now if we press that, it's our square selector effective thing, it's going to go into the middle. Now what we can do with this is move our device around and it's going to change what effect's being used or what preset's being used. So if I play a chord and then move the iPad around, that effect preset is going to change. How cool is that? We can literally move our iPad around to make some cool sounds so yeah, there's loads of cool things you can play around with here. Have a good experiment and just have a good bit of fun, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
11. Smart Instruments: Welcome back. Next, we're going to talk about smart instruments. Smart instruments are great for easily playing chords on our device, but they also work really well for people that aren't too familiar with music theory and how to string together chords. Let's get it started now. In this lesson, I'm going to focus on the smart piano, but it's worth noting that you can find the same system of smart instrument in strings, bass, guitar, and world instruments. We're going to go into all of those individually a little bit later, but the idea is basically the same. Let's show you by opening a smart piano. It's worth noting we can move between the standard instrument screen and the smart instrument screen by using this button here. It looks like a red chord. We press that on and off, they'll go between. As you can see here, we've got a lot of different chords, and we can play them with our fingers. For example, there's a C there and the higher we go up on this white bar, the higher the chords are going to be, and down here are our bass notes. The bottom one and the top gray one are both the same note, but an octave apart, and then the one in the middle is our fifth. That's basically the second most important bass note, but don't worry about that too much. In the piano's example, you can almost think of these gray notes as like your left hand playing the basic parts and the white parts, playing the chords higher up on the piano. Using this, we can play our instruments even though we don't have to know all those chords and all those shapes and stuff. You may notice up here as well, we've got an auto play feature. What this is going to do is going to play the chords for us and we've just got to select what chords we want. Let's try going into one, and you can see it brings up the slightly different view. If I tap on f, you can see it start playing for us. Now, if we want to add the base to your notes, you can type that in. Then if you want to play both the higher chords and the bass notes at the same time, you press on the letter. Each of these different numbers is just going to play that chord progression, ever so slightly differently, and then we can sew a chop and change with the bass notes and the chords. A mix and match and create some really nice sounding chords that way. Let's just turn the auto play off for a minute. Now, you can notice that we used to have our sustain again, so this works just like it did on the virtual piano. We can play with those nice sustained notes. All of the chords that is going to present to us are all going to work together. If you notice there, they all work together, that diminish on the end is going to be a little bit weird. Don't feel like you have to put that diminished one, it's just in there because it does technically work in music theory but most people stay away from diminish notes because they're really odd sounding as you can hear. You may ask why it's selected these chords for us and how they all work together. This comes back to what I was saying at the beginning about our key signature. Because we've told the program that we're writing in C major, is presenting all these calls to us because they all work in C major. What we can do is we could say like write a bit of piano using the smart chords, and then we could go over to the smart base. Because our key signature is still going to be in C major, all of those base smart notes are going to work with it as well. It means that we don't need to think about music theory, what goes together, it will just work seamlessly. Now, if we change the key signature, let's say change it to D, you notice all of those chords have now changed, but it doesn't matter because they're going to all work together still. For our sum today, I'm going to be writing in E major. Now, why have I picked that another top tip? Because I'm going to be writing with guitar later. Guitar works really well with E major because a lot of those open notes are going to work in the E major scale. It means it's going to work nicely seamlessly with those open notes being played on the guitar. Yeah, don't worry about the key signature too much, it's just a way we can really seamlessly pull together our smart instruments and also our scales, which I'll come on to a bit later. All of these key signatures do really is just change the pitch of our song, it's not going to change how they progress necessarily, but we can also change if it's a major or a minor key. Basically all that means is major sounds a bit more happy and a bit more uplifting and minor sounds a bit sadder and a bit more gloomy, let's have a listen. So you see it's just a bit more dark. But for today, I wanted to be nice and upbeat, I'm going to keep it on major, nice. Let's say you want to go a bit more in depth with those chords. What we can do is come up here to Settings and then press Edit chords, and what we can do is click on our chord and we can change it to whatever we want. Don't get too caught up in this, this is only an option if you want to get more in-depth with the chords. There's nothing wrong with sticking with the chords that already been laid out for us, but this is just a way of changing those up, I could change that to anything I wanted to. I can change it to E diminished, E diminished add seven, and then this is our base note. These are going to change the base notes down here. We can create some really weird chords like that. Don't worry if you get a bit mixed up in writing a custom code because we've got this button up here where we can just revert back to the original chord. Yeah, using the smart instruments, we can just write some really cool chord progressions and movements really easily, so let's try doing that now. Easy, I wasn't even think about what I was doing now, I was purely just moving around and playing and everything works really well together. Another top tip here, if you're going to be writing to the key signature and you're a bit confused about how to maybe put a chord progression together. A helpful tip is to always start or end on our root note. If our key signature is in E major, that is going to be our root note, or I like to call it like our home note. It's the place that feels comfortable and safe, if you listen. See how nicely resolves in that E. Let's try starting somewhere else and then ending on E instead. It will just brings it back home and you're like, that's concluded really nicely. Let's say you write a chord progression like that and that sounds really good and you can totally run with that and just use the chords that are there. But if you want to, like spice up a little bit more, what we can do is come back to that edit code section and then we can add a bit of spice to our chords. As long as you don't change either of these sections, so our D and the major and minor, we can play around with this section that's just going to add a bit of flavor to our chord, but it's going to still stay within the key signature. You see that like given our D chord a bit of flavor. If I change that back to none, it gives it load of difference of options and suddenly those chords are sounding way more professional and a bit more interesting than the standard chords. Let's try changing up those three notes and see if we can get something a bit more interesting. We have DAE and DAE again, but we're going to change up these ones to make them a bit more interesting. If you're going to do this, I recommend playing the chords as we move this, so you can hear the different notes, beautiful. How nice is that. We've just changed end number given every spice to our chord and suddenly that sounds way more intricate and beautiful to me at least. I'll give you a little before and after and now after. So cool. Again will end on that E because it's our nice home note. Another really important top tip. If you're a beginner and you're not too sure about how many chords you should use or exactly what you should be doing. Just try picking three or four chords and do, I said about either starting or ending on our root note, and from that alone, you should be able to build a great song. For example, there that DAE progression I had, that was so nice that you can easily write a song with just those three chords and that really isn't just a beginner trick either. Like the Beatles is just about every some of theirs was only three or four chords. In fact, most pop songs are just that, three or four chords and you might be thinking less well and good, but people like the Beatles were around for a long time ago, and music just come a long way since then. But take example, Billie Eilish, a massive global sensation at the minute. Her song, Everything I Wanted, just four chords, more or less played over and over again in the same order, and that song is amazing. You really don't have to get too complicated with your chord progressions to make a good song. Keep it simple, trust me you can find your most effective stuff that way. Having that chord progression is a great foundation, but it's not worth getting lost in. Once we have that foundation, we can play around with things like our dynamics, adding instruments in and then taking them away, changing melodies. All these things are going to vary up our song, so that you almost start to lose track of that chord progression. A really important lesson there, I hope you enjoyed that and I'll see you in the next lesson.
12. Scales: Welcome back. Next, we're going to talk about Scales. Now, don't worry, I know that can sound like quite a scary prospect and it's like, "I don't know music theory other than scales. No, thank you." But don't worry, GarageBand makes it really, really easy to use scales. We don't have to know anything about music theory. Let's jump into that now. I'm going to be explaining scales on the keyboard, but it's worth noting the [inaudible] of scales function is available on the keyboard, the strings, the bass, the guitar, and world instruments. If we click on our "Keyboard" and then we close down the chords, you can see here we've got Scales button. When we click on that, it's going give us a list of lots of different scales. What scales really are, are a group of notes that work well together. They each have their own unique characteristics and own unique sounds, so really similar to our smart instruments. GarageBand band's going to look at what key signature invented and it's going to say, "Awesome, I'll make those scales so they fit into that key signature." Again, we don't really need to know the theory behind it, we can just focus on the playing. Depending on what key in engine we've got selected, the most appropriate ones are going to pop up more towards the top. Because we're in a major key, you can see up top here it's got more of those major scales that can work nicely with our major key, but if we'd stop here and change it to E minor instead, you can see it shifted that list and it's [inaudible] some of the ones that are going to work best up at the top. Let's switch back to our major key and let's try with our major scale first. It's going to change the view to rather than having the white and the black notes, it's just going to have these white rectangles. Now as I play this, it's just the scale, so we can't hear a bad note. You may notice these grayed out notes here, they are our root notes. This is just going to reflect what our key signature is, so again, it's going to be E. A little bit like I said on our smart instruments lesson, that's going to be like a whole note, a nice and cozy, comfortable place, to say if we do a little riff, resolves really nicely. I've recorded the little chord progression we came up with in the last lesson, so let's try playing our major scale over the top of that. See how that works? Let's try some other scales. Again, each of these just going to have a bit of a different characteristic. Major pentatonics, really nice. Major blues is going to be a bit more mysterious. There's loads to play around with these scales, but we can make it really easy for ourselves and just pick between two different scales. That's all natural scale, so our major and our major pentatonic. If we're in minor, we'd pick between our minor, which is our natural scale, and our minor pentatonic. Those are the main scales that are mainly used in West in a pop music, and there were I think about 99 percent of people will be using, some just stick to them if this seems a bit overwhelming. But in case you wanted to write a Japanese style song, you can use those scales for that. I personally really like using the pentatonic scales, I feel like whatever you play using them seems to sound good. Now we can pull together several of these things we've learned. We can play our chords using our smart instruments, we can use scales to make a melody, or a lead part, and we can use our merge recordings function to merge that all into the same track. I've got my chord recorded here, I've got my merge recording set on, I can head back to our instrument screen with our scales, and I can hit "Record". I've created a lovely bit of piano without any knowledge of how to play it. This is where you want to get across in the course is, you don't need to know music theory or be able to play an instrument to be able to write music now, you can use these features to your advantage and just write beautiful pieces of music. Thank you for joining me for this lesson. I can't wait to see you on the next one.
