Transcripts
1. Introduction: Everyone, welcome
to Garage Band for the Mac operating system. In this class,
we're going to dive into garage band from
the very basics. We're going to talk about
how to get it set up, how to get started
with garage band, and then we're going to dive
right into making music. I'm going to make
a track with you, and then I'll give it to you to play with and goof around with. You can do whatever
you want with it. And then we'll go into
instruments, tracks, layout, learn how to use these built in drummers that it has to
make drummer tracks, all the built in
synthesizers that it has. We'll do some
recording. I'll even lay down some guitar tracks. We'll talk about how to use EQs, compressors, in garage band. We'll even do some mixing and
mastering in garage band. And finally, we'll
talk about how to take your finished
tracks that you made in Garage Band and upload them to SoundCloud or even Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, anything,
and start selling them. We're gonna have a lot
of fun in this class, so please join us for Garage
Band for Mac OS. Here we go.
2. About Your Instructor: Hey, everyone. Welcome to
the class. My name is Jay. My full name is J Anthony Allen, but I go by just J. So, let's get started by
telling you a little about me, since we're gonna be
spending a lot of time together over the
course of this class. I am a composer, producer. I've worked on film, television, games, and also just creating
and releasing my own music. That is both acoustic and
electronic. I do a lot of both. I released a couple albums a few years ago where
that did pretty well. We got to in the top 20 of the CMJ EDM charts with
a couple of tracks. I also have a PhD in music,
which is pretty rare. That's that thing right there. And I have two master's
degrees right there and there and an undergrad degree in guitar performance, if
you can believe that. For many, many years, I was an academic, and I
taught at a university, meant several universities over the years and got tenure
in the whole thing. But last year, I decided to
give that all up and focus entirely on my own music and independent teaching
in classes like this. I find it much more
liberating and free, and I just enjoy it
a whole bunch more. I've worked with orchestras and ensembles all
around the world. I travel all around the world. I still do teach
in person a little bit at a summer
program in Italy. I have private lessons
that are available and all kinds of things
if you need extra help. So if you want to
know more about me, I'm around available. You can send me a question,
or you can search me online, and you'll find a
whole bunch of stuff. I've also written a few books. I have another book on pre composition
coming out real soon, but my most popular book is Music Theory for
electronic music producers. It's a real book. It's on Amazon. I encourage
you to check it out. It's been out for a few years, and it's doing really great. I'm really proud of that book. Okay, Enough About Me. I write a whole bunch of music. That's all you
really need to know. Alright, so enough about me. Let's talk about garage
band, what this program is, and some of our first
introductory stuff. So like setup versions,
things like that. This might seem kind of trivial and if you've already installed it,
you're past this. But there's a few
important things to know about the setup and
installation process, particularly in the virgin stuff that I would like to
talk to you about. So let's do that first. So let's talk about next
Versiin MacOS PC versions, all of that stuff
in the next video.
3. What is GarageBand?: Alright, so what is garage band? I'm going to tell
you, in my opinion, what I think garage band
is. And that is this. For many years,
there was a program, a professional audio
program called logic. Okay? So logic was
around for a long time. At some point, maybe a decade ago or so,
Apple bought logic. Okay, so logic was not an Apple product
for a long time, but then they bought logic. And they tweaked it and worked on it and
made it a little bit better. Made it a
lot better, actually. Logic is a great program. It still is. And Apple owns it. So what kind of sort of started happening around that time is that Logic was like
this kind of big, complicated professional
level audio production tool. So Apple started making garage band as kind of
like an entry level logic. So, the garage band that we have now is very similar to logic. It's a little easier to use. There's a little less options. So it's a great place
to start making music. You may eventually want to
graduate up to logic 'cause there's some things
you can do in logic that you can't
do in garage band. But there is a ton of stuff
you can do in garage band. I've seen people putting out professional tracks that
they're playing in clubs, all kinds of stuff, and they're making them
in garage band. So it is entirely
possible to stay your whole life in garage
band. That's totally great. But do know that if you get
really good at garage band, there is another tool that is so similar that
you'll be able to use a lot of what you already know if you decide
to move up to logic. So just a thought out there. Now in this class,
I'm going to be using garage band version 10.4 0.8. If you're on an earlier
version, that's fine. If you're on a later
version, that's fine. Just know that that's
the version I'm on. So if there are very subtle
differences in your version, could be that you're
on a newer version or an older version. Most of those things
that are different are subtle things,
things about, you know, like this knob is
here instead of here, stuff like that, things that
you can easily work around. If there are major updates, I'll probably make a new
version of this class or point them out in the Q&A
section for each video. So just look at that and if there's anything wildly
different, I'll point that out. Okay, one more thing
about the version. Garage band exists on a whole bunch of
different platforms, and that can be a
little confusing, okay? So I am on a Mac, okay? So if you're on a
Mac, things are going to look exactly
the same as I am. I don't believe there is a Windows version
of garage band. There are similar
programs for Windows, but I think garage band is
Mac only because Apple owns. However, it is not
McIntosh only. There are versions for iPad
and iPhone, basically IOS. There are IOS versions. This class, I'm going to use the MacOS version
in this entire class. Now, if you want to follow
along using the iPad version, I think it's going to
be about 95% the same. So there will be a
lot of stuff that looks slightly
different on the iPad, but more or less the same. So you'll be able to
follow along with the iPad in this class
just fine, I think. However, I am planning on making an iPad specific
class after this. So if you are on an iPad, you might want to look
around for that class. If it's not out yet,
it'll be out shortly. But even without that, you'll
be fine following along on iPad, MacOS or iPhone. Virtually anything
you can install garage band on is going
to work just fine. Okay, let's move on to talk
about installation and setup.
4. Installation and Setup: Okay. Before we continue, I just want to point out one
kind of weird thing. I just Googled garage
band for Windows, and I found all kinds
of shady sites saying, like, Here's a download link
for garage band for Windows. Those are not real. Those are Those are scams, so
don't click on those. You're going to
destroy your computer. Okay. So how do we
download and install this? So I'm going to go to the Mac App store or the IOS app store,
whichever you like. But go to the app store,
search for garage band, and it's gonna be right there. Oh, there's an update for me. I might actually
just do that. So I'm gonna download a little update. I always try to keep everything
as update as possible, especially for these classes. Okay, so we're going
to download it here. As soon as this is
done, downloading, we're going to hit Launch
and get it all running. Now, when you do launch it, you can go to the settings, which is going to be up under the Apple menu in
the top left corner. However, you don't need
to do that quite yet. We're gonna go
over the settings, and we're going to
talk about how to connect amity keyboard, microphone, record,
all that stuff, okay? So we don't need to get
too bogged down in it yet. Let's just have fun, okay? So the next thing I want to do is just make
some music, okay? So in the next video, it's
going to be kind of long. I'm just gonna make a
track from scratch, okay? You can zip forward and just see how I do different
stuff if you want. The goal of this next
video is just to get you exploring garage band. So we're going to
do that, and then we'll talk about saving. I'm going to give you
that session so you can use it to play around and have some fun
with garage band, and then we'll get
into the nitty gritty of how to do
virtually everything. So let's make a fun
and silly track, and then we will continue on to setting up instruments and tracks and learning
about the interface. So, off we go.
5. Let's Make a Song!: All right. Let's make a track. So I've been kind
of in this, like, synth wave cyberpunk
kind of vibe lately, so I'm going to
make one of those. So I've just hit Command New. I've got a blank slate here. So let's go New empty project. Go look at our details. Oh, and by the way, when I'm making a track right
now in this video, all I'm doing is showing you
the possibilities, okay? So I'm gonna blaze
through some stuff. Gonna be like, Whoa,
how did he do that? Don't worry. What I'm trying to do in this video is just
show you the possibilities. In the next 50 videos, we'll be talking
through everything I do in this video, okay? I am going to try to talk
through what I'm doing here, but if you miss something, we're going to go
over everything again slowly and in a lot
more detail, okay? So we're just having
fun to get started. So I'm going to look
at these details. Tempo, let's go actually
down just a little bit. Maybe ten. Let's do C minor
as our key. 44 is good. Input device. This is really
cool because we can use our phone as an input device
or any other input device. There's no other DA that
I know that can do that. So pretty cool.
Our output device, you'll see this around
this whole class. Your output device should
probably be like built in out or something like
that. Mine has to be this. This is like my capture software so that I can make these videos. So yours won't say that.
But, okay, let's choose. And now we have big blank slate. Software instruments, audio
instruments or a drummer. Let's start with let's
talk about the drummer. Let's make some drums real quick here. I'm
going to hit Create. Okay, so when I
created this drummer, we will go into a lot of
detail on how drummers work. But basically, I can
choose my drummer. They have names
for these people. This is Kyle. But I'm
going to go to electronic. They don't have a
the perfect genre for me. So I'll go here. Alright? So now I got
Ronnie playing the drums. I find this, like, name
image thing kind of silly, but whatever, it's cool. It works. That's a
little too janky. Let's try Big room IDM. That's a little
more what I want. So I can click on
these in real time. That's actually
kind of cool, but not what I want at this moment. Okay, so let's hear that again. Let's just loop this section. Okay. Cool. All right. Let's add another track.
Let's add a synthesizer. Let's go there. I want
something kind of bright. Let's do keyboards. Real kind of FM sounding. That's kind of cool.
Let's lay that down. Why not? Okay, I'm gonna grab it when it
comes back around. One, two, three, four. There we go. All right. You know, I know it's kind of weird the way it
doesn't really show you mini notes until after you've recorded them,
but that's how it works. Okay, I can double
click in here, go to. This is what we call
the piano roll editor. We'll go over how this works. I'm just going to
tighten up my playing. Basically quantizing it here. I want it just to
be really light on the grid. We'll explain. How do we do this later. But, okay, let's add maybe, like, an arpeggiated
synth. So another one. Let's do, like, um, I really want I'm trying to use only standard stuff that comes
with garage man right now. Um Okay. So let's try this. This isn't my favorite
sound, but it's there. It's nice and
simple. We're going to I'm gonna just a
C minor chord down. Okay? 'Cause
remember we said our C minor actually maybe
a C minor seven. Okay, that's cool. If you don't know what
chords to put down, like, I'm talking about C minor seven and stuff like that. We'll talk about that a
little bit more later, but you might want to explore
some music theory classes. Here we go. Okay. There's our first chord. Now I'm going to do
something little different. I'm not gonna play
in these next cords. I'm going to tighten this up. Down here. And I'm
gonna duplicate it. And now I'm gonna switch chord. So let's put something
different here. The base note I went
to was a B flat, so don't worry about this. That's kind of cool.
So I have a B flat, a D, and an F. Let's go B flat, D, F, and B flat. Okay? Then here, I think I
went to a D. Is this a D? Let's double check. No, I
went to an E flat there. No, this is a D. Okay, so let's make this longer, but we don't want it to loop. So we got to grab it down here. Let's grab that. And let's put some kind of Dcord in
the key of C minor. Let's go to, like,
a G cord on this. Yeah, so G D, D flat. Oops, not this. Not that stuff sharp.
Let's take that up to a G, and then we'll go back to maybe our first chord for the end. Placing notes like this can be a really tedious kind of thing. This is where music theory
comes in really handy, but you'll get it. You'll learn music theory.
Alright, let's check it out. I dig that chord. It's weird,
but I kind of like it. I I should point out that I'm filming this class like four days after Halloween. So there you go. What else do we need? I
kind of want some vocals. Maybe some affects or something. This isn't very synth
wavy, but that's okay. Let's see what's in this
pack. Supreme lead. A little drive on
it. It's not bad. Let's take this chord
progression down here and line it up and see We need
to arpeggiate this. So let's add an arpeggiator. It's complicated. Alright, cool.