13. Sampler: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about our Sampler. A Sampler is what we can use to record our voice or any other sounds that we can find, and we can then play around with those sounds using a keyboard. We're going to open up a new instrument, and you can see on the keyboard, it says Sampler there, so you're going to hit on there and it's going to bring up this screen. Like I was saying earlier, we can use that sampler to play whatever sounds we can record with our device. They've got some pre-made sounds here. If we click on here, we can actually see the sound bank. We've got some giggles, and ohs, and kids cheering. Let's have a play with the bark. If you select that, and then we can play that bark on the keyboard. But my favorite thing about the Sampler is the fact that we can record our own sounds into this. If you're using the microphone on the device itself, it should pick up straight away, like you can see here. You see as I'm speaking, the microphone is picking up, and this is just a reading of how loud my voice is and how well it's being picked up. If I turn the input up more, you'll see that it's hitting right at the top, now. We don't want that because that's going to cause peaking. What we want is just for it to be underneath the top, and we can move that input dial up and down until it stops peaking. I'm going to talk at the volume that I'm going to record at, so about there, and that's not peaking too much so I'm going to be happy with that. We can also change some of these settings by pressing here. We can change the input level so that it's done automatically, so we don't have to set that ourselves. You see here you can get a bit more of a detailed reading of how close we are to peaking. That looks all right to me, but we can turn it on to automatic if you want that to do it for us. We also have a button for our monitor here. What our monitor is going to do is going to allow us to hear back what we're playing and recording. When you're ready to record, we're just going to hit that red button, and it's going to start recording. There we have my little sample, and it's going to start recording. Then you can play about with that voice. What you may have noticed the Sampler doing there is once I hit that record button, it waits until it could actually hear a sound before it started recording. If I'm really quiet, and then talk, it's only going to record once it notices a signal. But let's say you've got some background noise or something else happens, you can easily use these arrows to trim down where you want the sample to start and end. "Then talk. Talk Talk. Talk." If I just wanted that talk, I can trim it down and just have that, "Talk. Talk. Talk." I want to make it a goal to try and get a sample into this song. Let's try a new recording. Yeah. What we can also do with a Sampler is find out how we wish we sounded, yeah, or something like that. Then you can also find out how you actually sound, yeah, which is more like that. As basically all my calls is "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." I'm sorry about that. Now we can also play around with the Sampler further by reversing it, "Haey. Haey." It sounds like I'm doing some Japanese prayer or something. "Haey." We can loop it. "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." It sounds like hell. We can also go into the details where we can fine-tune a couple of things. This box here is basically going to dictate how quickly our sample fades out. It's got quite a nice fade on it in a minute. "Yeah. Yeah." But maybe a bit too sharp. If we drag this line a little bit longer, "Yeah," it sustains a bit more. "Yeah." But you get some more of that after noise, so we can take that down a little bit more if we want to. "Yeah." We can play with this to just help guide the trail. "Yeah. Yeah" Awesome. Don't worry about that too much though, if you like the sound of the sample as it is, you can leave that. Then we can play around with the tunings. This is more or less the pitch, "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah," or the fine-tuning. But because it's only just on one note, I don't think is going to really make much of a difference. But if you're using a longer sample, you'll probably notice more of a difference. "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah." If we record a sample that we really like, we can hit up here, and then we've got a button there to save it to our library so that we can always come back to it. If you don't want to record your own sample, we can actually muck about with some of the sounds that are in GarageBand or other sounds that we've recorded on our phone from another time. If we come up here to Sample, and then go on Import, we can select from the Apple Loops or from our files. This is going to be where the sounds and recordings from our device are going to be kept. You can see here we've got a song from one of our students. We're going to go back to Apple Loops for now. We're going to get again to Apple Loops a bit more later, but they're basically just a massive bank of sounds that we can utilize in our song. But we can filter down the sounds by using the search bar. Let's have a play around with a tambourine. Here we've got a tambourine hit. We just got to press this button to add it to our Sample Library, and then we've got our sample in there. Now what we can do is quite interesting, because we can control the pitch and the note of the instrument. We can turn something like a tambourine, which is just a one note percussion instrument, almost into a lead. You see? How cool is that? Yeah, this is one of those tools that's really good to get experimental with. Have a good play around with it, and hope you enjoy the Sampler. Nice one. I'll catch you guys in the next lesson.
14. Strings: Hello. Welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about the virtual strings in GarageBand. We can use these to create really beautiful sound in orchestral pieces or we can use them in a more modern way to add a really cool vibe to our song. We're going to come down here, add a new instrument, we're going to find our strings. You'll notice that we've got a couple of different options for our strings, let's start with the smart strings. All the smart instruments in GarageBand are very similar, there's only a couple of minor differences, so a lot of the same principles we talked about in our smart instruments lesson are going to be exactly the same here. As you can see, we've got our Autoplay, we've got our chords laid out here, and we can change those chords by coming to the Settings, Edit Chords, and again, our Key Signature is going to reflect what chords are presented to us. They look a little bit different now because we played around with our smart piano and our smart instrument, so we're going to mimic each other. But if we want to change that back, we just go to Edit Chords and then those chords we've changed. I'm just going to hit Revert. Very similar to our smart piano, we can use these sections to play chords. The lower down we go, the lower the chord, and the higher we go, the higher the chord. You can chop and change around with these, go between different chords and different sections of our chord. Again, because that's linked to our key signature, all those chords are going to work really nicely together apart from this diminished one. Again, don't worry too much about that one, it makes musical sense but it doesn't mean we have to use it. If we look up here, it's going to show you exactly what strings are being played. We've got some violins, some violas, cellos, and basses, and we can select exactly what's being played by selecting and de-selecting the spotlight. As you see, the spotlight's off that base now, which means it'll be taken away, and I could do the same with the cellos. If I just want those higher pitch strings, just using the violas and violins, I can do that and equally, I could take them away and just use the cellos and the basses. Just like our other instruments, we can use Autoplay. Then if we come up here, we've got some different options for different string sounds. What we can also do with our string sounds is create a swell. I like using this because it sounds really natural and can add a lot of depth to a song and they sound really realistic in my opinion. To do that, we've just got a rub our finger up and down and it's going to create that swell. Now, the faster I do that, the louder it's going to be, and the slower I move my finger, the quieter it's going to be. You can really get quite intricate with how you use it. Again, depending on where I start playing the chord, the lower or higher the pitch is going to be, so if I want to make a low note, or a really high note. Then if I hold my finger on, it's going to tail off really nicely. That is pretty much the smart strings. Now, we can either head back to our selection screen and select Notes, or we can switch between the chords and the notes using this little section here. Now, we can select the strings that we want to use, and then we can play it using the neck of the instrument. Now, we can use scales within our strings as well. This is super handy. Again, if you're not too sure how to play a cello or you're not sure how that whole thing works, we can just use our scales and that's going to make it really easy for us. I really like the major pentatonic and it's going to bring up a slightly different view and they're all going to be in boxes, which in my mind is much easier to manage as well. Basically, in each different square there's going to be a different note and the gray boxes are going to be our root note. Because we've got the key signature in E major, it's going to be E. All of these gray notes can be the same. Just higher or lower pitch. Again, because we selected that scale, all these notes are going to work nicely together. For this song, I think I'm going to use a bit of strings. I'm going to try and get a bit creative. I'm going to aim towards more of a funky kind of song. But I'm going to use our strings to create what we call in music as a drone. All the drone really is, is like an ambient sound that runs throughout our song and it basically just helps thicken out our song. I really like to write around a drone because I feel like it starts to thicken out as I'm playing and recording around it and just helps give my mind a bit of a direction. Because we're writing in E, my drone is going to be an E chord. I'm going to play it, I think without the violins and the basses, so it's more of like a mid sound. I quite like it around there. I'm just going to record a little bit and then loop it into the rest of my track a little bit later. There it is. Nice one, guys. I'll catch on the next class.
15. Virtual Guitar and Bass: Next, we're going to talk about the virtual guitar and bass in GarageBand. To find it, we're just going to add an instrument. We're going to go through guitar first and then bass afterwards. As you can see, just like a lot of the other instruments in GarageBand, we've got a couple of different options as to how to play our instrument. We've got our smart guitar, notes and scales. So let's start with smart guitar. Again, all the same things we talked about in our smart instrument lesson are going to apply here. We've got a lot of chords that work with our key signature. Then to play our instrument, we're going to adjust the string like we would a real guitar. Or we can just press the letter at the top of the chord to play all notes at once. The only thing about playing the chords of one tab like that is that they can sound quite unnatural. I recommend always strum if possible, or we can just play single note at a time. We can use the Autoplay feature, just like with the other small instruments. We can change the guitar that we're playing. If we tap up here, we can select from like an electric clean, we've got hard rock, retro wah, and roots rock. Loads of really cool sounds there. As you may notice, as we change between the guitars, it gives us some different effects to play around with. Here's some echo. We've got hi-drive treble boost. This is just going to change depending on what we've got selected. Just like the rest of our instruments, we can use these to create cool chord progressions. They're all going to work nicely together because they're in the same key signature. But again, this diminished one can be a bit of a pain, so don't worry about that if it doesn't work. Apart from chords, we can also play the notes, very similar to the strings. I'm just going to bring up the guitar and the key, and we can play just like we'd imagine. We can use our scales function if you want to make it really easy for ourselves. We want to use a major or a minor scale. We can also bend the note on the guitar so we can create those chord. Let's switch on to our bass and we'll see what's different. Just like our other small instruments, we've got our smart chords. We've got our Autoplay. Just like with our guitar, we've got some more options as to what sound we want to pick. We've got a couple more with the bass because we've got some electronic basis which are going to look a little bit like this. Again, depending on what bass we select, we're going to have some different effects and just like the guitar and the strings, we can switch to notes. Or if we're not too sure how to play a bass, we can again come to our scales and utilize those. Also, in the guitar, we can bend our notes. This is where we're going to carry on building our song. I've got the drum sounds I'm really happy with. Later we came with the piano, but I think it's a little bit different to what I want to create today, so I'm going to take the drums and our drone with our strings and I'm going to write our chord progression using my bass. I'm going to keep things really simple today and hooking in what I was talking about earlier. I'm going to write our song with just four chords or four notes. I've picked out four notes here within the E major scale. Bass beginning. That is going to be our chord progression but to make it a bit more interesting, I'm going to bounce between the main notes and some other notes just to make that bass line a bit more intricate so they sound a little bit more like this. You see, I've stayed with the chord progression, but I've just done some twirly bits to make it a little bit more interesting. Let's record the idea, the drums and the drone. If you're recording a virtual instrument and you notice it's maybe not quite perfectly in time or you're a little bit off, don't worry about it because I'm going to show you a really awesome tool called the quantizer a little bit later, which is going to enable us to snap in our notes, it's the perfect time even though we haven't played in that way. Great. We've got a really good foundation there. It's a [inaudible] time, I need to sort out that drone and do a couple other bits. But we've got a really nice foundation there. Let's carry on building that in the next lesson.
16. World Instruments: Hey, welcome back. Next, we're going to talk about world instruments. Now, they are our last virtual instrument to get off our list, so let's jump into that right now. Now, I don't profess to be any professional world instrumentalist, so I'm very sorry if I cause any offense by pronouncing any of these instruments wrong. I'd like to say that this is a pipa, I hope. All the world instruments are going to be a little bit different, but it's worth noting that they all have the same smart chords and scales that we've talked about before. There are access to chords, we come up here to chords, and we've got a really similar setup to those other smart instruments. Again, we can play our chords, we can use autoplay, or we can select from our notes. It's currently selected to major pentatonic, which is perfect because I don't know how to play the pipa. Really similar to our guitars. We can play the instrument by just pressing on the string. It's worth noting, these red stamps are our keynote. In this case, it's going to be our E. All the same note, different pitch. With the pipa, we can use this tool down here to basically select how fast we want to pick the note. If I press my finger down on our E, and then I can slide my other finger up and down this toe, and the further I get to the right, the quicker it's going to pick that note. We can do the same with our chords. We can also use this white bar at the edge to strum out our open chord. Moving on to our next world instrument, we've got a erhu. That's maybe how you pronounce that word. Let's have a listen to what this sounds like. That sounds really cool, I think. Again, those great notes, it can be a keynote. We can use this slider down here to change the vibrato of our notes. That is basically, how much its moving around. I'll show you an example. We've got a horse effect here. This next button is going to allow us to play some thrills with our notes. That's our standing note, when I press this button down, it's going to play those thrills for us. This button down here is going to allow us to play a grace note, but it sounds a little bit like this. Again, just like our other instruments, we can choose between a scale, and we can select our chords, and we can use the same vibrato function here. Again, we've got our autoplay there, if we'd like to use that. A little reminder that if you ever get a bit lost or you forget what some of these buttons do, we can just hit this "Help" button at the top, and it's going to give us that nice big description about what each thing does. I know the word instruments might not be the most popular choice for a lot of you guys, but I really want us to get in here because there are still so many awesome sounds you can make with these, especially if you're going more in the route of creating film music or quite atmospheric music, melodic sounds, video game soundtracks, all that stuff. It just enables you to get that bit more creative and have that bit more diversity with your sounds. I really just love using these instruments, just but not knowing how to pronounce their names. A massive well done if you've made it this far in the course. That is all our virtual instruments covered now. Next, we're going to look at how we can edit and quantize those virtual and MIDI instruments to make them sound really good. Then we're going to move on to recording with microphones and guitars. I'll see you in the next lesson.
17. Editing Midi: Hey, welcome back. Today's lesson we're going to look at editing MIDI. MIDI is basically the information that we give to our recording program to tell it how to play out virtual instruments. Now because that information is virtual, is on our device, we can change it and shift it even after we've played it. This makes it really easy for us to shift those notes into time and basically just chop and change them after we've played them. Because we've already got a bit of base recorded, I'm going to use that as the example today. The white bars as you can see here, that's our MIDI information and that's basically telling the instrument what to play. To change this, shift it around, we can click on the sound file, click again, and then we can go over to "Edit," and it's going to bring up this screen. You can see all of our MIDI information here. Each one of these green bars is the note that we've played. Let's play a song and see exactly how this MIDI information is being read. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense. You can see as our track header is moving throughout the track, it's going over those green visibility information, which is telling the instrument how to play. Like I was saying earlier, we can do some things to edit the MIDI information that's been put in. We can hear the note that's being played by just tapping on the note, and we can hear how long is going on for as well. You notice the longer base MIDI information means that is a longer note and the shorter ones, mean it's more stabby. We can edit that now by pressing on the note and then using the arrow on the side to show to shorten our note, so it's more of a stab, or again, we can drag that back out to how it was before, and there's going to be a small of a sustained note. Now, we can also move those notes around. So say if we played the wrong note to start with but the rest of the tape was really good, we can just move that into place. If we click on a note, you'll see we have an option to cut, copy or delete, and we also have an option for velocity. Now, if we click on that, it's going to give you this slider. Now, the velocity is basically how hard we've played that note or that instrument. The higher to the right we go, the louder that note is going to be played, and vice versa, the furthest left, the softer it's going to be played. We can use this to dial back the intensity we may have played with. Or maybe if we hit one note way too hard, but the rest of the tape was really good, we can just change that velocity up in the screen. We can also use this MIDI edit function to move our notes further into time. Say here, for example, I know it's just that time, I can select it and then just give it a little nudge into place and then it'll be perfectly in time. But I'm going to show you a really easy way to automatically do that to the whole track using quantization, and that's coming up really soon. In the top left here, you notice we've got a pencil button. If we select that, we can draw in our notes. Let's say you wanted to add some notes in, we can draw in the notes like that, and then with the same function, we can tap to take them away. Now I know a lot of people actually like to write instruments this way, especially with things like percussion and drums. Feel free to come in here and have a good play around with that pen, try drawing in some notes, and maybe that's how you come with some cool melodies or riffs. You notice when I create a note, it's going to be a certain length. The length of that note is dictated by the last note we input. If I wanted to make that shorter, I could drag short. Then every time I'd write a new one in, it'll be the same length. Yeah, a really handy useful tool there. I hope you enjoyed that. I'll catch you on the next lesson.
18. Quantisation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about quantization. Now, you may be thinking, "Quantization sounds like a scary word, I'm not interested in that." But it's actually an incredibly useful tool to snap our virtual instruments into time. For example, if you've put a drumbeat into GarageBand that you really like, but it's not quite perfectly in time because you're not a robot. We can use the quantizer to snap those notes into place to make sound really tight and together. We can either use the quantizer on our sound file alone if we just want one section to be quantized, or we can select the track as a whole so that everything that goes into that track is quantized. If you want to quantize just one section at a time, you click on the section that you want. Click again, head over to Settings, and then you've got Quantisation here, and then we have our settings there. Or if you want to quantize the track as a whole, like I said, we want our track selected with the gray. We're going to come up here to our settings, "Track Settings," "Quantisation," and there's our quantization there. There's a couple of different ways of using the quantizer. We've got Straight which is a typical quantizer that it's going to snap all those bits into place for us. We've got Triplet. Again, it's going to be the same, but this is going to snap into place for triplets. If you're writing your beats in triplets and your time signature is in triplets, that's the one you want to use. Or we've got Swing. Swing is going to add a bit of looseness to the feel of our instruments, so rather than it being perfectly in time, is going to feel loose and I'm going to you an example of that in just a minute. For example, I've got a drumbeat here that's really out of time. I'm going to turn on the metronome so you can hear how out of time it is and then we're going to push it into time using our quantizer. Awful. How do we sort that out? Because I'm not writing in triplets, I'm going to be using the Straight quantizer. Once we click on that, it's going to give us a couple different options. The options here are basically just asking us, what's the closest note you want our MIDI information to be dragged to. Do you just want it to be dragged to the 1/4 note, or the 1/16 note, which is much more intricate? But if you don't really know about that, honestly don't worry. The best thing to do is just to go through each one and see which one sounds best. Let's select 1/4 and see what that's done to our drumbeat. How cool is that? It's dragged perfectly in time for us. If I change up to 1/8, you'll see how this could change. Because my drums are so out of time, you might actually find they've been dragged into the wrong place. Let's have a listen again. They've actually been dragged into the right time there and you can see how actually that's given it a different feel. They're almost like offbeat bass, but they're in time and that's pretty much what these quantizer options are for. Is, how intricate is that beat, and exactly how do you want to order it? Again, don't worry about it if it seems overwhelming, just go through each one until it sounds right to you. Once you've got your track in time, you may notice that one or two notes are slightly out of time or not exactly where you want them, and that's where we can use the Edit MIDI function that we talked about last lesson to just head in air and move them about if we need to. Let's delete this drum track for now because I was just using that as an example. Let's come back to our bass part and see if the quantizer can help sort that out. That's pretty in time. There's a couple notes that weren't quite there. Let's see if we can sort that out using the quantizer. I'm going to come to Straight on 1/16. Let's head back and see what that has done. Awesome. That sounds great. There's one note in there that I'm going to move slightly, but that is pretty much perfect now. Let's try and see what the swing does to this. This is going to really change up the feel of that bass. We can select from either 1/8 or 1/16, and we can select if we want the swing to be light or heavy. Let's try heavy first to give you a really good idea on what it does. Really different sounding. It's still in time, and that's still totally usable. It's just depending on what kind of sound and output we want. Let's try it on the light setting. That's a really nice balance there of it being dragged nicely into time, but also it's added a bit of that more human element. If I was to play that bass part in real life, I probably wouldn't play it exactly correct. Having that bit of swing just introduces that human feeling to it. That's another thing I want to get across with the quantizer. It's amazing and it's so useful the dragging in those notes into time, and making our song sound really tight and together. However, you might lose a bit of that human feeling. Using that swing, or going into the MIDI Edit and maybe just changing up how some of the notes quantized can make a song sound a bit more human and a bit more grounded. Don't feel guilty about leaving it in that straight perfect timing. It's just about what sounds good. You do whatever you want, and whatever you think sounds best. That is our quantizer. Really, really helpful tool. Just keep in mind that this only works with virtual instruments and not things that microphone's and guitars or an instrument you record with the microphone. Thanks guys. I'll catch you in the next lesson.
19. Connecting an Interface: Next up in the course, we're going to talk about recording microphones and guitars and basses. I'm going to show you why I'm doing that with the microphone on our device. But like I said in that [inaudible] video, if you want the highest quality recordings with professional microphones or with a direct input with our guitar, you'll need something we talked about earlier, which is a camera adapter if you're on the older iPad. If you're on the newer iPad, you'll need a dock and we'll need an audio interface of some kind. A little bit like I said earlier, the audio interface is basically going to take our audio signal from a microphone or guitar and translate it into our device. Because I'm using an older iPad and these devices need powering, I'll need a camera adapter to make it work. I'm going to take my camera adapter and I'm going to plug it into the power. This is just plugged into the wall. Then I'm going to take my interface and I'm going to plug that in there too. Then I'm going to take this and plug it into my iPad. If you're using an eye rig, I believe they plug into the auxiliary port, this one up at the top. Then if we head into a microphone, when we plug it in, it should give us a message like this which is basically just confirms that the device is plugged in and it's working. It's asking us whether we'd like to turn on monitoring. Monitoring is just going to enable us to hear back exactly what's happening on our microphone or our guitar as we're playing or singing. We're going to turn that on, but just make sure you've got headphones connected otherwise there'll be feedback issues. Then I'm going to plug my guitar in and plug that into the interface. Once it's plugged in, we're going to play our instrument or sing at the level we hope to record that, and then we're going to set our gain. As we play, you can see that there's that green light coming up there. Now, I can adjust the gain on here on the side. I want to just set it so that when I'm playing, that light is nice and in the grin. If you set too high, it will go red, which means it's peaking and the audio signal is being distorted, so it's going to sound not very good at all. Like that. That's what we want to avoid. You're going to just take that down. I'm going to play at the level I'm going to record at. Gone green, so I know I'm good to record. That is how we connect our audio interface.