Let's add a vocal. Okay, so I just hopped
on over to splice. If you're not
familiar with Splice, that is a website where you can just get
billions of samples. I went over there, I found
a cool vocal I liked. Alright, I'm going
to drag this vocal right in from
splice. Here it is. We go to drop it right there. Alright, now, rhythmically,
it might not line up. I already know this
is in C minor, so it should be pretty good. What I kind of want
to do, though, is I don't want to have
that come in here. Let's maybe have this be the music we've written
so far, be an intro, and then we'll make the vocal
come in right after it, and we'll chill out
those synths when the vocal enters to give
it a little more space. Okay, so I'm going
to take all of this. So I'm just shift clicking, copy. I'm going to go out here. I'm going to duplicate it. We'll have a vocal
come in there. Now, I think we're going
to have to chop up this vocal and align it a
little bit better. But but we will see Let's just put it there
and see what happens. I'm a big fan of, you
know, see what happens. So let's take our drummer
and not loop our drummer, but just extend our drummer. I think that'll give
us, like, a fill. 'Cause remember, this isn't
a normal audio track. This is, like, a weird
drummer audio track, right? Alright, let's hear
what we've got so far. Oh, yeah, and then here let's take out this synth
when the verse enters and the vocal
enters. I should do. By show while we listen to shop Bang. It fit pretty well,
actually, that random vocal. Um, let's quit, come
up with a chorus. So let's extend our beat out. Well, let it figure out
what it wants to do. And what can we do
with this vocal for a chorus? Let me
hear it one more time. Bye tim. I have to say. I listen to Shuang. Okay, let's bring this
back in for sure. Maybe that will make that the
lead thing for this chorus. And then maybe for this vocal. We'll do Ideally, I would find another
vocal by the same singer. But since I don't think we're
going to find that quickly, let's just chop up et's chop out a bunch of this and just give us those oohs and we'll just
kind of deal with those. So I'm just chopping up a little piece of it
and then copying and pasting. Let's just do that. This is kind of weird, but I
think it kind of might work. I'm just really filling
in this vocal stuff. What I really want you to
see here is how I'm editing, what I'm doing to
make this sound good. We keep jumping way out like
that because we're landing on we're pasting where
the playhead is, which is way forward. This is the playhead.
This thing. Okay. Now, in order for this
to work a little bit better, I need to change my
core progression. So let's go out here, leave our drums
alone with our bass. We're in the key of C minor. So something cool to do for
the chorus would be like a G Then maybe. Then
maybe a C minor. Then maybe an A minor, then some kind of D. A D and another D.
How about a occupier? Okay, so our notes
here are G C D. Cool. All right, we don't need
that last bit. Maybe we do. So we need to go out one
more bar for that. By. Bob Bobby. Oh. Oh. Boy. Alright, I was gonna change the chord progression
to conform to that baseline, but that was pretty red. I kind of liked it. So
let's stick with that. Um, you know what
I could even do? Watch this. Let's
take all of this. Um Take all of this. Copy it, and let's
put it again here. But as it enters let's
put this back in. Put that there and that
there and that there. And I kind of want
to add more drums. Let's add a second drummer. This is crazy, but
I really just want an added layer of high hats. Did that go all
the way back here? Okay, so let's just solo
this. I don't want that. I want something really
simple because we're laying it over top of so here, I want the
SnagonTmsPercussion, Cymbol I'll take,
kick I don't want. I mostly want high hats. And that. Okay. Let's take that. I'm just going to use this as a layer to, like, give this last chorus
a little extra groove. Okay? So now, when
that chorus comes in, it's going to feel really good. Okay, let's hear our song.
We'll wrap it up here. B, you'll be there this
year, I have to say. Oh my fa you don't is Santa fee. And we listen to oh baby babe babe Oh, babe. Oh, babe. Oh, baby. Oh, baby. Oh, baby. Oh, baby, babe. Baby baby Okay, cool. So if
this was one of my own tracks that I was gonna actually work on longer,
here's what I would do. I kind of like this, oh, baby, but it's too long. So something needs
to change here. We need more of a
kick to happen here. So I'd probably redo these high hats to make them a little more light and fast. So something crazy like that. Um, maybe add another bridge, and then verse chorus, put a structure to it, depending on what I find for the vocal. So that was fun. Let me
give you this track. You can download it,
play around with it, arrange it, redistribute it. You can do whatever
you want with it. I'm making no copyright
claim to this track. So I'll give you that
session in a minute. But first, let's
talk about files, sessions and how we download and share stuff so that I can
get this to you correctly.
6. Files and Sessions: A when we talk
about saving files, there's two different things that we might be talking about. One is exporting our session
or bouncing our session, and the other is just
saving our work. So let's talk about
the first one first. So what we have
here is a session. We have individual tracks. If I take this file
and try to play it in Apple Music or upload it to Spotify or
something like that, it's not going to work
because they don't support this kind of file, right, with all these
different tracks on it. So we need to export it. We need to render it as
a single audio file, right, like music
that we can play. We'll talk about how
to do that at the end. It's pretty simple,
but there are some settings I would like
to go over before we do it. So we'll talk about how to
export your track so that it can go straight to
Spotify or Apple Music, SoundCloud, whatever you want. But for now, we just want
to save this session so that I can upload it and you can download
it and play with it. So to do that, we're going
to go to File Save As. And this is a garage
band project. So we're going to name it, um Dark fun Track. I don't know. And I'm going to put it
in this place for you. I like to name them with numbers so that I can keep track of all these files
while I'm doing stuff. And there it is.
Dark fun Tracks. Okay? Now let's go look at it. So if I go to Finder
and look at it, Dark Fun Track, this is a
garage band project file. This is actually
a hidden folder. It's a folder with a whole
bunch of stuff in it. What's in it doesn't matter. You don't need to dive into
that. You can if you want. But the point is, if you take this file and open
it on your computer, everything should
play correctly. So I'm going to give
that file to you next. You can download, open it, and just start playing around.
Just start making music. You don't need to know
what you're doing. The best way to
learn these kinds of programs is just to start
poking around, okay? I'm going to walk you through
everything in this class, but the best thing
you should do right now spend an hour just poking
around with this file. Try to make some music,
adjust some things, explore the program on your
own for about an hour, and then we'll see you back, and we'll start going over
instruments and tracks. Alright. See you then.
7. Your First Window: Okay. Here we are. We've launched the program, and it looks like this, okay? So when you launch it
for the first time, you're gonna get a
window that looks like this. What do we want to make? A new empty project. We can
look at recent projects. We can look at some of it's
learn to play music things. We're not really going to
spend any time on this here, but please check this out. Piano lessons, artist
lessons from other people. This is something they
started doing recently, that's fun. Lesson store. You can buy more
lessons with people and project templates, an
electronic songwriter. These templates are
actually really great. So you can choose
one if you want, but I'm not going to this time. I'm going to go back
to new project. So before we click on
New Empty Project, we've got some details
here that you saw me use when we did
our own track. We can set our key, our tempo. We can tap a tempo,
time signature, our input and output devices. What's important to
know here is that all of this stuff can be set
up or changed later. So you're not married
to any of this stuff. Set it up here if you want,
but you can change it later. I don't really want that. Alright, so I clicked
on New Empty Project, and now I get this create four
different types of tracks. Okay? Now, here's what we got. We have Mi tracks, software instrument tracks,
okay? Drummer tracks. We've seen that.
Mice Or Line audio. We'll come back to that
guitar or bass tracks. This is like, if we want to plug in our
guitar to this. Do. Okay? So here's what
we need to know. Mi Tracks, also known as a
software instrument track. Those two things are synonymous. This means we are going
to select an instrument like those synthesizers that we used in the previous track. And we're going to either
draw in mini notes with the mouse or we're going
to play a midi keyboard. So I have a mini keyboard here on my desk
that you can't see. There. Here's my mini keyboard.
Actually, I have two. I have this one, which
is like my main one, it rolls back. I'm
really proud of that. And then I have this kind of
goofy mini keyboard here, too, that does some
weirder stuff. But this one is my main one. So when I load up a mini
track, this is what I'm using. Okay, so that's a mini track. Drummer tracks,
you've seen me use. Those are these weird
almost AI kind of thing that is built
into garage band. We'll look more at those
in a minute. Mic or line. Basically, this means, like, do I want to plug a mic in so I can record my voice or anything that requires a
microphone, actually. That's how we do that.
And guitar or bass, do we want to plug
in a guitar or bass? These two things are
technically kind of the same. They're just saying, these
are audio tracks, right? They both say audio tracks. Um, we'll go through
how to do all of that. I actually this
section, I think, more on recording a
little bit later, but we'll put our toe
in the water now. Okay? So these are our
four types of tracks. Alright? So, let's dive into each of these and see
what they can do. We'll start with the
software instrument one. So I'm going to hit Create, and then we're going
to go to a new video.
8. Software Instruments: Alright, so we've loaded
a software instrument. Maybe I'll do it
again just one more time just to help
us get us started. So let's say don't save.
We're at this window, I'm going to click
Empty Project. I'm going to double
click whether or not I did any of
these details or not. I can double click
or hit that choose. And now this comes
up, and I'm going to hit Mi software Instruments. Okay. So now let's focus on
this area over here, okay? We'd like to call
this the browser. So anything so basically, these are all of your sounds. For now, we can get more.
We'll talk about that later. Okay? So we can click
on one of these and see the different presets
that are in it. These are all presets that
we can load and play with. Here's some Amba, vibes, percussion, guitars, Neat. Now, if you have this
symbol next to any of them or possibly all of them, it just means that you haven't yet downloaded these sounds. Okay, so just click
on one. Let's go to this electronic drum kit. That's kind of big. It's cool. Let's go to this base one here. Okay? Here are all
my possible things, but I'm going to download these. I'm going to click
right there. It's going to say, I need your password. And now it's downloading those
in the background, okay? So you might want to spend a few hours
just downloading these. They are going to use up
kind of a lot of memory. So you can save them to
an external hard drive. If you want, you would
do that in the settings. You would set that up. But
if you just download them, they're going to put them
on your main hard drive, which is probably the best place for them to be
right now, anyway. Okay, so any of these
can be played just by loading on them and
then playing our minim. Okay, now there's
let's talk about this mini keyboard business
for a few minutes, right? Because we might
want to set that up. If you have a midi keyboard, you can input notes
with your keyboard. There's also two other
ways we can input notes. You don't need a midi keyboard. I'm going to go out
on a limb here and say something that
most people don't say in electronic music or in any
kind of music production. And that's that don't get a keyboard if you don't
play piano, right? Like, don't get a keyboard. There are tons of other midi instruments that you could use. So if you play an instrument, get a mini version
of that instrument and do that and set that up
so you can play in notes. We'll talk more
about that shortly. But next, let's talk about this area down here a little bit more and the settings
for each of our presets, how we can make them our own.
9. Making Sounds: Alright, so we can
go through any of these sounds and customize
them to be our own. First, let's look up here at the library that
we're looking at. This has all sounds,
but there are more. This is showing us an aggregation
of all of this stuff. But if you want to zoom in more, keyboard collection, we can
just look at our keyboards. So here's a piano.
Let's go back to A. Now, you can see here we're
still just seeing pianos. Like, here's a nice piano. That's a pretty
nice piano sound. Great. If you're
stuck here like this, you're like, how do I get back? Go down here and grab
this little bar and go, whoop and slide it
backwards. There we go. Alright, now let's go
to something cool. Let's go to a
keyboard. Okay, let's say we like this, but
we want to adjust it. So we're gonna go down here
to these controls, okay? So we've got a couple things here under the track heading. We've got keyboard
sensitivity we can adjust. Extra plug ins,
we're going to talk about external plug
ins later, okay? So file that away for a minute but that's
how we get there, but I want to set
that aside for now. Now we've got some controls. Now, every one of these is might have slightly
different controls, right? Like, if we scrub
through a few of these, we're going to see
different kinds of things happening here. And it all depends on what
kind of instrument it is. So let's go back where were we? Fairy tale bells.
Okay. So here we've got some controls for this particular sound.
Pitch modulation. Pretty neat. Okay? Compressor we're
gonna talk about how compressors work later
when we talk about mixing, but this is basically gonna
if our sound is, like, all over the place in volume,
crank up a compressor, and it's going to make sure that it's not all over
the place with volume. Like, you've got
really loud stuff and really quiet stuff in
the same instrument. Drive is like distortion chorus is kind of a doubling effect. Delay is going to add All
that extra stuff at the end, and reverbs can make it
sound like you're in a little tiny room like I
am now or in a big cave. So each of these is going
to be slightly different, but you can dial your
own things in here. And down here, you can save it. So let's save it as fairy tale
bells Underscore J Custom. Sure. Save that and
now check it out. User patches, fairytale
bells J custom. Now I've made my
own preset, right? So now I can just load that up whenever I want,
double click on it. Now it's on this track, and I can start playing
it and recording. Okay. We do have more
controls down here. We're going to look
at this window in a little more
detail in a minute. But I want to just focus
on sound making stuff. Okay? We're going to learn
what this does and that does, and that does shortly. But for now, let's
move on, and let's talk about that
midi setup stuff. If you've got a keyboard, you're itching to use, let's do it.
10. MIDI Setup & Musical Typing: Okay, next, let's talk about MIDI setup and
getting a keyboard to work. So we're going to make our
first trip to the settings, so we're going to go to
garage band settings. All right, so now I
want you to click on this tab at the
top, Audio and MIDI. Okay? Now, this audio
input and output stuff, just hold on to
that for a minute. We're going to come
right back to it. But I want to focus
us on MIDI, okay? That's these two
menus down here. Now, here's the deal. This is a little deceptive and confusing the way they
have this set up. For me, anyway, they
have it set up here to be and this is true of a lot of the philosophy
behind garage band. And that is, they're going to hide the ugly bits
from you, right? So they don't want you to see all the nitty
gritty of the settings. They're trying to
make it easy for you. But someone like me, who's
used to dealing with, like, you know, Ableton,
Pro Tools, logic, all of the heavy duty stuff, that's kind of
frustrating because it's hiding the thing
that I want to see, but you don't need to see that. Basically, for most
MIDI controllers, all you need to do
is plug it in with the USB cable, and
it should work. Load up an instrument, start banging on it and see
if you got sound. If you don't go here and hit Reset MIDI drivers and
then see if there's any software that your keyboard requires that you install. A lot of them on Mac don't,
but some of them do. So just look at the instructions that
came with your keyboard. There is another way. If
you don't have a keyboard, there is this thing
called musical typing, and a lot of production
software has this built in now. So let's take a
quick look at it. I'm going to go up to Window. And I'm going to do
show musical typing. You can also get this with
Apple K. Show musical typing. Now, what this is is we're
going to turn this keyboard, which I sometimes refer to as keypad or Quirty keyboard just so it's not confusing
with mini keyboard. Well, we're going to turn
this into a musical keyboard. And this is how
we're going to do it with what's on the screen. Okay? Here's our
sustained pedal is the tab key, and then
here's our notes. I can click on them
on the screen, or I can just play this way. Whoa, I just made
some crazy stuff. But that's how you can do it. Now, if you want a trick
to remember what notes are we on your midi keyboard,
here's what I always do. They're almost always the same. It goes ADSF. The trick to remembering
what notes are where is F and G are actually
the pitches F and G. Okay? And then so you can kind of go up and down from there. And you can switch
octaves with Z and X. You can see them shifting the range we're
looking at up here. So now we're gonna
be really low. Go up. I'm gonna hit X. Now we're up another octave. X. X. Oops. X. X. X. Right. So you can switch
octaves that way. This is great if you're working
on a laptop or something, I use this when I'm on a plane a lot, just a monkey around. So check it out. It's a really It's not my favorite way
to deal with stuff. I would rather work
on a music keyboard because, you know,
that's my background. But it's a pretty good
way to do stuff too. You can do chords. Just playing, you know, the notes
on your keypad. So explore that for me.
11. Audio Tracks: Alright. Let's jump
over to Audio Tracks. To add another track, I'm going to hit this
little plus button up here. That brings back this friendly little
window that we know. So we can do either
of these two. These are both
audio tracks, okay? So I'm gonna hit MCR Line. All right. Now, there are a
few more settings there that we should
probably look at. So let's hit that plus again. I'm gonna hit MCR Line, and then I'm going to
hit this details button. Okay. Now, this is really
important for your setup. Input. What input
are we listening to? So I have a microphone
right here. It's being used for my voice. At the moment. So
this microphone is plugged into an
audio interface. We'll talk more about that
later on channel one. So I want to say input one. Now I want to hear my
instrument as I play to record. I'm going to translate this into something much more useful. I am wearing headphones. That's what that
should say, okay? So I want to hear my instrument
as I play to record. In other words, let's say
I got a flute, right? Wait. I have a PhD
in this stuff. How's the flute go?
This, this. There we go. That feels right. I don't have a PhD in how
to play the flute. So let's say I'm
recording a flute, okay? If I say, Yes, I want to hear this
while I play it. The way it's going
to happen right now is I'm going
to play my flute. It's going to come out these speakers while
I'm playing it. Okay? It's basically
going to amplify me. It's going to
record it, but it's also going to come out the speakers that
I'm listening to. That means those
speakers are going to go into this microphone
along with my flute, come out the speakers
into my microphone, out speakers, into
my microphone, and this is what
we call feedback. We don't want that. If I'm wearing headphones,
then I can do it. Then I can let my sound go through my microphone
and then into my ears. It's not going to
feed back because the microphone can't
hear my headphones. So if I'm wearing headphones, yes, I can listen to this while
I record it if I want to. That's something that
some people like to do and some people
don't like to do. But if I'm not
wearing headphones, the answer to that is should
probably always be no. Alright, so now we
create our track. Alright, so now let's
talk about how to get audio into that track. So let's look at
our audio settings.
12. Audio Setup: Alright, let's delete
this Audio one. I'm going to click
on the track header. That's this part right here, and I'm just going
to press the delete key on my keyboard. So now I just have
one audio track. It's called Audio two. I could double click on that
and change the name of it. Let's call this vocals, or if we want to be
cool, we just write box. Okay, so here's my voice. Now, this instrument stuff over here doesn't matter.
There's no instrument. The only instrument for this one is this This is my voice. Don't worry. I'm not
going to sing, probably. So let's go to the settings and make sure everything
is set up perfectly. But I do want to point out that before we go
to the settings, we can already tell
that it is set up perfectly because we see my
voice coming in right here. Watch. It's slow. That's a
little concerning. If I do something fast, it takes a while for this
to respond. Watch. Weird. So we've got some latency problems that
maybe we can deal with. Let's go to settings, audio MIDI tab, and devices. This is what we care about.
Input and output device. Okay? Your output device
is your speakers. What are we What's going
to play the sound? That's what that
question is. So, for me, this is going to
Telestream audio capture. That's my, you know, capture
stuff to make these videos. But normally, I have this set to Universal
Audio Thunderbolt. That is this box right here. That box, which, if
we look at the back, that is where my
microphone is plugged in. You can see my
microphone coming in there that little on
the left side volume. So this thing handles
my microphone going in, and it also handles controlling
my speakers up here. And here, yes, I have a lot of displays.
It's kind of an issue. We'll talk more about
audio interfaces in later section when we dive
deep into actual recording. So my output device
is going to be this, but your output device
is going to be, your headphones, your
speakers, whatever they are. But if there's a
audio interface, it's gonna be that.
Input device. So actually, right now, it's using my phone
as my microphone. I didn't even realize that. So what I want to do is go up to Universal Audio Thunderbolt, and now it's connecting
to my audio interface. Now it's in my audio interface. Yeah. Cool. So now I'm listening
to my microphone. If you want to use your phone, you can just set up your phone right here
as a microphone. But I have an actual microphone, so I'm going to set that up. So now it's going
into there. So now. Okay, so now I'm just going
to go to my vocal track. If I go down here and look at these settings, here's my input. So I can change it
here if I want. Here's that monitoring thing. So if I turn this
on, it's going to play what I'm recording
through my speakers. Okay? So that's what
I'm doing right now. It sounds crazy to me. I'm at risk of feeding back
at any moment right now. So I'm gonna turn it off. Okay. All right. With all that set, this is
my volume for this track, and I can hit the
record button up here and start recording myself. Here I am. That latency is gone. So latency we saw in
the meters is solved. Yeah, that's right on
now. So, that's good. Latency is the time
it takes for me to record something to the time it takes for the computer to get it and show it on the screen and play
it back, potentially. It can be problematic if
you have a slow computer, I have a pretty fast computer. So we're doing okay. Alright, so we know how
to record a microphone. We know how to record
some midi stuff. Let's take a quick
look at getting just some pre made pre recorded
sounds into garage band. And I want to take
the opportunity to introduce Apple Loops to us. So let's go to a new
video and do that.
13. Apple Loops: Okay. Earlier, when I made that track, you saw me pull in some audio
loops, some audio files. So here's how you do that. You can drag in an audio file from any kind of browser window. Okay, so here's an audio file. If I drag it right
over into this area, it just loads, right? And it makes a new track.
Okay? Don't actually want that that's from
a different project. But here's what's really cool. You already have a whole
bunch of audio files already. You have something
called Apple Loops. I believe this comes
with garage band. It's about 15,000 audio files, and they're all tagged and
analyzed by Apple already, so that when you drag
them into your session, garage band will know these
particular kind of loops, garage band will know what key they're in, what
tempo they're in, and to some extent,
what genre they're in, and it'll let you adjust
them to fit your track. So it's going to
automatically make it sync to the tempo of our track, okay? So these are very
special audio files, special loops that are going to work when we pull
them into garage pan. They are located right up here in that little
curly cue thing. So I'm going to
click on it and we see all of our Apple loops. Okay? We can sort by sound pack, kind of like over on the other side and look at
all these different things. We can sort by instruments. We can say, give me
all of your vibes. Okay? We can sort by genre, descriptors, dry processed, a arrhythmic dissonant,
all kinds of stuff. So I can go here. Now,
here's all my audio files. You can see that ton of them
need to be downloaded still. Creepy. So, I haven't
downloaded all of them yet. The only ones that
are downloaded here, I think, are ones that
I've used before. I just downloaded them
as I needed them. But you can download
all you want. You can heart put a heart on them to
save it as a favorite. But once I find one I like, I'm just going to drag
it right over in there. And you're going to see
something magical happen. The magic thing is that no
matter how long this loop is, it's going to fit
perfectly on the grid. We're going to talk about
navigating this grid shortly, but it's going to
fit right there. It's just going to. If I
change the tempo, watch this. Here's my tempo up here, 120. Check it out. I can change the tempo, and the Apple loop is
staying right put. It doesn't care what
tempo we're in at all. If I go real slow, it's gonna play real slow. Recording myself. You can see how my voice is all stretched
out and dragged, but this one is pretty steady. It doesn't really
care. Speed up. That latency is gone. So latency, we saw it's
going to speed right up and just stay right on
top of the tempo, no matter what we set it to
because it's an Apple loop. Apple Loops have special powers that normal loops don't have. So explore these Apple loops. There are billions of
them here, not billions. There's like 15,000 or so. And I know that
because watch this. If I get rid of all of this
and I just go down here, I have 13,317 available to me. Not bad.