20. Recording Guitar and Bass: Hey, guys, welcome back. Today, we're going to be looking at recording guitars and bass. We're going come down here, press on our "X," and we're going to find the guitar. Now, it's worth noting that the bass and the guitar you see here are just virtual guitars, so we don't want to come to that. If we're going to be plugging in our guitar, we need to keep going along and we'll need to find them under AMP. I'm going to look at the guitar first and then we're going to go into bass afterwards. But they're both extremely similar, they just have different presets and different amps. Let's click on "Clean" and it's going to bring up our amp. This is amazing. We can use this amp just like we would a one in real life. If you're a guitar player, you'd probably know what all these dials do and you'll be right at home with this. It's just got a ton of effects. We can select our EQs, our gain, our output. We've got some reverb there and some tremolo. For recording guitar and bass, I really recommend that you do use an iRig on interface. It just means the signal is really clear and is really rich, and you're going to get a great sound that way. But if you're on the go and haven't got one to hand, you can totally still use the microphone. It's just not going to be quite as high quality. If I unplug my interface for now and then come up here, you can see it brings up a couple of different options as to what to do with our microphone. As you can see, as I'm talking, there is an input coming up here. If I grab my guitar, you can see it's been picked up with our input over there. Now, we want to have that similar to the audio interface. We want to have a recording, but we don't want it to be going into the red, like you can see there. Our input level is too high there. We want to make sure that our signal is always staying green and it's not peaking because when it peaks, it distorts and it sounds awful. If you want to make it easy for yourself, you can click "Automatic" and that will just do the work for you. However, I want to have a consistent level, so I'm going to select it myself. We can turn on our monitoring as well and this is going to enable us to hear the sound as we're playing. You can hear it's coming through that amp now. It's worth noting, if you're using a microphone on your device, you're going to either have to put the microphone next to an acoustic guitar or you're going to have to put it next to a guitar amp so it can pick up the sound. Down here, we have Noise Gate. This is going to help eliminate background and input noise, but I'm going to go into that a little bit later. With the rest of the lesson, I'm going to be showing you with my guitar directly linked into the interface. But everything I explain throughout this lesson is going to go for the same, if you're using the device's microphone or not. I'm going to plug the lead into my guitar. It's plugged into my interface, and then I'm just going to plug my interface back in. Once we've got that all connected, we can start playing around with our amp. We've got loads of cool effects on here, got some reverb and some tremolo. We can then change the preset using this button at the top. We've got loads of different amp presets here. Have a really good play around with these. They're all going to sound completely different. They're going to have their own different dial settings and they're all going to sound really cool. Then we've got some more distorted and process sounds here. I really like these processed effects. I find there's loads of cool effects and presets there. Also on this page, we have a tuner, which is super handy, a massive top tip. I know it's the most obviously I could say, but tune your instrument before you record. The amount of times that I've recorded a drumbeat and then just gone straight in with the guitar, then only later to realize that the guitar was ever so slightly out of tune and it just throws everything else off. Make sure you tune before we start. We can also swipe through the different kind of guitar amp sounds by going left and right. You can see we've got more of a Fender Star Lamp. This is obviously the more of a Volks one, a Marshall. There's just tons of different ones here, so you can spend loads of time getting really experimental and just having a listen to the different sounds that are available here. Not only have you got loads of awesome amp presets, but you also have pedals up here. Now, each preset is going to come with some pre-selected pedals, but we can chop and change these depending on what sound we want. I can drag this off the screen, and if I want to select a new one, I just hit this empty space and it's going to bring up a load of these pedals. Let's try a WAH pedal. I can add that compressor. That's giving a bit of vibe. Some of these, we can sync to our BPM as well. The tremolo, there is going to be the same as the BPM. I'm going to take with that WAH pedal, I like that vibe, but I maybe change it up a little bit. Don't worry if at any point, you want to change up these pedals or these sounds, you can do it all after you've recorded too. I really like the sound of that so far. Let's try bringing that echo back. Great. I love the sound of that so far. I love those pedals. I really like the amp that's being used. I might tweak some things later, but for now, that is perfect. I'm just going to place some fun chords over our bass and our drums. Awesome. There's a little idea I've recorded there. You can see how it's really starting to come together now, the bass and drums, and the guitar have all laid up really nicely. Yeah, I'm happy with that. Coming back to the songwriting again very quickly, as you notice there, I only played four chords and they just mimic what's being played in the bass. Now, I'm only going to use the same four chords in our chorus. I'm just going to play them a bit differently. Rather than strumming out those chords and letting them sustain, I'm going to add a bit more, that sort of thing. I will hopefully show you that you don't need to have lots of change in chord progressions to make a good song. You can make those four chords work. Let's try going over to where our chorus would be. Don't worry too much about the placement or exactly where things are set out right now. I always think it's best to just get all your ideas down first, and then all the editing and chopping and changing, we can do later. Let's give our chorus guitar a go now. Now, I might just redo one or two of those guitar takes just to make sure they're really good and I'm really happy with them. Because I've got my guitar set up and I'm in the mindset of recording guitar, I'm going to record a bit of lead, and then I'm going to figure out exactly what to do with it and where to put it later. What I can do is I can click on our guitar track and duplicate it so it's the exact same settings, so we don't need to go between them all and find that preset and those pedals I really like. Then I can record a bit of lead to my chords, nice and easy. Because I want to create a bit more of a lead tone, I'm just going to change up some of these settings because they're a bit more leady. Let's try the WAH pedal. Turn the presents a bit. Maybe back down the mids and the bass, add a bit more gain. Awesome. Again, I could change that a bit later. Happy with that for now, so let's record. Just like I said earlier, the exact same process works, just the same, but with bass, we've just got to select that down here. We're going to have all the same settings, some tune up, presets, amp heads, headers, everything is going to be the same, just on bass. I quickly wanted to mention, if you don't know how to play guitar and you're interested in learning, my friend Marc Barnacle has an amazing beginner's guide to guitar, which you should definitely check out if you're interested. Marc has actually taught me lots about guitar over the years and he is honestly a fantastic teacher. Definitely go check that out if you're interested in learning. Thanks for that, guys. I'll see you in the next lesson.
21. Recording Audio: Hey. Welcome back. Next, we're going to talk about recording audio. Recording audio could be anything from an acoustic guitar, an acoustic instrument like a cello or a violin, a live piano, vocals, anything that you can record with the microphone. We can use the internal microphone in our device for this or we can connect a microphone using an interface, which we spoke about earlier, to record those sounds. I recommend if you do want a high-quality recording, to use a microphone if possible. But for today's demonstration, I'm just going to use the mic in the iPad because I think that's what a lot of people will be using. If we come to this plus, and we're going to find Audio Recorder. Let's click on that and see what options it gives us. As you can see here, point your iPad towards the sound you want to record, then tap "Record" to begin. We've got some effects here. These are going to just change the sound of my voice. Let's put our monitor on so I can hear myself. Let's just see what some of these do. They're just going to be some fun different sounds that we can use to muck around with my voice. I actually really love this auto tuning one. You can use that to sound a bit be Kanye West. All the Bon Iver stuff use that extreme tune in. You can see on the left here, really similar to our guitar controls, we've got an input selector. So we want to just make sure that we set this to a level where our recording isn't peaking. If I'm going to be recording with my voice, that's going to be too high. You can see it's peaking there. That means the audio signal is going to be disrupted and it's going to sound really bad. Play or sing at the volume that you want to record at. Then we're just going to set that so it's nice and in the green. Over here on the right, we've got our outputs. This is basic and it just affects the volume, which we'll come to later once we know how loud our tracks are going to be. We can also go into our input settings up here, which is going to show us a list of some of the other options. We've got our input levels so we can dictate that here, or we can slide that onto Automatic. We've got a monitor, which we can also access down here. That's just going to let us hear back what we're playing and recording. We've got our Noise Gate. I'm going to come to that in just a bit. These are just some of the fun presets. As you notice, once I click on them, it's going to give us some different effects. You can just play around with the effect here, but we're going to focus more on the studio sounds today. If you click on there, and then click again, it's going to give you a load of different presets depending on what you're recording. If we were recording with drums, we've got loads of cool presets for them here, keyboards, acoustic guitar, vocals, and some producer effects. Then we've got our fun effects on the end there. Let's try a bit of acoustic guitar to start. Once I click on a preset, you see, it's going to bring up some effects for me. It's just going to give us some effects that sound really nice with a guitar. We can obviously chop and change them if you want some more room sound. You got some presence. Change up the tone. We can really play around with these presets, find a sound we like. Every one one just going to be a little bit different. There's really no right or wrong with picking these effects. You just want to make sure your guitar is nice and close to the iPad. Your input level isn't peaking. From there, just play with those effects. The main effects like compressor and reverb, we're going to go into a little bit more detail later. But yeah, just play until you figure out something you like. The exact same process is going to go for our keyboards and drums. Each one is just going to give you a slightly different display of effects. You can just choose them and change them to a lock in. Remember, that you can always change these effects later. If you maybe decide you want a little bit less of the compressor or a little bit less reverb, that can all be changed later. Let's have a look at vocals. With vocals, I personally like to record first and then play around with the presets and the effects afterwards. I'm just going to sing something over our track so far. I don't think I'm going to use it in the final version because I'm not a very good singer. I just want to show you the process of recording vocals and how it all goes together. When recording vocals with any mic, we come up against the problem when we use certain words. What do I mean by that? When we say words like Pete, with a P, it sounds like a shot of air into the microphone and it can make it do some weird things. For example, Peter pick up the pudding. That was the best example I can think of. Now, on our device, if we're far enough away, we can often avoid this problem. For example, Peter, pick up the pudding. It's not quite so bad. But I know often people like to get quite up and close to the mic, so we can use a pop filter to get rid of that wind interference. Peter pick up the pudding. Peter pick up the pudding. But again, you don't have to use this, it's just if you're finding you're having problems with those P, Peter's. I'm going to start recording a good bit before the course actually comes in just to give myself a chance to prepare and then we're going to hit "Record". I think that's good enough. I'm really not a vocalist, but I think that's cool just to show you some things. Let's have a listen to some of the different presets that we can use. I'm going to solo my voice actually so you can hear it a bit clearer. The first thing I noticed just before we get further, did you hear all that background noise? That shh? We can get rid of that by using something called a Noise Gate. If we come to our input settings, you can find our Noise Gate down here. When we turn that off, it's basically going to help block out background noise and any unwanted noise. It's not going to cut out everything we don't want to hear. If there's a really loud bang in the background or something, there's no way we can get rid of that. But between my lines there, there was the input noise. Now, the Noise Gate detects the louder parts of the song and notices those as the base we want and then cuts out everything else under a certain threshold. We can determine where that threshold is using this slider. The more aggressive you want that Noise Gate to work, we can slide that further up; and less aggressive, you can go down. Let's have a listen to that now with our Noise Gate on. Do you see, it has completely cut out that background noise. Now you may have noticed it does slightly cut into the vocal there. Let's just adjust the aggression of the Noise Gate. Turn it down a little bit and see how that affects it. Maybe it'll make it a bit smoother. That nicely cuts out that background noise. Let's have a play around with some different presets and see what different sounds we can make. Let's go for Radio Ready. I really like what we've got there. I like that extreme stereo setting. I've turned the compressor up a bit. I've taken the tone down ever so slightly. Let's hear what that sounds like for the rest of our track. I think for a recording into an iPad, that sounds really good. We've only really scratched the surface there on some of the effects we can use. We can obviously layer up these vocals and create harmonies. A massive congratulations if you've got this far, you now know how to use every single instrument and every kind of amp, drummer, keyboard, everything on this instrument panel, you know how to use. How awesome is that? We've got loads covered now, but there's even more to learn about GarageBand. I can't wait to show you a bit more. I'll catch you in the next lesson.