14. Drummer Tracks: Okay, let's talk
about drummer tracks. Let's add one. So we're
going to go over here. We're going to hit a
plus. Well, first, actually, let's get rid of
our Apple Loops window. We can do it two
ways. We can press this little curly
cue button again and get rid of this, like that. Or I think just about any window or area
within the program, you can kind of grab
its border right there, click and drag so
you move it around, but then just smash it to
the right and it goes away. Alright, so to add
a drummer track, we're going to hit
this plus, and we're going to go to drummer. Alright, and create. Alright, now we've
seen this before. This drummer thing
that garage band does, I think logic does it, too, but I've never seen
it anywhere else. This is just unique
to this program. So right out of the
box, it created Rock, Kyle, using this drum kit, okay? So we have three choices
we can make right away. That is, who is the drummer, the genre and the sounds
of their drum kit. Hey, so let's just solo this. Solo means this little
headphone icon. That means mute, everything except this track.
We call it solo. Alright, I'm gonna turn off my metronome. That's
this right here. Okay. Let's try punk rock. Max. Let's go back here.
Now, this, like, kind of AI drummer
thing is going to put fills where it thinks they
go and all that stuff. You can adjust those things. We'll look at that in a minute. Okay, so here's our
Max punk rock drummer. Okay? You could change our
genre if we wanted to. That's cool. Let's change
his drum kit, though. Let's go back to the beginning. So coal, kit. I like
that snare drum. Okay? So all of these are
just colorful names for kids. Naming sound presets is one of the hardest things
to do in the world. A lot of people like me, have our toddlers name
our sounds for us because we can make a sound or a drum
groove and then say, It sounds like Motown, sort of, but then your toddler
can come in and say, it sounds like burnt cookies, and then that's what you call it because naming sounds is hard. Anyway, so we can
set our drummer, our genre, and our kit here. But once we do set that, this groove that we get, we still have some controls
over it down here, okay? So let's dial in
those controls next.
15. Drummer Controls: Okay, so now that
we've got our drummer, let's look at some of
these controls down here. Okay, so here in this mix section and
remember this is going to be different for
different styles, right? They're going to have slightly different
looking things sometimes. So here, these basically
give us levels for each of our instruments or instrument groups,
like symbols. And we can also toggle
them just on and off. Let's say we don't want the kit. Turn that off. These symbols
are a little intense. Turn those off. Let's go
back to the beginning. Good. So we can do
whatever we want with it. Let's turn the kick on
and the symbols off. We can add some compression, which is going to just kind
of smooth out the volume. Again, we'll talk
about compression compression when we
talk about mixing, but it doesn't really
need a lot here. And then we can do a
little bit of effects. This is going to
be EQ and reverb. So we get more base
if this is lower. So I kind of like to run around. But there's more we can do. Let's go back up
here. Let's double click on this waveform. And now we get our
drummer controls. These are a little
bit different. Okay? These are going to show us our whole loop right here, okay? And some much more
specific controls. Okay? So we can use this
to go between loud, soft, simple, and complex. So if we want him to
play more complex, and this is like, we're directing
this drummer right now. We're directing Max right now. We're telling him, Hey, man, play some more complex stuff. Okay, so there's more snare. There's more kick. There's
a lot more going on. Play simple and loud. You Should probably
just loop this. Let's just loop this.
With that button. Okay, simple and loud. Complex and loud. Cool. Let's kind of split the
difference a little bit. And let's go to this
part of our diagram. So here we have all of
our instruments, right? So let's pull our symbols back
in. Start kick and snare. We can adjust how that hits. More percussion. Toms, I click on the Toms,
and we get them. Cymbols I don't like those toms. I'm pull this back. Okay.
More percussion. Tambourine. You can always have
more tambourine. Claps. Cool. Now I really don't like those toms.
Let's get rid of those. Here's fills. More fills. I was weirdly groovy for a minute there, so
I kind of into this. Okay, little bit of swing. It's not gonna sound
very good here. It kind of. So, you have a lot
of control over this virtual drummer to really make what you want.
It's kind of neat. You know, I got to admit
that as a, you know, professional producer
who's worked with a lot of different software
and is used to, like, really carefully placing sounds for his drums to make
my own drum patterns. This is I had to, like, poo poo this when it came
out and be like, Oh, scoff. I am too much of a professional
to use such a tool. But no, this tools
rad and that way of thinking is
dumb. End of story. Let's move on.
16. The 4-View Layout: Alright, so now we know
the basic kinds of tracks. I know we didn't look
at the fourth one, but the fourth one is really
the same as the vocal one. They're both audio tracks. We'll get into how to set that up to actually
record a guitar and stuff when we're recording
a few sections from now. Now, those things, those
four types of tracks, really just three, are your main bread and butter
of the software, right? Everything you do is
going to start with making one of those
kinds of tracks, okay? If you just want to pull
in outside audio files, what type of track do you want? You want either of
those last two, either of the audio tracks. If you make one of
those, you'll be able to pull in audio
of whatever you want. Now, in this next section, I want to just kind of
take a quick step back and do big picture overview of just what are we looking
at with this program? What are our layout
situation here. So, in garage bin, we have basically
four windows, okay? Now, when I say windows, I'm really talking about areas. This app likes to exist in
one single window, right? And I think that is so
that it stays universal between the iPad and Mac. And it's cool. We don't need a whole bunch of
windows flying around. I really like that. But there are four
main areas that I want us to explore and learn how they work
a little bit, okay? The first is the transport bar. That is this kind of
lighter gray thing up here. We call this the transport bar because way back in analog days, we had a thing that was like
our controller for, like, play, stop, record, and,
like, sat on our desk. And it was called a transport. That's basically what this is. It's a modern version of it. Computer version of
it. So this area at the top is called
our Transport. Now, this area at the
bottom, this window here, this is just called
our smart controls, and this window changes all
the time, as you're seeing. Any controls for
whatever we're looking at are going to
show up down here. Okay? We're always going
to get them down here. Third thing is our library. That's this area over here. That's where all our stuff is. A lot of our stuff
is, not all of it. And then the fourth big
thing is the timeline. That's all this. Timeline is where
your stuff goes. We look at time and
organize things over time. That's kind of the definition
of music for some people. Now, there are other
little windows that kind of come and go, like, our Apple Loops. This one is just like a
little project notes thing, which is really handy
and a few other ones, but mostly, those are the four areas of
the entire program. So let's dive in deeper on each one of those areas right now.
17. The Transport: Okay, let's talk about this transport and what
these controls do here. Now, one thing about me, I'm not a big fan of, you know, every single dial and button walking through
what everything does. The same way I'm not interested in telling you a long list
of key commands to memorize. You'll find those
when you're ready for a long list of key commands.
They're out there. I want to focus on the main
things that's going to get us making music as
quickly as possible, okay? So let's start with
the main stuff. How about right here? Okay? We've got Rewind forward. Jump. Usually, this means
jump to the beginning, play from wherever
the playhead is, record, and loop.
It calls it cycle. I'm going to call
it loop. You can see that the loop area is what is darkened right here. So that's what's going to loop. Okay? Now, over here in
this cool window, first, we have where our playhead
is, is what that's showing. So we're looking
at bars and beats. So Br two, beat one
is where it is, okay? So that's just showing us
where the playhead is. This is showing us our tempo. We can click and
drag to change it. This is showing us what
key it thinks we're in, which may or may not be right,
but it's actually pretty good and our meter, okay? Okay, so right here, there's a fun little button, and that's going to
let you change the way time is being shown in
the transport here. If we just switch it to time, we're just going to see,
you know, 2.6 seconds. That's what we've done
here. So, you know, you can toggle between
these however you want. I find when I'm working,
I prefer beats. But if I'm working to a film
or other media or something, sometimes I just need
time to make sure that I hit seconds and
things just right. But let's go back to beats
because I like that better. Now this little tuning
fork is a cool one. It's not going to do
anything right now because we're on
a drummer track, but if we go up to one of
our instrument tracks, and we click this, it's going
to show us a tuner. Okay? So I can play a note. I'm playing Middle C. Oh, actually, this is looking
for my audio input. So it's just giving
me a nice tuner, so I can try to figure out
if I'm singing in key. Uh, leave it to a guitar player to sing E. Um Anyway, so a quick
little tuner there. This is what controls
that count in. You saw that when I hit record, three, four, and then
it starts recording. So it's gonna count in four. If you don't want
that, turn it off. And then this is
just a metronome that we're going to
hear while we record. This is our overall
session volume. Okay? And then over here, we have notes that we can leave
for ourself about this project and the
Apple Loops button. Oh, we didn't go
over this stuff. So back over here, this is
show the Smart Controls. This is show the editor,
is slightly different. We'll talk about
the editor soon. This is a fun little button. It's like a quick
help. It might be handy to have this
open sometimes. If I click on it,
this little window pops up. There it is. It says Quick help. Now if I
put my mouse over something, it's going to tell me
exactly what it is. Okay? So you might want to just keep that open while
you're working. Then finally, this is show
or hide our library. Cool. Alright, let's go on to
the smart controls area.
18. The Smart Controls: Okay, the Smart Controls area
is this area at the bottom. Now, this area is the most
just kind of modular. It just changes depending
on what we're on. So let's click something
random. Here's a reverb. So we have some controls
in this main window. I want us to kind of focus
on this top bar right here because all this
main window changes for every single
thing that we're on, but these things at the
top generally don't. So track. That means we're controlling parameters
for this track. Okay? We also have some
master settings here, too. This is controlling
the parameters for the whole song, okay? This is kind of
our master track. So if we say, like, boost the highs here, it's gonna boost them
for the whole track. According myself. Here I am. That latency is on. So latency, we saw in the media. So this is kind of going to
mess up our whole track. So really subtle adjustments here if you want to do anything. Here's some more plug ins. You can get controls
of these plug ins by these little
middle parts here. This is going to
pop open something new and show you some controls. Talk about plug ins more later. Ka, you've also got this EQ. Every track has a cool
little EQ already set up so we can draw an EQ curve. Again, we're going
to talk about how to actually use EQs shortly. So if you know how to use
an EQ, this is great. If you don't know
how to use an EQ, hang around. We'll
get to it shortly. But that's about it for
the smart controls area. It just is very modular. So there's not a ton
to go into here. There is one other
button that pops up. That I want to try
to get to pop up. Oops, I got to be on track. There it is. It's this button. And this is an arpeggiator. You'll see arpeggiators pop up a few different places in
garage band, but this is one. So we can click on one and
then we can set some styles. Arpegiator is what makes it. So when you play a
chord, instead of going, B with the chord, it goes, pop up, pop up up pop, pop up, pop, pop, pop up, right? That's what we did in this little silly little track
that we made the other day. This fun little track that
we made when we started, it used an arpeggiator to get those notes
going up and down and up and down and moving like that rather than
just playing chords. So this is where you'll
find your arpeggiator and then a bunch
of presets for it. Alright, let's go on and
talk about the library.
19. The Library: All right. We know a little
bit about our library. We know that we can narrow down our options here by
selecting something there. We can search right here. So if we want, like, dubstep, we can see if we have
any files named dubstep. We have Dubsmash what is that? So. Doesn't matter. I can clear that search
with that little X there. Here's user stuff,
stuff that I've made, and then here is a whole
bunch of other stuff. Don't forget that you can
save your own presets here by hitting that save button at the bottom
after you adjust them. You can also switch here kind of scrub through
stuff by going like this. So you can audition
different sounds this way by scrubbing through here or just using your arrow key
and going down down down, do, do, da da down I
think it's a little bit faster to use the arrow keys, but however you like to do it. Alright, let's talk
about the timeline.
20. The Timeline: Okay, the timeline is
actually fairly complicated. There's a lot of stuff
in the timeline. Basically, what we have here is time going from
left to right, and we put things down here,
and we move them around. Okay? That's the easy part. Let me go over some of the big
picture stuff that's here. For each track, we get
some controls, okay? This little headphone
icon means solo. That means mute,
everything else. I just want to hear
this track, okay? This one means mute. That means don't
listen to this track. Turn it off. Okay? We've
got a little icon here. I think you can change
these icons somehow. Yeah, there you go. Control click on it. You can put whatever icon you want. Self. Cute I love how my weird little thing
turned into this weird, like, beat poet gorge self. Um. That latency is gone. So latency, we saw in the
meter. That's so fun. Anyway, um, Okay, this button up here is your
they call it catch playhead, but it basically means the playhead is going
to follow along. It's a little easier to listen
to some stuff that way. Over here, we have the volume of the track and the
panning of the track. This is like panning
means is it on the left or on the
right speaker, right? For example, if I go to
our drums and I say, put them all the
way to the right, you should now only
hear these drums in your right headphone
or right speaker. Cute. That's legal. That should
only be in your right, and now it should
only be in the left. Now, if it's not in
the right or left, it's possible that
sometimes when I upload these videos to the
different platforms that I sell them on, some of them strip the panning away from the audio tracks. They like, compress it down. I don't know what's going on, but that might be happening. If it is, just trust me, that that's what panning does, moves things left to right. But all of our editing is going to happen
here in the timeline. So we need to get really
comfortable with it. So the whole next
section of this class, we're going to devote to really digging in
to the timeline. And there's a plane
flying over right now. So the next section, we're going to dive into the timeline, working on the timeline, editing, importing sounds and
really start making music. Alright? So here we go.
21. Reading the Time and BPM: Okay. Okay. Read that.
Okay. Here we go. Okay. So now we're looking
at our big content area. The first thing I want us
to do here is understand how to see and
read time on this. It's easy to see kind of
what's happening here. We've got some tracks, and, you know, we can
move them around in time just by clicking and
dragging them, right? But what you can't easily see here is how long are
we looking at here? Like, is this an hour long? Is this 5 minutes long? I don't really know. So I know. I can tell, but it's
because I know how to read this grid at the top.
So let's do that now. Okay, so you see this grid, one, three, five, seven, nine. Why is it only odd numbers? It's only because
of my Zoom level. If I zoom in, which I can
do with a two finger pinch, like so, I can do
like this Mmmmmm. Oops. I'm in the wrong spot. There we go. I can do like this. Or You can do by, I believe, option and then scroll wheel
on a normal mouse. Okay, so if I zoom
in farther and go all the way back to the
beginning, I'm zoomed way in. We'll get more numbers one, two, three, four, five. Okay. So before we were
zoomed out so far, it was only showing us
every other number, but now we're zoomed in farther.
We can see every number. It's a 612. Hello? No. It wouldn't be a 612 number. And there wouldn't
have been a pause. Okay. Uh, ****. We kind of lost
what it was doing. Okay, so now I can
see every number. Now, what are those numbers? Those numbers are measures. Okay? So this is one measure, two measures, three
measures, four measures. Okay? Now let's
look at the ticks. The ticks, it's just
like a ruler, right? The big ticks, this one, this one, and this one, these are beats. Okay? So beat one is at the
beginning, beat two, beat three, beat four, and then the next measure. Don't understand rhythms
and counting and stuff, you can, again, check
in music theory class, check music theory classes. But basically, you can see
the kidding here, one, two, three, four, one, two,
three, four, right? You see that on that
waveform. Okay, so every number is a
downbeat, okay? But we can zoom in farther, and this is where it
gets a little confusing. Sooner or later, if we
zoom in far enough, we're going to see a two or even a three digit number, okay? Like this, it's
going to be 1.2 0.2. The way to read
that is to kind of, uh, Almost think of it
not like one number, but three different
numbers, okay? The first number, all
the way on the left, the first number is going to
be the bar you're on, okay? We're on bar one.
The second number is going to be what beat
you're on? We're on beat two. And the third one is going to be which 16th note
you're on, okay? So we're on the
second 16th note. So bars beats 16th notes. If we go back one, here
we have just two numbers. You can assume the third number is a one when you just
have two numbers. So bars beats 16th. So we're on the first
bar, the second beat, and the first 16th note of it, which is where we
are right there. Okay? So let's go
way up somewhere crazy and try to
figure out where we are. How about Ray here? One, two, one, 145,
a fourth number. Alright, let's dissect that. We know what the first
three numbers are, right? Well, let's go way up higher. Here we go. We will find one of those four
digit numbers, though. Alright, let's go on this one. 27248 dot 81. Where are we in this music? Well, we are at the
27th measure, okay? We're at the second beat
in the 27th measure. We're at the fourth, 16th
note in the 27th measure. And then we're at the
81st frame, I think. I'm not really sure.
Different programs call this last thing,
different things. But you can see
there's nine of them. This is 81, and this is 89, so there's eight
of them, I guess. It's really, like, such I mean, we're talking milliseconds here. So you don't I never really
deal with the fourth number. In fact, most programs don't
ever have a fourth number. This is probably about as zoomed in as you're going
to normally be, and we have two
digit three digits. So why is this important? Why do you care about
all this? Here's why. If you're working on something
and you're like, Okay, I need a melody that goes up and then down and
then does this thing, or I need this drum pattern, and it's going to
go kick, snare, kick, snare, high
hats, whatever. You're working, but you don't realize that you're
super zoomed in, then after you make that thing,
you're going to play it, and it's gonna go, it's
gonna last two milliseconds, because you're so zoomed in. So keep track of just
where you are and how zoomed in you are so that, um, you know where
you are in the music. That's it.
22. Importing Audio: Alright, let's get some
audio into our timeline. There are two ways
we could do that. Now, first, let
me just point out something and make sure we're all on the same
page about this. We have three different
types of content that can happen in our piece,
in our timeline. Okay, so terminology wise, garage band likes to call each
of these little chunks of things regardless of what
they are, are region, okay? So this is a region. This is an audio region because it has a waveform in
it, so that's audio. This is a midi region
because it has these lines in it that show MIDI data that looks like that. It's different than
an audio file. This is a drummer region. This is just weirder. It's kind of an audio
file, but it's just weird. It's these weird drummer things
that garage band can do. So three different
kinds of regions. And each region has to go
on its correct track, okay? Drum regions can only
go on drum tracks. I think let's try moving a
drum region to a midi track. And yeah, it gives
me this error. It says, Not a drum track. So drum regions can
go on drum tracks. Midi regions can
go on midi tracks, and audio regions can
go on audio tracks. We can tell the
difference over here by seeing, there's
a drum machine. That's a drum.
That's a drum set. This is a synthesizer, and
these are audio tracks. They just have this
waveform here, right? So that's how the
tracks are laid out. Now, when we're importing audio, two ways we can get audio
into a garage band, audio files, I should say. One is just to drag
them in. You can find things in our library over here, all of these different sounds. These are mostly
instruments, though. The only way to really the
way to get really good sounds just as audio files or loops would be to go over to our Apple loops that
we already know about. So if we go to an Apple loop, we can find one, and we
can drag it right in. If you drag it to an empty area, it's going to make a track for whatever you're
dragging in there. So if I'm dragging
in mini stuff, it's going to make a mini track. If I drag in audio, it's
gonna make an audio track. So I can drag it on a
track that already exists. I could drop it right here,
and it would be fine. I could drop it up here
on an audio track. That's fine or a blank space, and it's going to
make a new track. I can also just drag
stuff from the finder. Here are here's a big project I'm working on, doesn't
matter what it is. But these are audio files, so I can just drag one right over in there and
just plop it down. Cool. Actually, it looks like it sinks the tempo to
that. That's kind of fun. By, you'll be sure,
I have to say. Different keys, but kind of fun. Anyway, Um, so you
can drag audio in. Now, the second way to get audio files in to garage
band is to record them. So in the next big chunk, we're going to do a bunch
of stuff about this, but then we're going to
jump down to recording, and I'll pull out maybe
a guitar or something, and we'll actually focus a
whole section on recording. Okay? So that is
our second way of recording something
into garage band, which we'll devote a whole
bunch of time to in a minute. For now, let's
talk about ways of getting Midi into
your session. But
23. Importing Midi: Alright, let's talk about
getting Midi into your session. Oh, with audio, there were
two different ways to do it. With Midi, there are three. I don't know why my voice went way up high for a minute there. That
was kind of fun. Okay, so three ways
we can do it with MI. First, we can import a MIDI file the same way
we import an audio file. You'll actually find
some MIDI files. I think in Apple Loops,
you'll find some. You can see these
icons are audio files, but there are MIDI
files in here, like this when you have just this kind of icon,
those are MIDI files. Like, let's MIDI files are really small
versus audio files, which tend to be a bit bigger. So, um, so let's download
these real fast. There we go. And then, you know, I can
drag them onto a new track. Now, remember, midi files
have to go on midi tracks. Audio files have to
go on audio tracks. This looked like it
was gonna let me drop this onto an audio track. What's it going to
do when I let go? Because this is a midi region. So if I put it in an audio
track, it should not work. I actually don't know
what it's going to do. Interesting, converted
it to an audio file. It's generally not going to
be what you want it to do. If it's a MIDI file, you probably want it
to stay a MIDI file. But that's up to.
So that's way one. We can just drag a MIDI file in. Way two is we can record which
you've already seen us do. We can record with
a midi instrument, with a keyboard, with a midi guitar, with
whatever you want. And we'll talk a little bit more about that
in just a minute, but you've seen me do that
already with some of these. I think this baseline, I just
played in on the keyboard. The third way you can get MIDI into your session
is just to draw it. Let me show you. I'm just going to go out
to a random spot, click on a MIDI
clip and then say, I'm going to control click right here anywhere on any blank
area in a MIDI track, and I'm going to say
create MIDI region. That's going to make a blank
chunk of MIDI stuff, right? So I'm going to open it
it's gonna be out here. Here it is. Then inside
that region, again, I can just control click
to create a note and then Put it here. I can copy it, add more notes. I'm just option clicking and
dragging to make more notes. This area is called MIDI Editor. I think we've seen it a
few times now already. We'll spend some more
time talking about how to get notes into that
in just a second. In fact, let's do
that right now. Let's go to a new
video and talk about how to get around inside
the piano roll editor.
24. Using the Piano Roll Editor: Okay, let's talk about using
the piano roll editor. That's this thing, okay? Now, we call it the
piano roll editor because way way, way back, like 150 or so years ago, we had this thing
called a player piano. Maybe you've seen one of these, but it had this role in it
and little holes punched out. And as it spun, air would go through
those holes, and it would actually
physically play the piano notes.