22. Multi-track Recording: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about multitrack recordings. That's where we can record one or more sources at a time, let's say we can record a drum kit with lots of mics or even just with one mic and one virtual instrument, we can record them at the same time. To find the option to enable this, what we've got to do is go to Settings, Advanced, and then we've got an option here for Multi-track Recording. Let's tick that on. You'll see over on the left here, our view has slightly changed. We've got these red dots now. When we press on these dots, they're going to turn red and that's going to enable that track for recording. For example, here we've got our virtual guitar and a microphone, and I can enable both of them to record at the same time. You'll notice up here on our "Record" button, we've got a little number 2, which means those two tracks are ready to be recorded. Because I don't need to see the microphone interface while I record, I'm going to head into the guitar interface instead. Then whenever you're ready, just go and hit "Record". If we head back to our project screen, you can see both vocal and my virtual guitar there have been recorded. Yes, some awful humming there by me, but that gives you a good idea on how that multi-track recording works. This is great, especially when paired with an interface with multiple inputs we can record, drum kits, whole bands, really the sky's the limit with how we can record like this. Hope you found that useful. Let's get cracking on with the next class.
23. Loops: Hey, welcome back. Next up, we're going to talk about loops. Loops, a little bit like I was saying earlier, basically a massive bank of sound samples and cool little riffs bits and pieces that we can use in our track. If you come up to the top right, I've got a loop button there. We're going to press on that and it's going to show us a load of different options for our loops. We've got drum sounds, we've got piano sounds, bass sounds, just about anything you could think of. Like I said earlier, there's over 3,000 different sounds they use here. I know what a lot of people like to do is, actually just use the loops to create their songs, which you can totally do. What's really great about this is, they all match our tempo and our key signature. Every one might not match perfectly because there's so much variation, but a lot of them as you'll come to see, we'll work with that key signature. We can filter down the loops, either by searching or using the search selections here. We can select by instrument to say if we want a guitar part, it's going to bring up a load of the guitar parts. You can see here there's a 146 and to listen to them, we just got to tap one them. Loads of variation. Now if we click on X up here, we can also search by genre. Let's have a listen to some funk sounds. Then we can also search by description as well. If we want a specific kind of sound, so let's have a look at clean. There's so much to play around with here. Once you've found a loop that you like, all we've got to do is take it and drag it into our song. It's going to create a new track here and then we can loop that to exactly where we want it. If I just want it for the verse, I can drag it there. Let's have a listen to what that sounds like all together. Cool, right? That's matched the tempo and the key signature and it works in there. I don't think it's quite right stylistically, but you can see how it goes, given it works. A really handy way of finding a loop we like is by playing our song and then just going through those loops so we can hear what they sound like with our song as we're searching. I think in this song, I'm going to use a sample for like a little breakdown, so I want a cool drumbeat to breakup between our verse and our chorus and I found this one I really like. I'm going to take that and I'm going to drag it in. I think, the guitars are going to cut out and I just want the bass and the drums. I reckon, it's going to sound a little bit like this. This is going to change that song, make a bit more funky, and aggressive, and add a different kind of tone to our song. But to demonstrate how powerful these loops can be, I'm going to just mute all of my tracks and I'm going to create a quick little tune just from the loops. Here's a cool drum sound, really cool bass part there, and we've got a bit of guitar on there too. Let's see how that sounds together. How awesome is that? You can use as much or as little of these loops as you want to. I really like using them for padding out a song, adding interest, maybe take some inspiration for some of the drum beats, the bass lines. That leads me onto making our own loops. If we come back up to the loop browser, we can select files and we can use our own sounds to use as loops. Say if you, there's a creaky door, that sounds cool, if you record that with your phone, you can put it into GarageBand and use that as a loop or you record maybe some rain noise or some noise of the sea, you can use that for atmospheric sound. There's loads of possibilities there. All we got to do is, take it and drag into our song, just like you have loops. I've got a song by one of our students there. That's not quite going to work, but that's how you do it. That is loops, loads of awesome possibilities there. I look forward to seeing what you come up with and I'll see you on the next lesson.
24. Editing/Creating a Swell: Next, we're going to talk a little bit of how we can edit and chop up and change our tracks and some cool options we have on the program. In this lesson, I'm also going to teach you how to create a swell using loops in some of the editing features we'll talk about. Let's click on our track and head over to Settings. You can see here it gives you a lot of different settings on how we can chop and change our song. Here we can adjust the gain, our speed. Let's have a quick before and after on some of these specs. You see that chain needs to be a bit faster, it didn't really work. But slowing it down actually made a really cool different beat there. We can choose to loop it. This is just going to automatically loop for us. There is our button to follow the tempo and pitch. This ties really well into our loops because it's going to match that tempo and our key signature. Then we have an option to reverse it and then we can also transpose it so it go up and down semitones to change the pitch. It's worth noting if you get a bit lost in the options all you got to do is press that "Reset All" and it's going to take it back to its original settings. There's loads of cool quite experimental stuff we can do with these features here but what I'm going to show you today is using the Reverse effect to create a swell. To create a swell, we're going to use a couple different loops. One of them being a crash cymbal. I'm going to type in "Crash." That will be fun. I'm going to drag that in. Let's leave it there for now. I'm also going to use a sub drop. This is just a really bass-y rumbling effect that's going to work really nicely with the swell. We're going to put it under there and I'm just going to loop it back so it's only one long. I'm also going to use a clap. That one sounds good to me. I'm going to trim it down a little bit. I'm going to drag it down there and just take back the loop so it's just the one clap. I think the swell is going to work really nicely from our verse into our chorus. It's going to create that big swooping gush into our chorus. It's going to create a bit of excitement, a bit of that energy. At the minute, they just going to sound like a bit of a mess. But here's where we're going to do a bit of magic. I'm going to reverse our cymbal. Come into Settings, Reverse, and then drag it so it ends just before the course. It's going to sound more like this. I'm going to do the exact same with the sub drop. Then we can add that clap on the end to create a bit of an end into it. Then I'm just going to cut those drums a little short. Then I'm just going to add a little bit of reverb onto those claps. Again, I'm going to come to Reverb and some effects a little bit later. This is going to make it a bit less dry. Let's see how that sounds now. How cool is that? Lastly, I'm just going to take this loop. I'm going to copy and paste it. I'm going to reverse it back to how it was and that's just going to add another little crash into our chorus. Nice. We've got a really cool swell there leading us into our chorus. There's lots of cool stuff we can do within editing, but that's just a little example of something you can do. Adds a little layer of sort to your track. Thanks, guys. I'll catch you in the next lesson.
25. Live Loops: Next, we're going to talk about Live Loops. Live Loop is basically an alternative way of using our product screen. Traditional recording programs look a lot like this. They always have a timeline and you have your start and end. With a Live Loop it's a bit different. It basically breaks up every sound into a little loop that we can play around with, bring in and out, chop and change, and do some really cool stuff with. We're not going to add any of the Live Loop stuff on top of our current song. I'm going to start a new project, just so we don't mark anything up. You can see at the top here we can select between tracks and live loops. Now if we press Live Loops it's going to bring up different screen to what we're used to. These are all different preset sounds with loads of instruments and loops already loaded up. But just for now we're going to start a brand new track so I can explain the process with you. As you can see, it looks a bit different, we haven't got that long project screen rather we've got lots of these little boxes. Each of these little boxes can contain a sound or a loop. If I click on one of these boxes, it asks me if I want to put in a loop or use an instrument. If I click on instrument, is going to take us back to our instrument panel. This is going to be really familiar to you guys now hopefully. I could go over to drums. Let's try maybe an electric kit for today. Then if we record something using our instrument. Now we can head back to our Live Loop Project screen by using this button here. You see there it has recorded in a little loop for us. What we can do with Live Loops is just press on that recording. It's going to play it for me and it's just going to loop round and round again. Now we can just keep adding lots of sounds and recordings to this grid and we can start to build the song that way. Let's try adding maybe a loop now. If we click on our gray box, we also have an option for loops. If you click on there, it's going to bring up our Apple Loops browser. Last one, that sounds really cool. Then all we have to do just like we did before, we're just going to drag in, and rather than it being across the screen, it's just going to be contained to that box. We can either click them one by one, or if we click down here on this arrow, it's going to play everything in this column. Let's try that. You see these are playing the same time. Let's add some more things. Let's go back into instruments. When we're ready, just like before, go hit that record. Awesome. Let's go back to our project. Let's hear the sounds together. I'm going to keep this short and sweet today. I'm happy with that as like a little verse. I found with live loops, the easiest way to manage it is for each column to be a different musical sections. We can easily just go, our first play. Then I can click on the next section for maybe a pre-chorus and then the next session for the chorus. But we can still mix up bits and pieces, but that's just a nice way of ordering our song. If you're going to write whole song like this, that is. On this screen we can also drag this over and we've got the same options we did on our regular screen so we can, solo, mute and adjust the volumes, we can also go into IIT instruments effects. That is going to be just the same as our regular project 2. Now, if you're seeing the bottom left here, this is like our edit bonds. When we have that pressed on, we can do a couple different things rather than switching those sounds on and off. If I click on the now, you'll see I can record, delete, cut, copy, edit and use some settings. If I hit edit, it's going to bring it back over to our regular project screen and we can do all the same things we did with our kemari and the other things we've talked about in the course so far. I can click on it and I can chop it. I click on it and loop it, split it, edit it, cut, copy, delete, all that stuff are the same. I can head into the settings and use quantisation. Sixteenth notes can snap it into time for us. Yeah, everything is applied in that course so far we can do here. Just click Done to go back. Then beside that we've got settings. Here's where again, we can adjust some of those things we've learned about in the course. However, you'll notice there's something different here and that's our length. We can change the amount of bars and beats that is in this sample. We can also take an automatic function as well. It's just going to automatically snap to the right length. With this edit button activated, we can also change a couple of other things. If I press on our arrow to activate our column, we can duplicate all of these here, so that's just going to copy and paste it over to the right. We can name each section. Yeah, that's nice for labeling it like verse, chorus, pre-chorus, whatever you want to do. We've also got some settings here, so let's have a look at them. A Quantized Start, I'm going to come to in just a second. But we've also got this Play Mode. If we click on that, it's going to give us a couple of different options. Let's look at each of these. Re-trigger. When I press here, it's obviously going to start, and if I press it again, it's going to retrigger those loops. The next one is play by pressed. This is going to only play when we have it pressed down so and it's going to stop one bar after I take my hand off and then we have just a play and a stop. Pretty straightforward. Then it's going to stop. You notice as I was triggering and untriggering there, it sometimes takes a second to snap out or snap in. That is called a Time Snap and it's a way of quantizing the start of our bar. It sounds bit confusing but it basically just means everything's going to be snapped into place in time with the song. For example, if I had this off, I could press the Play and then press the Stop, and it stops right away. However, this can get complicated when you're trying to line up