They're really cool. You can still find
them some places. Player piano or sometimes
they were called pianola. But the piano roll editor is basically a digital
recreation of that. The piano roll Editor is
not unique to garage band. Virtually every audio
application has it in it. If you can work with midi stuff, it has a piano roll editor. In fact, the whole basis of this music theory textbook
that I wrote is that it's music theory using only the piano roll editor and not traditional music notation. Anyway, here's how we use it. So basically, wherever
there's a note, we're going to play that note
right there for that long. If we want a note to be longer, we can grab the end of it,
click and drag shorter. We can move it up just by
clicking and dragging. And you can see what note we're on by looking
over here, right? So we're kind of looking
at a sideways piano. You can see the dark lines and the dark gray
versus the light gray. That's the black and
white keys on the piano. So we're just
stretching a piano out. There's one other key element
to the piano roll editor, and that is something
called velocity. You can see it here where it's telling me the velocity is 99. Velocity is volume. It's just like the midi word for volume. So if we want to
get the velocity, we can go up to this button up here and now we can
see the velocity. Each note gets a little
dot and we can adjust it by clicking and
dragging on it. That's going to make
the note quieter. So the lower the note is here, the quieter it's
going to be, the higher it is here, the
louder it's going to be. You can also one last
thing about this. If you just hold down
the command key, you can get kind
of a pencil tool and just kind of
start drawing notes. Right? And then you side of it. You can highlight a bunch of
notes and do stuff together. So that's how the piano
roll editor works. Now, if you're an old
school person like me, you might be like, Oh, I just wish I had
traditional notation. Well, we sort of do.
Let's talk about it.
25. Using the Notation Editor: Okay, there's a
I'm going to show you the garage band
notation editor, if you want to work with
traditional notation. However, before I show you that, I just want to tell you
one thing in a little bit. I want to plead with you. There has been a long history of professional audio
programs having notation editors in them. They are always terrible. And the reason is this I mean, it took me a long time
to figure this out. But I think this is the reason. The reason is that this way of showing notes using the
piano roll editor is actually less abstract
than traditional notation. Traditional notation
is super weird, and it doesn't
represent the music as accurately as the piano
roll editor does. However, I grew up learning
to read traditional notation, and I much prefer that to this. I'm much more comfortable
with traditional notation. So if in garage band, we go up here where it
says piano roll or score, we can look at the
same thing that we've written in traditional
notation. So let's do it. Okay, here's some stuff. Okay. What the notation
editor is going to do is try to literally
adjust everything. And they are always impossible to read in
this kind of setting. So I would encourage you to take a stab at getting comfortable with the piano roll editor and try to try to get comfortable with that for
making this kind of music. At least when you're
working in garage band, if you are a traditional
notation person like me, it took me a while to get over my snobbery of it,
but once I did, the piano roll editor is
actually just a really, much more freeing
way to write music. Okay, moving on.
26. Quantize: Let's talk about
quantizing a little bit. Let me show you a little
example of what quantizing is. Let's go back to our
little song here. Do you remember when
I put these in, I spent some time adjusting
the beginnings and ends of them so that they
were right on the grid. Quantizing is a way to
do that automatically. Okay? So let me go out and
just try to play something. I'm going to turn
on the metronome, and I'm just going to play, like, Let's go to a chord one. None of these are
just, like, chords. They're all our peggios,
but that's okay. I'm gonna record myself
playing chords on this, and then we'll see what happens. So I'm gonna hit record.
I'm gonna play keyboard. Okay, that sounded
pretty good to me. Let's look. Here this.
Here's what I played. Now, if I zoom in, we can see my sloppy rhythms
right here, right? This should be
right on that line. Um, it should end
right on this line, and this one should start
right on that line. I could manually adjust or I could try playing
it with quantizing on. It's down here. So,
in order to quantize, we got to say, about what
rhythms am I playing. Let's just stick to, like, a quarter note, okay? And now it actually took what I already played and quantized
it to a quarter note. Okay? It didn't
quantize the ends. So different programs
do this differently, but not all of them will
quantize the end of the section. But I think you can
do that with notes. If we go over to the notes side, we can say like quarter
note and then quantize. Yeah, it doesn't do the ends. But that's okay. So we'll
do the ends manually. That maybe scoot to that
one back a little bit. But that's what quantize does. It's going to align the start of your notes to be right on the grid if
that's what you want. It
27. Moving Regions: Okay, kind of zooming back out. I want to go back out to our main timeline
window right now. I want to talk about just
moving things around. So I'm going to get rid
of our Apple Loops. I could get rid of
our mini Window, too, just for fun. I'll
just shrink it down. So moving regions. The thing to remember when
you're arranging and just moving stuff around is that
click and drag always works, but also, so do all of your, like, traditional
Microsoft Word commands. Cut copy paste, right?
All of those things work. So if I click on a region
and I do Command C to copy, then I move my playhead
wherever I want it. And I click on the right track. Make sure the track is highlighted where
you want it to go. And then Command B. Paste,
there it is, right? So copy, paste, cut. I mean, you can go
up to the edit menu here and see all of them, paste, replace, delete and move. You can also remove a region by just clicking on it and
then pressing the delete key. That's going to make it
go away. If you say, Oh, no, I wanted that
region, Command Z. Always your best friend. Undo. Okay, now that we
know our basic way around the timeline,
reading time, the notation, the
piano roll editor, and moving regions around, let's talk about some
editing techniques. So things we can do to
help craft our own music.
28. Using the Audio Editor: Okay, so let's get into
using the audio editor to do some more serious
editing of our audio stuff. We've seen the MIDI
piano roll editor. Networks great for MIDI stuff. The analogous thing for audio editing is
the audio editor, and that is this
down here, okay? So in the audio editor, oops. You can highlight
regions and edit them. So I just highlighted something, and then I press the delete
key to get rid of it, right? If I have the end
of a region here, you see these two icons. This is the same as we
saw up here, by the way. Those two icons say
if I drag this one out from the top, it's
going to loop it, which means this is the
beginning of that file, and it's going to continue
for as much space as I have. If I do it down here, it's just going to open up the file. So in this case, it's going
to get rid of what I deleted, and now we're just in what's
already there, right? So this one is gone. I can click and delete it. So the secret to this is
knowing the tops in the bottom. So if I go to the top part of the waveform and I click and
drag, I'm moving the region. If I go to the bottom
part of the waveform, I'm selecting and highlighting
something, right? So with this, I can do all
my Microsoft Word commands. I can cut copy paste, right? So I can delete just by
pressing the delete key, or I can copy that and then put the
cursor somewhere out here and paste it in. Okay? So if I want to
just highlight, like, just the kind of resonance
of this kick or whatever. Oh, it's a vocal thing. Do that. Maybe I want to
do, like, glitchy vocal stuff. Watch that. Check that out. Now, when
that enters, it's gonna, like, go but, like, really fast. Soloett. Bye. It's
a little robotic and uninteresting, but Ebay. Got. These little work.
But you get the point. That's how we can edit
our audio in garage band. There's one other layer
of editing we can do, and that is where we just
really start messing with time, stretching things out and
pulling things around. Garage Band calls that
flex time editing. Let's look at it now.
29. Flex Time Editing: Flex time Editing. Now, virtually every
audio production platform or program has something
like this now. I think Ableton was the
first to have this back, you know, probably a while ago. And then Ableton
calls it warping, ProTools calls it I think Pro Tools also
calls it flextime. Logic obviously has it. So basically, what
we're going to do is, if we look at this vocal
and we want it to just, like, sink to the beat, we can kind of try to do that. So, or we can manually do it. So the way to get to it is
we're going to go up here. This is our Flex
Time button. Okay? So now we're in flex time mode. The first thing we can
do is just quantize it. Let's quantize it
to an eighth note. Okay? And let's see how that sounds now. Is
it more on the beat? Good she I have to say. Yeah, you can really
feel it there, right? Now it's like pommPm Santa fe. I love you them. Okay, now, I only
quantize this region, so this one isn't gonna be quantized, time
quantized, see? So I could select all of these oohs see if it'll let me
quantize them together. It will. Bay Babe. Baby. Baby. Baby baby baby. By Baby. Okay, that was cool. Now, let's get into the weeds
and do this on our own. That time quantize by itself
is pretty darn good, right? But if I want to get
more in the weeds, I can click and drag on a syllable that she says
and just move it, right? Like, so let's say this
one is a little early. I want it to be right
about there on 26.3. There it is, right? Give you this one, I
want to be out here. Oops. That's the playhead. I want this one to be out here. So I can really just, like, play with time and where
things are happening. Now, here's a very important thing you need to know about this. The more you pull
something apart, the more you're going
to degrade the audio. Okay? So you're going to
start to get glitchiness and after effects if you
do really extreme stuff. For example, let's take this one and just
stretch it all the way. Okay? Now, this is pretty
glitched out. So let's hear it. Right, it goes. That's kind of a cool effect
in the right situation. And that's how you get it if you want to do it just stretch
something way out. But if you want it to
sound real and natural, you want to move these things as small as you can stand it. So do what you have to do
to get it on the grid. But stretching things like this, can cause that glitchiness. So be aware of that. In this case, I might
kind of like it. A A. Maybe This one. So that is flextime
and garage band.
30. Effects and Plugins: All right. Let's
talk about plug ins. Now, if you're new to
audio production software, let me tell you how your next many paychecks are going to go to
buying plug ins. So plug ins are external
I almost said programs. Oh, my gosh, external programs that can run inside
of garage band. All audio programs do this. Not all audio programs. A audio production
programs do this. So let me give you an example. Let's say, like I develop some
really cool effect, right? I'm going to make a plug in
of that really cool effect, and then I'm going to
put it out for sale. You can buy that plug in and
install it on your computer, and it'll run this kind of separate program
inside of grog band, and that'll give you access
to the special effect I made. So there are millions of plug ins around
the Internet, okay? Millions. There's a ton of
really great free ones. If you search for, like, free plug ins, you'll
find a ton of them. Here's how we get
to them. Let's go to It doesn't matter if
it's audio or MiTrack, but let's go to a Mi Track. Now, to get to the wave forms, we double clicked on a region. But to get to the
track settings, we're going to double click
on the little icon here. This is basically
our track mixer. Now, plug ins go on the track. That means they're going to affect everything
that's on the track. They're not specific
to the region. They're specific to the track. So if I put a delay
on this track, everything on this track is
going to be delayed, okay? There's a way to deal with that we'll talk about
in the next video. So I'm going to go down
here where it says plugins, and I'm going to open that up. Now, there are already
two plugins on here, a compressor and a channel EQ. I think that might
be like the default now. But I can add more. I'm just going to go to
this little area right here and click on one of
these dark gray spots. Now, these are the plugins
installed in my computer. I have probably a lot
more than you do. So you might have
this list because I think these are
mostly things that come with garage band, right? So pitch shifter, you may or may not have this
Audio Units tab here. This is where all my
external plug ins are. So these are plug ins that other people have made
that I've bought, and there's, like,
a lot of them. Um, anyway, so let's use
one of the standard ones. Let's do a delay.
That's easy to hear. Let's go to an echo delay.
So I'm going to select that. Okay? Now, this pops up in a new window because essentially this is its own little program, right? But it's running inside. So I could just
put that program, off to the side if I wanted or just close that window,
and it's still going to work. I'll close it in a minute. But
I want to set it up first. So there are some presets here. All plugins look different. So yours might look totally different, and that's just fine. Let's make, like, a
big, noisy delay. Okay? Give me some feedback. Mostly wet. Cool. Now I'm going to close this. I
don't need it anymore. It's just running.
See it right there. If I want to get back
to the controls, I can click right
here in this area. It's going to open that backup. If I just want to turn it off without adjusting the controls, I can just hit this
little power button here and now we're bypassing it. But with it on, we've
got mega Delay. Hey. Call it that feed back in. So that's plugins.
31. Automation: Okay, so let's say we want that delay to be
on for the chorus, but not for the burst. And if we put that
echo on this track, it's on there the whole for
everything on that track. So how do we turn it off
for a part of the song, back on for a different
part of the song? We need something
called automation. Automation is a fancy way to say changing a parameter over
time. That's all it is. So in order to get to
the automation windows, we have to kind of unlock a
new layer of garage band, and we're going to do
that with just the A key. No modifier, press
A on your keypad. That does that. If you can also go to mix show automation. Okay, so now everything looks
a little different right? What we're going to
get here is a line. If I double click on any track, we get this line, okay? Now, this line is showing
this parameter, okay? I can select a lot
of things here. You can select almost anything
that's on your track. Like, let's go to Here's
our plugins. Here's Echo. Let's do the wet amount. That's like the wet
amount is always like, how much of the effect you have. Dry means no effect. Wet means all effect,
but it's, you know, something can be
all the way wet, all the way dry, but most things are somewhere in between. So turning the wet off is
going to basically turn off the effect. So
let's double quick. Double click, and we see that the effect is here by default. So what we have here now is basically just a
breakpoint editor. We can make points by clicking. Okay? There's a point,
and there's a point. Now, this is where I
want it to come in. So I'm going to take the volume. Oops. I'm going to make
another point, take it down. Okay? And I want it
all the way down here. So now, our dry wet is going to be it's going
to be all the way dry, so we're not going to
hear any delay, and then it's going
to crank up here, and that's where we
will hear the delay. And now it goes
crazy with delay. In fact, if we look at
the plug in amount, we should see it change. Let's find out. Here
is the wet amount. Whoops. There goes. I went, but try it again. Bang. There it is, right?
See it turn on. Virtually anything
can be automated. Let's automate the volume
of this wobble bass. Okay? Right here, we
want it to come down a little bit and maybe
back up over there. It's gonna do that
do that, right? So now the volumes
just gonna cut down just a little bit
and then come back up. This is how you craft
really great music. It's all these subtleties. So that's automation.
32. Setting Up to Record: Alright, if you want
to record audio with garage band, you're
in the right place. We're gonna do that in
this section, okay? So there's a bunch of things
we need to think about. We need to think about
our hardware settings and our software settings. And then we need to think about other hardware like microphones, pre amps and all that stuff. Now, let me just
say, before we get into the weeds in this section, this is not going
to be a full, like, here's how you record and know everything about
audio recording. Audio recording is
a huge subject. People get hold degrees in it, master's degrees in it, and there's a lot
of nuance to it, both in the equipment
and how you set it up. The settings on your computer.
I mean, it's an art. It really is. So we're not going to get all
the way into that. However, I have a
few other classes on that topic if you're interested in really getting
into the weeds on that. What we are going to do in this section is
talk about how to do all of the
recording that I would expect someone would mostly
want to do in garage band. We'll do a couple vocal takes of just me talking to
show you how things work, and then maybe I'll
play a little guitar. So, the first thing we need
to do is go to our settings. And make sure our
input is correct. So we're going to go
to Audio MIDI Input Device Universal
Audio Thunderbolt. Okay, now, that is
my audio interface. Let's talk about audio
interfaces in the next video.
33. Your Audio Interface: Okay, let's talk about
audio interfaces here. So, so if you record
something on your computer, the first thing I
want you to do is think about what has to happen to record something
into a computer. The main thing that
has to happen is we have to convert an analog
signal to a digital signal. Analog signals are like waveforms
flying through the air. Those are things
that you can hear. You can hear analog signals. You, assuming you are a human, cannot hear digital signals. Computers can hear
digital signals, and computers can't
hear analog signals. It needs to be converted. So we have these special boxes
called audio interfaces. Now, I showed you the
main one that I'm using right down there,
but here's another one. This is, like, a
smaller, cheaper one. We use these boxes to do that conversion for
us both directions, analog to digital and
digital to analog. Now, if you're thinking
to yourself, Well, that can't be right
because I can hear my computer just fine. My computer has speakers in it. You're right. So your computer
has converters in it. It has digital to analog and analog to digital
converters in it. If it's got a little
microphone somewhere on it, which it almost certainly does, then it can convert an analog
signal to a digital signal. And if it has speakers
or a headphone jack, then it has the
ability to convert analog signal to digital signal. Cool. However, the converters that come in your computer
are not that great. So you can upgrade those with these physical boxes that take over the job of
converting the signal for you. This is why when you go into
a big recording studio, you're going to see a big
rack of these converters. Big recording studios are
going to have a lot of them. They're gonna have
really nice ones. Quality matters in this
conversion process. Now, there's another reason that we use these kinds of boxes, and that is to plug in stuff. So let's take your
average microphone. This is a microphone
called a Beta 58. Sure Beta 58. The actual
plug on it looks like that. It's got three pins, right? Look around your current
computer and find the three pin input jack, right? That matches that, right? You're not going to find it on your computer unless you're
on a really weird computer. There's nowhere to
plug that stuff in. You can't plug in a microphone just right into your computer. We don't have those inputs,
but these boxes do. If you look on the back, this is gonna let me plug in a
bunch of microphones, and it's going to let me
plug in a bunch of speakers. So that's why we use these. It's gonna give us a bunch of ports that we can plug stuff in, and it's going to do all
the conversion for us. All of that is to say that
when I plug in a microphone, I'm gonna plug it into
my audio interface. You can get cheap audio
interfaces for, you know, I think this one was maybe, like, I don't know, maybe $200. Um, you can find brands
like the Scarlet one. Scarlet is the model. What's the brand? Focus Right. The focus right
scarlet interfaces are great and very cheap. The one I'm using over here, this is called a
Universal Audio is the Company and Apollo
Twin, is what I'm using. That one's a bit more expensive. I don't remember
what it costs, but it's probably around $1,000. These go all the way up
these audio interfaces go all the way up to tens of
thousands of dollars for, like, the really nice ones. For what you're
doing, you probably need a couple hundred dollar
one. Nothing too fancy. Or you could just bypass this whole thing and just
use a USB microphone. This is my only USB microphone. It's got USB and analog
outputs on the bottom of it. Here's the thing about
USB microphones. These do the conversion
right inside the microphone, and then they just go
USB to a computer. So that's great. I used to really kind of
pooh pooh USB microphones and say, they weren't that good. The quality was not that good, but Man, they're
getting pretty good. They really are. So,
I'm open to using them. I still prefer, you know, using an audio interface
in the whole bit. But if you just want to get a couple USB microphones, it
might be worth trying out. So, looking back here, input device, this is saying, We are your microphones
plugged in? And for me, it comes up here as Universal Audio Thunderbolt.
That is my thing. Other options would be anything that's plugged
into my computer that can take analog signal and convert it are going
to be listed here. So microphones, speaker, I don't know why
those are listed there. That's weird. Zoom audio device. That's just the Zoom thing
for meetings and stuff. My phone, we'll come back
to that in a minute. My webcam, not this one, but my everyday
webcam, which is here. Then my phone again.
That's weird. Oh, you know why that is?
Because I just got a new phone, so I still have two
phones laying around. Anyway. Okay, so this is the correct thing for me because that is where my
microphone is plugged in. Now, if I go down to
an audio track, input. Now, which number
input do I want? So where is my
microphone plugged in? You saw on this other
interface that this one has four microphone plug ins. We would call those
four pre amps, which is a whole
other situation. This one has 16 inputs, the one that I'm using
on this computer. So I'm going to say
one, two, right? Now we see it happening, right? I really should make that
mono, let's hit that. Okay? So now Mono means
you're recording one thing, and stereo means we're recording things for both speakers. If you're just recording
a single microphone or a single instrument,
you want to be mono. Okay? So you can see my
signal coming in here. And great. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. There's my signal. It looks pretty good.
34. Recording Instruments and Voices: All right. Let's delete this. And let's lay some guitar
down in our fun track here. What I'm going to do is I
don't like most of this. So I'm going to delete it.
I'll keep this focal in there, though. Let's unmute that. Let's go here to, I don't
know why we call this 19. I'm going to double click on the title of the track to
change the name of it, and I'm going to call
it guitar. Alright. So now we need to
change our input back. So I'm going to go to settings, input device back to Universal Audio Thunderb Takes a second sometimes
to switch that over. Okay? Now, let's solo this for a second while I
dial in my guitar. This button right here
is input monitoring. What that's going to mean
is, remember earlier when I said don't sing and have the sound come out of the speakers because
it's going to feed back. Input monitoring is
that control, okay? So if I turn this on, it's
going to feed back, right? But not really, because I'm not recording a mic anymore.
I'm recording a guitar. So let me get that set up first. A minute. Okay, so I'm just going to play
an electric guitar. I've got this plugged
in with audio. I do have a Mi pickup
on this guitar, which is here and here. But I'm just plugged in
with audio right now. And we're running through some amp modeling stuff.
It doesn't really matter. After it goes through
that, it's going straight into my audio interface.
Okay, on channel two. So I'm going to
switch this to mono, actually, and then go two. That should turn off my mic, which it did, my
mic, which it did. Yeah. I turned off my mic, and it also stopped
recording it. So now I'm giving you,
like, a voiceover. That's why my lips are not
matching with what I'm saying. So I muted everything so I could check my guitar, make
sure it's working. Now I'm going to turn on the tuner that we looked at before, and I'm just going to tune
my guitar string by string. Now I'm going to kind
of switch to, like, fast forward in the video, so I'm still tuning. But you don't need to sit through me
tuning all the notes, but I did want you
to know that I did tune because we tuned,
because we can. Oh, I recorded, I think, two takes of this little
chord progression. It's a weird chord progression. So I edited out the
first take here Alright, not bad. I
think here I make some jokes about it being such
a weird chord progression, and then my mic starts
working. So, bye. Alright, so we recorded
some guitar onto our track. Horay. Problem now. It
doesn't sound very good. I recorded a pretty
dry guitar tone. It went through
some pre amps here, but nothing would really
give it much life, right? Like, if you're
recording guitar, you might want some distortion, some reverb, some delay, maybe. So let's look at our amp modeling
tools to see how we can spruce up
the tone of this.
35. Pedals and Amps: Alright, so often, when
we record an instrument, not always, but often
the goal is dry. Like, we want to
record it pretty dry so that we can put
some effects on it later. Now, that's kind of what I
do with electronic music. If you're recording
orchestral instrument or any kind of
acoustic instrument, you might want it not
to be really dry. And maybe I should define
that. What does dry mean? Dry just means that
we're going to get the sound of the instrument
into the microphone with as little
reverb as possible as we want to make it not sound like it's
being recorded in a room. We want it just to be very
small and just direct sound. So this is pretty dry. The reason I like to record things really dry is
that that gives me a lot of control over the sound of it once I get it
into production. So let's take this guitar tone. First, I'm just going
to loop part of it because we're going to do
a little experimenting here. Let's loop all of this. There we go. And the loop is on. Okay. And let's solo this. So we only hear our guitar part. Let's stick one. Listen first. No go work. No, I really messed
up the end of it. But, you know, what's
cool about that. Is it the same both be Okay, so let's fix
that flub first. Flub is the technical
word for you messed up. So here's what messed up. So let's take it back. Take the bottom of the waveform. Let's go to right on
this 32, I think. Okay. And now let's
go back here. This is the same chord. So first, let's align that with the actual beginning so that
it comes right in there. And now, whoops. I want to turn off flex time because I don't
need to adjust the time. I just want to highlight
about a bar here. So 25 26. Okay. Copy. Alright, now
we're going to go out here. This is another audio track right under it, so let's whoops. Just put it there.