several different tracks at the same time, because they're not going to snap into time with each other. A better way of demonstrating this is if I play one track and then the next one. Because they haven't been quantized and that time snap isn't working, they're not going to be in time with each other. It's only going to work if I perfectly press them in time, which is really quite difficult to do. But we can adjust this using this section up here. The regular one is on one bar and I do recommend leaving it on there. But if you want it to be a bit snappier and a bit quicker to change between sounds, we can use these here. With this edit button activated, I can also move these sounds round and I can hold each one down and select them all if I want to move them round together. Let's try throwing some more sounds in here and try and develop a quick song. Awesome I like that one, let's use that. Another way I like to keep this nicely organized so it's easy to manage is having all your drums on one line, all your guitars on the other and keeping it succinct like that so it doesn't get too confusing. Otherwise, every box would do something slightly different and it'd be quite hard to understand and keep track of what's going on. That was a little bad time. However, using the magic of our quantized, we can make them snap nicely into place. Let's go straight at 116, see how that sounds. Last one, snapped into time perfectly, so use for that quantizer. Let's add some base. Let's quantize it to make it sound nice and tight, and let's see how that sounds now. That sounds awesome. Let's see how that sounds together. Awesome. How cool is that? I think I want to have an extra little swoop or swell to get us from our verse to our chorus, so let's look for one of those in the loops. That's so cool. Let's add that in. I'm going to add that in separately because I'm going to jump between the verse to chorus just to see how it sounds. You notice that all of these sounds are in like a circle, which means they just loop continuously. Now with that later sound, I don't want it to loop around. I just want to play it once between the verse and the chorus. I'm going to hit our edit button, press on it, hit settings, and then turn off looping. You'll see that is turned from a circle into just a regular looking WAV file. That means it's just going to play once, once I press it. Really quickly while we're here, that quantized start which we just spoke about a minute ago. We can dictate exactly how each sound uses that quantized start or the time snap function. We can also dictate that play stop speeds. What I talked about earlier, the play while pressed and the re-trigger, we can also do that for each box individually. Again, it's a bit more advanced stuff, feel free to just leave that for now if that seems overwhelming. Once you found an idea or a progression that you like, we can record that obviously. Let's hit record. Going to hit that first section in. We're going to play around twice. You can hit that riser and pause. Here, stop when we're ready and that is it recorded. Now barely surprise. There's another button up here which might seem familiar, which is going to take us back to our project screen. That has recorded it all for us in that Project screen. I'm going to go back to our live loops up here if we want to add anything else. We can bounce back and forth between our live loops and our regular project screen and start to build our song that way. To just show you a bit more, I'm going to start a new project and go with one of the preset live loops instead. Let's try rock. You can see here there's loads of pre-made progressions and sounds using Apple Loops that we can have to play around with. We can play one at a time, or we can use the column selector. That is an introduction to live loops. Now you can use this as opposed to that project screen if you'd like to, or you can use like a hybrid between the both. It's just a really nice option to have and I think particularly for people who aren't too sure about music theory and just want to throw those live loops in, see how they sound and create progressions like that. This is great. Okay, thank you for this guys. I will catch you on the next lesson.
26. Developing Our Song: Hey, guys. Welcome back. In today's lesson, we're going to look at developing our song. I'm going to use all the tools we've talked about in the course so far to further develop our song, get more of a verse-chorus-verse structure into place. I'm going to talk about how we can change the way we play the instruments, to change up the dynamic and the feel of certain sections, and yeah, start to really complete our song structure and how it's all going to go together. This is going to be more of like a production and songwriting lesson. Like I said a couple of lessons ago, I wrote in a bit of new bass here, and now I use the exact same four chords or four notes, and I just changed up slightly how I was playing them so I could sing along to the chorus. Just a bit more of a choppy baseline. Then I just improvised and at the end, just hit the notes by themselves and let them ring out. That's made me think maybe the second verse could start really chilled out and we can maybe bring the drums right down, and it can be nice and quiet. But we'll get back to that in just a sec. First of all, I'm going to trim down this drone. I'm going to put that towards the start, just so we've got the drone coming straight away, and then I'm going to loop that throughout the song, so it's the hallway their. You may also notice everything comes in quite suddenly, which can be quite problematic. I'm going to move everything a couple of bars to the right. You may notice that the guitar's there. Again, they're coming quite suddenly. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to stretch out those guitars back a little bit so we get a bit more of that organic sound as it comes in. GarageBand is quite clever in that. It starts to record when we're actually not recording, so I can drag that sound file back and it's going to have that organic sound. See how smooth that sounds? Now it sounds a bit more natural sounding. I think I actually want some drums to bring us in. I'm going to go over to our drama and create a new section. That is our little drum intro there, and everything's now back in time. On the note of that auto drummer, I'm going to make him follow the guitar. If you remember from earlier, we can use our kick and our snare follow to follow our guitar. This is where naming your tracks can come in handy. I don't know what one is my verse rhythm guitar, so I'm going to head back into part of the screen and name that one. Let's make and follow our verse guitar. Let's see how that changed it. So much nicer. So good. I really do recommend using that follow for each in the drummer. It makes it much more like an involved member of the band rather than just a separate drumbeat. We also have our lead guitar. However, I think where there would normally be vocals there, having that lead guitar is quite strong, so it could interfere with the melody of the vocals, so I'm just going to move that into the verse and see how that sounds. I'm going to use the exact same verse guitar of my first verse in a second. I'm just going to copy and paste it. Let's see how that sounds with the lead guitar. Sounds nice. Nice one. This is the beginning of our second verse there. I'm going to add a bit of drums into that second verse. But before I forget, I'm going to name this our chorus guitar and I'm going to make our drums follow that too. So follow chorus guitar. Let's add in another drummer section up top here and I'm going to make it really nice and chill. I think I'm just going to have it on the symbols. I'm going to have it really simple and soft. I think I want the drums to stop just short. I want it to stop with that baseline going duh duh. Awesome. That's where I think I want to totally change it from being nice and quiet and chill to almost like a bit of breakdown and something that's completely contrasting what we just heard. That's going to add a nice bit of interest in something unexpected. That's where I think I'm going to use this really crazy drumbeat from earlier. Tone that down. Then I think I'm going to have the electric beat and then our auto-drummer Mason also playing along with him. So let's create another drummer track. Let's make him really loud and simple. Do you see how they both work together and make a really nice, chuggy beat there? I really like that, this is where I can use my yeah from earlier. Do you remember that silly sample I did? Now, that might sound a bit silly, but I like it. I'm leaving it in there. I think we're mostly going to have a really powerful baseline to go along with that breakdown. Let's head back into our bass. Nice one. It's really starting to come together there now. I think this transition between this verse and the chorus is where I want to use those swelly clap noise that we came up with earlier. I'm going to move all of those over. I want to now swell up the clap to leave a tiny bit of complete silence. Just going to add a really nice bit of quiet before we swap back into the verse. That's going to add even more emphasis onto our chorus and make it even more powerful. Nice one. Now I'm just going to copy and paste all of our previous chorus bits over to the second chorus because they can just be exactly the same. However, I do recommend if you're really get deep into songwriting and you want to make something really unique and really special, recording that chorus again might add that bit of variation and to make it a bit more unique and give that second chorus a slightly different feel. But yeah, for the sake of time today, I'm just going to copy and paste. Sorry for being lazy. The verse in the chorus will sound like this. I'm thinking the first verse sounds really good. However, I think I want to put a little bit of keyboard or something else in there just to thicken out that first section. I really like the sound of that keyboard. Let's put it into our major pentatonic so it's really easy for me to play. Let's see what we come up with. I want to keep this song really short, sweet, and simple. I'm going to just let it trail out on the second chorus. However, I think it will sound really cool if that lead guitar comes back in in the second chorus. I think it'll make quite like a triumph and really upbeat, happy ending. I'm not usually one for guitar solos and that, but today, I'm feeling a bit crazy. I think I'm going to mimic what we did with the lead guitar earlier, but just add a bit more in the ending to make it progress more and it gives it the feeling that something has developed. Excuse me while I take about 100 takes to get this right. No. I think that was it. I'm really happy with that. I really like the progression. I think that sounded pretty cool. We've got a bit of work to do in terms of adding effects and mucking around with some other things, which we're going to come up to you next. But I'm really happy with that structure, how things come in and out, the different levels of dynamics. I'm really happy that we've managed to write that only using four chords, just using the same progression, we've just changed [inaudible] come in and out. We are really nearly there now. Next we're going to look at effects and ways we can make this song sound even better. I look forward to seeing you in the next class.
27. FX: Hey everyone, welcome back. Next, we're going to look at FX. Now, that's a little bit different to the effects like reverb and compression. FX is actually a little tab we can open up on GarageBand, you can see it here. We can use this a little bit like a DJ tool. As our song is playing, we can manipulate it, and change it, and add some really cool things in on the fly. I think the easiest way of explaining this is just jumping straight in and showing you what it's all about. Once I click on the "FX" button, see it brings up this panel here. Now, each of these different sections, as we run our finger over, are going to manipulate the sound of our song. Let's have a listen to what some of these do. That first one is a filter. It's going to enable us to cut out that high end and the low end, and really manipulate the frequency of the sound. Then we can use this Lock button to lock in exactly where that frequency is going to be held. Or we can use this button over here to do that thing over our iPad again, so we can move it. Let's play the track. We can manipulate the sound by moving our iPad around. Then what we can also do with this section, but also this section too. Just click up here and we can change the effect that's used. We've got Repeater. Let's have a go with some Reverb. Awesome. All right. There's loads of different ones we can play around with here. I highly suggest jumping in and just having a good play around with all the these and seeing what kind of effects you can add to your song. Lots of really cool sounds we're playing with them. We can change it back for filter for now, and let's go over these other bits. Next, this slider here is basically going to pull and push our signal. This stage 1 over here's going to digitize our signal. We have a slo-mo effect right down here. We can make a quicker one on the right side. We've got a turntable kind of sound. They have a Rewind button there. Then we have another panel over here which we can chop and change just like the one on the left. You can use these all simultaneously and you can create some really cool unique sounds, and really change up the sound and feel of our song. Let's have a play of that one. You get the gist there. I'm not the best using that. I'm a bit prophetic with my DJ and skills. I think I'm going to use this but in a very simple way in that I'm going to use this filter to slowly bring those drums out right at the beginning. A little bit like this. Simple swirl there to bring those drums in and slowly introduce the song too. As you saw there, all you've got to add those effects on, is go to the part of the song you want those effects, hit "Record", play in the thing that you want. Then once you come down to the bottom here, you see that bit of FX information is there on our track. Just like before, we can move that around, or chop and change it even after you've played it. See yeah, make sure you have a really good play around with that. It's so much fun. I think a lot of people who are into like electric music, and into their deejaying would really get along with this. Nice one guys. I'll catch you in the next lesson.
28. Mixing Intro: Hey guys, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look a little bit into mixing. We're going to talk about reverb, getting our gains and our volumes right, and starting to make our song sound really great. Let's have a listen, and let's have a little tweak of the volumes first of all, to make sure everything is at a nice level. I normally do this section by section. I'm going to focus on the verse, first of all, to check everything's all right there. The levels there, are all sounding good to me. They're nice and balanced, I can hear everything nice and clearly, and they'll work really well together. What I'm going to do next is add a bit of reverb. Now, reverb is basically, how the sound reflects and how it would sound in a room. For example, if I were singing in a hole, that sound would be completely different to that if I were singing in a room, or a small club, or something. We can add reverb effects to our tracks, so we can make our instrument sounds like they're placed in a certain room rather than just record it dry. Let's start with our drums. You can either add reverb by clicking on your track, coming up to our Mixer Settings, go into Plug-ins & EQ, Edit, pressing a ''Plus'' button, and then finding a track reverb there. Now here we have all our different reverb settings. This is really great if you want to get really specific with a certain reverb sound. You've got your Predelay, your Spread, Reverb Time, you can get really in-depth with how the reverb sounds there, but for today I'm going to keep it really nice and simple. I just want a basic bit of reverb over the top, and I want them all to sound like they're in the same room. We do that by going back, and then heading down here to Master Effects. There you can see we've got a reverb and echo slide. An echo is just going to dictate how much of a bounce back of the sound there is, it's almost like a bit of a delay. If I solo our drums and then play them dry, meaning without any reverb, just so we can see what they sound like on their own. Then I'm going to start to slide in some reverb, and I set a tiny bit of echo too. There we've gone from quite a dry, boring drum sound, to that of one that's got much more life and much more interest about it, and it feels much more tangible, it feels like it's in a room, it feels like it's being played by a person. Here's where we can get a bit more in depth with the reverb that's used. If we click on ''Master Effects'', we then have some different options using these arrows, as to what kind of echo and delay are being used. Here we've got a load of different cool echo effects, and here we've got a lot of different reverb effects. As you can see here, they're also named after a different space. I love this because it really translates what sound and what feel we want our song to go for. I'm feeling like this song is a tighter, almost club like sound. I can imagine people in, a small venue listening to this stuff. I'm going to select "Club", but let's say if you wanted to write like an orchestral piece, where you wanted like a big hall, that would sound completely different. Song is in a huge hall, and that club is a bit more tighter and a bit smaller, but again, we can adjust how much of reverb breaks using this slider. Awesome, that's just given a nice bit of life to our drum kit there. I suggest using a reverb on most tracks, it's just going to give it that a bit of more life that we spoke about. Now I'm just going to fly for the track and add a bit of reverb to each instrument. It's worth noting with the Master Effects, if I set the reverb on Club, it's going to be same for all the instruments in our track. We can't have our guitar in a chamber hole and then our strings in a club. That works really well, because you want all of our instruments to sound like they're being played in the same space. You see that it's just given it that extra bit of life, extra bit of interest, and it sounds much more real and lifelike now. Another couple of little tips, if you want to adjust the gain of any of your recordings, what you got to do is tap on the recording, tap gain, head to Settings, and you can see up here, we've got our gain selector. If you want to control the intensity of the output, we can change that there. Also you may have seen on our Effects and Plug-ins & EQ there, we hit ''Edit'' and hit ''Plus'', we've got a ton of different effects there. These are fantastic for adding an extra bit of interest and intrigue to our song. Got our song sounding nice and balanced now, and it's got a good bit of reverb to make it sound nice and lifelike. In the next lesson, we're going to take it another step up and have a look at panning. I'm excited to show you how that works. I'll see you in the next lesson.
29. Panning: Welcome back everyone. In this lesson we're going to talk about panning. Panning is basically the art of moving an instrument out to the left or to the right. It sounds quite simple, and it really is, but it can be really, really effective at giving our song some space and making it feel realistic. If you imagine seeing a bad life, those members spread out from left to right. They're not all standing in front of each other. One, that would look really weird, but two, it would sound really weird. Although sounds would be coming at you from the same direction, although sounds will overlap each other and it'd be hard to hear each thing individually, so we use panning to spread out those sounds just like we would if we were a live gig, and maybe give the guitar some space over to the left. The singer gives me space in the center. Maybe the keyboard player a bit more out to the right. We can build a stage, if you were. To access panning, we come up here to our mix eruptions. Then you can see just below volume here we've got track pan. We can slide this to the left, if you want the sound to move over to the left. Equally we can move it to the right before it's been moved to the right. To demonstrate this, let's head onto our guitar, let's solo it and play it, and we'll move around that pan down. You see how it was moving around there? Let's use that example I gave earlier, and let's try and move each instrument into its own little space. I personally leave the drums and the bass pretty centered because I find like they're the central core rhythm instruments, they want to be nice and central. I'm going to move my guitars around in just a sec. But we've got some of these keyboard effects that I'm going to move round to the left. Let's move our base ever so slightly to the right just to give it a tiny bit of interest. Let's have a look at our lead guitar. Let's move that into its own space too. Let's move that arrow to the right. Let's move this drum beat maybe over to the left a little bit. Something else we can do with panning is use it alongside double tracking. Double tracking is where we take two of the same sound, so the same guitar part, but then panning one way over to the left and one way of to the right. It gives it a really nice spread. To do this, we can click on our "Rhythm Guitar." I'm going to use that as an example. We can hit "Duplicate" and it's going to copy and paste all the same effects that were on our original track. Then we can take our sounds, copy them, and then paste them. Then we can use the pan to spread one left and one right. I'll give you a before and after so you can see the exact difference. You see how that's really changed up the space that those guitars are playing within. It sounds really big, and really wide, and uses up a lot that space in our headphones, you'll often see people use the same double tracking method when you're using vocals as well. Awesome. You can hopefully hear that we're starting to spread out the different instruments in our track, give them their own space. Hopefully you can start to hear them a bit clearer and give it that extra level of professionalism. Awesome, thanks, guys. Next up, we're going to talk about automation. I'll see you in the next lesson.
30. Automation: Next we're going to talk about automation. I like to think of automation as like a little robot helper. You can use our automator robot friend to adjust the volume for us throughout the song. Let's say you've got a guitar solo coming up and you want the volume to be racked up just for that part. We can tell our robot friend, that guitar solo I want you to bump it up to plus eight dB, and I want it to be really nice and loud. Automation on Garageband iOS is just kept to volume, so it's nice and straightforward. Let's take example earlier of turning the volume up for our guitar solo. My guitar here sounds great because it's nice and quiet point in track, but the guitar solo over here, I think needs a bit of a boost. We can find automation by clicking on the track we want to add automation to, and then you can see there we got automation, so let's click on that. You can see that fine line there is zero dB, and our gray, slightly thicker line is where our current volume is at. I can adjust the current volume by moving that line up and down. I'll show you what I mean by solo in the track. What we can do is select our pen up here, and then we can add some dots to the track, and then turn it off to move the dots, and then we can tell the program where we want that volume to be increased, where we want it to go down. We can get experimenting with volumes. I can say use this to make a bit of like a swell in with a guitar, or I could use this the same feature to make a track or the song fade out. But for our track, I think I'm going to make it sort and then I want it to be a bit louder, so maybe like up here. I like the level there, and I've added in one too many dots. If I want to get rid of that, I've just got to turn our pen tool on and I'll tap that off. I'm also going to create a bit of a fade-out so that ends nicely too. It just ends nice and smoothly. When we go back to the home screen, you can see the gray line of the automation there. It's worth noting that after you automate it because we're programming in how we want that volume to work, this dial then becomes redundant because we've already programmed in how we want it to work. Just keep this in mind if you are going to use the automator, it becomes a bit trickier to mix, so I suggest using the automation after you've adjusted the volumes. That is a quick guide into the automation on Garageband. I'll see you on the next lesson.
31. EQ: Next up we're going to talk about EQ. If you've ever used a mixer or a guitar amp before, you may have seen bass, middle, and treble and using those dials, we can change the frequency of our sounds. We can increase the bass or reduce the treble and that is going to change the overall sound. Our equalizer or our EQ, is a more sophisticated version of those dials. We can get a bit more intricate and we can manipulate the sound much more accurately than we can do with just those three dials. To find our EQ, we're going to go to our mixer settings and we're going to plug-ins & EQ and we're going to look for visual EQ. As you can see here, we've got bass, middle, and treble, and they're going to align with these three dots. We can manipulate each of these different bands by moving these dots around. If I want to increase our mids, I've got to take this up and if I want to decrease it, I've just got to take it down. You may notice there's a bit of EQ already happened here, that often happens when we use presets or some of the virtual instruments, they've often been EQ'd a tiny bit for us. Let's just get right into it. Let's play our drummer track. Yeah, we can adjust the treble. We're just going to bring it more the high-end. The mids and the bass. That's again more clear visual representation of what's going on with the sound. We can click this analyzer button down here, and if we play that again, you can see the sound waves. You can see where our sound is mainly sitting. This been a drum here we have got sound all throughout that frequency spectrum. We've got the kick, more of the bass end, and the symbols in the high-hats more along the treble end. We can expand this with this arrow button down here if you want a bigger view and you can see on the right here we've got a gain control. If we want to bring everything up or down, we can do that here. We can use the equalizer to reduce sounds that we don't like. We can use it to exaggerate the frequencies we do like, so for example, on bass, if you wanted more low-end, we can turn up the bass frequency. What we can also do is shape each instrument's EQ so that it has its own space on the spectrum. Because when all of our instruments are playing, a lot of those frequencies are going to overlap and make it a bit harder to hear each thing individually. EQ-ing each instrument to give it its own little space on this frequency spectrum, makes it really clear to hear and makes them stand out really well. On GarageBand iOS it's really simple, so we've only got those three dots. But you'll often see in more advanced recording programs they'll have lots more of these dots so you can get really intricate with it. But I quite like how simple this is. I think that ties in quite well as to how you use EQ best, and just making gradual adjustments and movements can often be the best approach because at the end of the day and we still want our bass to sound like a base. We don't want to manipulate it so much that it sounds completely different. With that in mind, let's head into a couple of instruments and maybe see if we can shape our sound, so it's a bit nicer. For example there, that high-end is just a little bit ringy, so I just want to take the top end off ever so slightly. Then I just want to bring up a little bit of that kick. Make sure to bounce back between the solo and the full track, because what we're trying to do with this EQ is make it fit in with the rest of the song. We might EQ so it sounds great on its own, but then when you pull it into the song and accompany it with all the other instruments, it might not quite sound the same, to bounce back between the solo and the full band track. Last one, that sounded good to me. Let's head into our bass. You'll notice as well, with these two dots on the end, when we raise them or lower them, they create what we call as a shelf and we can manipulate that to make a curve if we want to get all of those high frequencies out. But this is just going to enable us to shape it a bit easier. But if you look at the mids, it's going to create more of like a hill. That bass, I just want to bring up that low-end. You see it's making that nice shelf for me, so all of the low end is going to be affected from this point. I'm going to shape it ever so slightly around the mid because that's where our guitar's going to be sitting, so I don't want to adjust it too much, but I just want to make sure that a guitars got a bit of room. We're only making very slight adjustments here and it's worth noting, if you're a beginner and you just want to make songs, you're not really too worried about the mixing of them, you don't need to do this. This is totally, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it. Let's head into the guitars now because I think they could definitely use some work. I'm scooping out some of those bass frequencies to give the bass a bit more room. I just want to take those slightly harsh, higher frequencies out, which I've done there. Last one, we've gone through a ton of our instruments there and we've just given them a little tweak and a bit of Sculpt to make them fit in with our song that bit more. Now there's really not any right or wrongs with EQ and I think it's really important to just experiment. Our EQ is just there to give us that sculpting over our instrument and like I said earlier, to give it space within our song, and to enable all of our instruments to work together in harmony. The reason there's no one size fit all with EQ, is because each song is going to be very different. How you EQ a song with just one acoustic guitar and a voice would be completely different to EQ-ing that guitar in a mix with drums, bass, strings, and lots of other things. But whatever you do, don't get intimidated by it. Like I said, there's really no right or wrong, is all personal preference and how you think it sounds best. It's down to you, the producer, to choose what you think sounds good. If you want to make this process even simpler for yourself, what you can just do, is head into our mixer settings and just adjust the bass and the treble in our plug-ins in the EQ section here. That is an introduction to EQ there. Hope you enjoyed that and I'll catch you in the next lesson.
32. Compression: Welcome back, everyone. In today's lesson, we're going to talk about compression. Now, alongside EQ and reverb, compression is one of the most important effects to talk about when mixing. So what is compression? When recording, there's naturally a dynamic range, which means we have some really loud parts and some more quieter parts. A great example to use is for singing. Sometimes you're going to sing really loudly and really powerfully, and other times, you're going to be more controlled and a bit quieter. This causes issues in mixing because once you set a level, you'll often find some parts seem rather too loud, while other parts might seem too quiet. It's really hard to get a consistent level, and when we have a lot of that dynamic range, a lot of that loud and clearer, the recording can often sound weak, so we use compression to basically squeeze down the louder parts so that the whole recording is more consistent, and as a result, it sounds more punchy, more confident, more present, and it makes for a much better mix. I've got display here to make things nice and clear. These black parts are our sound recordings. Parts like this would be much quieter, whereas these parts are really loud. You can see here we get a very mixed level because of that dynamic range. We combat this by setting a threshold, a certain volume. In this example, it's minus 15 dB. Everything over this threshold, so all those really loud bits, we can squish down, and that's going to make our sound much more consistent and a much nicer level overall. This is what a uncompressed sound power would look like, and this is what a compressed one would look like. You see how much more consistent and even it is? Let's head back into our track to hear how this sounds. For an example, I'm going to use our drama. Let's solo that, and then find that compressor, we're going to go into the mix eruptions, plug-ins & EQ, and then our compressor is there. We can switch that on and off with this button here. Now, I'm going to go into these settings in just a second, but for now, I'm going to compress it heavily so you can see the difference that compressor makes. Cool. You notice the difference there, it was much punchier and much more like confident and in your face. If you want to keep it really simple for yourself, we can head back and there's a compressor setting here. So we can just adjust the compressor intensity from here if you want to keep it simple for yourself. But if you want to go further into the settings, we can do that too. Our compressor threshold is where we set that line. If we come back to our graph, our threshold is how loud it has to get before it starts compressing. The higher we set the threshold, the less compression there's going to be. The ratio is going to be how much compression takes place above the threshold, so we can set it to be really aggressive if you want everything to be compressed, or we can make a bit of a blend. So we can adjust the intensity of how much is compressed using the ratio. The higher the ratio, the more intense the compression is going to be, and the lower the ratio, the less intense the compression is going to be. A one-to-one is going to be no compression at all. To make the compressor sound a bit more organic and natural sounding, we have something called attack. The attack is going to be how quickly the compressor starts to work. The longer the attack, the slightly smoother it's going to be. But if you want a really aggressive compressor, we can take that attack down, and it's going to be a bit tighter and a bit quicker to engage our compressor. So when using compression, because we're bringing down those louder parts, it can often result in our track being a bit quieter than it normally would. To make up for this, we have a gain dial. We call this makeup gain because we're adding game back on because of what we lost from the compression. Then we have a mixed slider here so we can dictate exactly how much compression is going to be on our track. Again, I don't really like too many rules around making music. However, I think a big top tip for when using a compressor is to make adjustments when listening to the track as a whole. It's easy to play around with all these options when solo because we can hear them really clearly. However, what we're trying to do with the compressor, is make it punch and stand out, and we need to know how that's fitting in with the rest of our song to really make it work properly. So let's turn the solo off, and let's start playing around with this compressor, with the goal of making everything sound nice and present. But with this song, I'm not going to use too much compression because I want it to be quite a relaxed track. I don't want it to be really in your face, so I'm going do some light compression. Particularly, the drums really just makes them shine. You can hear all the little elements of the symbols there and it makes them just stand out that bit more. That sounds good for now. I'm going to head into our base and add a bit of compression there too. Let's head into our first guitars. Another top tip, I always like to be pressing this On and Off button on the compressor. It's really good to hear exactly what difference you're making. So if you're always coming back and forth, you're going to hear those differences and you're going to hear where you want to go and what difference it's making. I really hope you can hear the difference there. It might only be subtle to you now, but the more you use it, the more apparent compression will become. It gives it that extra punch, that extra energy, and I think it made it sound more professional. That is a brief introduction on how to use compression. Don't get too intimidated by this, and remember, the most important thing you can do right now is experiment and see what sounds best. Similar to EQ, there's no one size fits all with compression because it totally depends on your individual track. So use that to empower yourself and to think, I'm going to use the compressor how I think it sounds best, and the more experience you have with a compressor, the better you'll become. Just get in there, get experimental, and I promise you, you'll be amazing at producing a compression before you know it. I think that is our song done, guys. How exciting is that? I think I'm just going to fade it out at the end, maybe just slightly adjust the lead guitar amp, but that's purely just a personal preference. Thanks, guys. I'll catch you in the next lesson.
33. Finished Song: Okay. Hello.
34. Exporting: Okay, so we're finished. Our song is done, it's recorded, it's mixed and it's sounding really great. Once you're at this stage, obviously you're going to want to share it with people, right? To do that, we've just got to come back to our project screen and it's, My Song 16, is the one we want. We're going to hit "Select", select the one we want, and then go to "Share". We could share our song as a project so we can send it to our friends if we want them to work on it or record something on it. We can share it as a ringtone or we could just share it as song. We're going to go for this one. Now I'd always recommend that you export in uncompressed WAV file because this is going to be the highest quality. However, if you want a smaller file to say send to a friend, the highest quality iTunes Plus will be fine. But for today we're going to go with uncompressed and then we've just got to hit "Share" and it's going to save it wherever we choose so I'm going to send it to my Mac. It's going to send over file-sharing and that's going to be as done. A massive congratulations if you got to this point where you've written and recorded your song, no matter how long, short, or complex it may be. You've got to the point of exporting it, and now you have your own song. Again, I'd just like to emphasize if you do want to send it over to me, I would absolutely love to listen to whatever you've done. I'll be listening to everything that is sent over to me and if you'd like any critique or feedback, I'd be more than happy to help out with that. Thank you so much if you've stayed with me this far. I'll see you on the last lesson.
35. Final Thoughts: A massive well done to you if you've made it this far in the course. I really hope that you can take a lot good stuff away from this and that you enjoyed the course. I just want to say a couple of little things before the course does officially end. Something that I really struggled with in the early days of recording and writing my music was that, I didn't like anything that I did. I really struggled to write what I thought was good music, and because of that for a long time I didn't write and record or do anything like that. I think a lot of people struggle with that. They write a song and it just doesn't turn out how they'd like to, and they start to think, "I'm awfully in this, I can't do this." I think it's the same with lots of things not just music. It's so easy to get to write and get annoyed with yourself because you're not producing the music that you want to. But that just shows that you really care about your craft and you care about the music that you're creating. But I think it's really important to remember this, if you think of your favorite artist, now, I guarantee you they will have had hundreds, if not thousands of songs they've written that they hate. But to write those really special songs, they had to go through the bad ones first. Every time you write a song that you don't like, you will grow and adapt and learn from that. But the key is to carry on. Don't let one or two of those bad songs put you down and make you think that you're not a good artist. I think the key to nailing this idea is to just have fun with the process. You don't need to take it seriously. That's another thing that I really struggled with, is every time I sat down at my laptop or my tablet, I feel like I need to create this amazing piece of music, and if I didn't, I was just going to be disappointed. But a lot of the favorite tracks I've actually written, have come from just mucking around. I plugged my keyboard in and just find three notes that I like the sound of, throw a weird effect on there. Even now, I've just mucking around and having fun. I've made some of my favorite songs. I think that's enough waffle for today. Please let me know if you would like to learn a bit more about some. I absolutely love making these courses and I really want to be guided by what you guys would like to see and what you'd like to learn. Please feel free to send me a message on Instagram or give me an email, or follow in the discussions of class. One last little thing. You've already done so much for me by watching the course this far. Every minute really does make big difference. I really hope that you've enjoyed it and you've taken a lot of good information away from it. A review is absolutely massive for people like me making online courses, it really helps me out. I'm genuinely passionate about teaching and making things like music as accessible and easy for people as possible. To know that I'm doing that, not only makes me feel really good, but it also just points me in the right direction as to making more courses and helping people further. If you do have time, I'd appreciate it so very much. Thank you in advance if you have done that. Thank you again guys. It's been a pleasure to make this course and I as your teacher, catch you soon.