Tidy that up. Okay. Now, here is that extra audio. Let's go to the end
of this. There it is. Let's try putting
that right there. Okay? Now this is going
to have a weird end to it. Oh, weird. I didn't do it long
enough. Let's try that. So what I'm going to do here
is leave it at the end, a little bit of what
I had, and then use the beginning because the
beginning was the same chord. So let's see if that works. Just Yeah. Okay, that sounds a
little sudden here, but I think once we sweeten
it up a little bit, it won't sound so sudden. Okay. This is just extra space, so let's delete that. Now, let's tidy this up. So I'm going to double
click on the icon to track and go
down to plug ins. So let's click here
on an empty spot, and let's go to amps and petals. Amp designer and a pedal board. First, let's look at
the amp designer. This is going to look
a lot like an old amp. We've got some presets up here, clean, crunch and distorted. Crunch means a
little distortion, which is maybe what I want. So here are models
of amps, right? So singing tweed,
I like tweed amps. You can see one right
behind my guitars right there is an amp
that is a tweed amp. It's called a fender
hot rod Deville. And this is kind of an emulator of it. It looks like that. So with these emulators, we can change all
of our settings, and click and drag here. We can even move
the mic on our cab. We can kind of say
where we want it to be. I know that for my
particular amp, I like it the mic off
center right around there. So let's try it. Okay, let's see what we got now. Too much. Are you not, actually.
I kind of like it. Let's go to the
pedal board next. And you'll notice here, I've used up all my plug in
space, but no, you didn't. Just got to very carefully
click underneath that. And we'll get pedal board. So, now we've added
another slot. Okay, a pedal board
effect here is just like, you know, if you're
a guitar player, you've got all these
funny petals, right? We're used to this.
I'm a guitar player, obviously, so let's grab this. Is this a fuzz face? Yeah. Actually, I don't
want a fuzz face. Let's just do, like,
a simple there's like a compressor and maybe
some kind of Delay. Retrochorus. It's probably
not gonna sound very good. What have we got here? Trematon. Alright, let's
turn these all on. Let's see what we got. That trem I think that
trem is kind of working. Once we put everything back in, tremolo is the
thing that's making the guitar feel like it's
going, Whoa, like that. Let's feel it. Let's hear the whole thing with
my guitar part. I'll do a little bit of
mixing while we're at it. Let's make it blend
a little bit. Okay, now that we've
got that tone going, I'm kind of hearing
something different. I'm kind of thinking, maybe what we need there is like a
bunch of big power chords. So I'm going to re record it and add just big
power chords there, and then I'll be right
back. Okay, here we go. Alright, felt pretty good
about that. Let's hear it. Now, remember, when
I was recording it, I couldn't hear it because
I muted my guitar tone. All I could hear was, like,
the unamplified guitar stuff, which kind of sucks
to record that way. You really want, like,
that big feeling. But in a small one person studio like this, sometimes you
just have to do that. I could have put on headphones, but I just didn't feel like
wrapping myself in cables. I just wanted to bounce
around and do it. So anyway, let's hear it. Okay, let's go back to that
pedal board real quick. Actually, I'm gonna go
back to the amp designer. So here's our amp designer. Remember to get here, I
double clicked on the icon. Amp designer, something a
little bit brighter here. Let's maybe try one of
these distorted ones. Yeah. Let's hear it now. Cool. I thought I heard
a screw up, though. Yeah. This cord was late. So this is a great opportunity
to use our time designer. This cord should have
happened right there. It just feels weird. So here we are.
There's the cord. There's where I want it. Open up time designer. That's
where I want it. Now, did I mess up
everything in front of it? I don't think so. That
looks pretty good. Alright, let's try it. Go. Alright, and now just to, like, make this nice again, let's take this and maybe
put it right on our chorus. I don't know. We'll
see if it works. So here is our new chorus. Oh, gosh. What did I do here? Clearly,
I put some effects on this. Okay. So, let's go back
to our automation, and let's turn off that echo.
So I don't want it there. And so I got to automation
with a letter A, and now I'm going to get
out of automation with a letter A. I'm gonna
unsolo this and hear it. I'm gonna adjust that just the way the place it
starts really quick. I kind of want to lead in, so I'm just gonna play
around with this for a second to find a spot
where it fits well. Almost. I have this
cool idea where I want this vocal to
lead into the chorus. I don't want that,
though. Di, d, d, d, d d, d do do. There. Let's try that. Listen. Okay, let's just go
back. One last time. I know I'm getting pretty
deep into the weeds here, but I just want to quantize
this one more time to the ace note. Listen and do you listen to shopping? Do you listen to shopping? Alright. Maybe you need
a little more base here. Cool. We got something
up and running. Let's move on to talk about the finer points of
these drum tracks.
36. Choosing a Drummer: Okay, let's talk about this drummer situation in
a little bit more detail. So, let's make a new one. So I'm going to
delete that track. I just clicked on the title of the track and then press
Delete. You can delete it. So let's go to a new track with this button up in the
upper left corner, and let's go to drummer
track and create. Okay, so now I get this
in our library, right? So the way I think about this
drummer business is that we basically have three
levels of presets, okay? And in each of those presets, we can modify all day long. So our first level is
the drummer, okay? So what these really
are are algorithms. Each of these
people, so to speak, they're not sophisticated enough to be considered like
AI, I don't think. They're not AI, I don't think. I mean, they're kind of AI like, but they're really
just algorithms that are going to emphasize
certain beats, certain styles,
things like that. And we have kind of a
lot of them, right? We have this pop rock, Kyle, all of these
ones, Brit pop. But we can go to alternative, and there's more,
songwriter, R&B, electronic, hip hop,
and percussion. Okay, so let's go to let's go to kind of like a songwriter,
experimental songwriter. You know what I really want in this track right here is
what we tried to do here. Let's just add with
the high hats, let's add in some percussion. Let's add, like,
a pop percussion. Quincy. That's
funny. I bet all of these names are rooted
in some famous drummer. Like, Quincy is probably
Quincy Jones, who just died. Sad. Anyway, um Okay, so I'm going to go with Quincy. Now, what sounds are we
gonna use with Quincy? This is kind of
our second layer. And that is the drum sounds. Let's go to a new video
and talk about that.
37. Customizing the Drum Sound: Okay, so down here, we have more sound options
for each drummer, and it's going to
change depending on which drummer we're looking at. So here we have some user
patches and percussion patches. These performance patches, I believe are designed for using, like, in live performance, which you totally can do. But let's use one of these. I don't think I want
a Latin feel on this. I'll just be weird, but a
studio thing could work well. Let's solo it. Okay, so once I
select one of these, I can go down here and start really kind of
customizing my sound. Like, here are the
different instruments, and here are some effects. We've got tone, drive,
delay, ambience, modulation, compressor, and then each of my percussion instruments I
can control the volume of. Okay? But we don't actually
have a drum track yet. So I'm going to
control click where I want it and say,
create drummer region. And there it is. Okay?
And it actually filled, like the perfect
region that I wanted. That's pretty smart. Let's
solo it and take a listen. Okay. That's actually pretty
good for what I want. Get a little
crunchier with drive. It's gonna add
distortion. Not much. Just a little bit. Delay is probably not
what I want here, but that's obviously
gonna add a delay. Take just a little bit of
that to sweeten this up. But we can change the volume
of each of our instruments. And we can even go back
and just switch whole kits if we want to by going
back to the library.
38. Customizing the Drum Groove and Pattern: Okay, now let's play with some of these
settings a little bit. So if you don't see this window, then double click
on your region, and you'll get it back, okay? So we have some
beat presets, okay? So these are gonna all
sound a little different. Let's audition a few of them. I can kind of do it in
real time, I think. Here's multi platinum. So it waits for the next
downbeat to update. Let's go back to basics.
Let's go back here. Should probably just turn loop
back on, but that's okay. Actually, let's do
it. Okay, not bad. Um, let's change the patterns by turning different things on. And these sliders, you
can kind of think of as, like, activity level, right? Like, let's get it more
active. Super active. Everything. That's too much.
I don't want that or that. No tambourine. We'll
leave tambourine in. Alright, that's good. I just want to
readjust that delay. I'm not really feeling
that delay we put on it, even though it was
just a little bit. Let's double click
on the track icon to get back to this view,
see some of those effects. Pull that delay out.
Okay? Now I can click on the region
or double click on the region and get
back to my settings. I give it a little
swing if I want. I don't think that'll sound
particularly good here. Actually, that kind
of feels good. Let's hear the
whole thing. Today. We'll be listen to shop and listen to shop Alright, I think we're getting
something kind of interesting.
39. Effects and Automation: Okay, one last quick thing before we move on
from drum tracks, don't forget about
FX and automation. They still work on drum tracks. So if we want to
automate, we can go to A. We can look at everything
we can possibly automate, including some of the smart
controls for our drummer. If we want to turn that delay
up over time, we can do it. We just have to make a line. And now that delay
is going to crank up as we play because
of automation. There's our delay right there. Solo it. See our
delay moving up. Cool. So also with more effects, you can go down here and you can add more plug ins if you want. You just got to
click right there, T on that little line, and you'll get space
for more plug ins. These drum tracks come with a bunch of plug ins
already on them. That's great. You can turn them off or add more as you like.
40. Using External VSTs and Plugins: Okay, up next, I want to talk a little bit more about effects, but specifically VST
effects and plug ins. So we've looked at
plug ins a little bit. Let's go to our vocal track. Sure. So here's our plugins and we can get to more
from right there. Now, if you've ever heard
this phrase before, VSTs, there are basically two
different kinds of plugins. You can think of these as, like, the language they
were written in. It doesn't really matter
to you at all as a user, but you'll see
these terms around. So I want you to
know what they are. VST three letters
and AU, audio units. It used to be true for, like, a minute way back, I
don't know, a decade ago, that VSTs were kind
of a PC thing, and AU audio Unit, is what that stands for,
was kind of a Mac thing. At this point, Mac can
handle any of them, and I think PC can, too. So if you see a cool VST, as long as it's built for whatever operating
system you're on, that does matter, then it
should work just fine. So you can find these all
over the Internet and download them and buy them
and blow your paychecks. There's a bunch that
come with garage band. Here are let me just show
you a different one. If I go to Audio Units, I have a lot of audio units. Let's do this. Let's do
a Glitch machines one. So Glitch each of
these is a company, and I've bought these. Glitch Machines is a
really cool company for doing sound design
effects and things. Let's try this cryogen
Okay, here's cryogen. And remember that any VST, any AU, any plug in, we're just going to
say plug ins from on. A plugin can have its totally different design because it's its
own program, right? And it happens to run within garage band or whatever
program you're using. But this is going to route
our audio through it, so we can do some
really cool stuff. This is a fairly
complicated one to use. And it's got even more
complicated things over here. But, I won't go in do a long thing about how to use that
particular plugin. Some plug ins are really complicated and
some are really simple. Let's just hear what
we did just by putting that on with the default
settings, might be nothing. I'll be good this
year. I have to check. Yeah, we're not really hearing cause we didn't
really dial anything. Okay, there are two
effects that come standard with garage band that I really want you
to be comfortable using. And that is EQ and compression. So let's go to a few videos and talk about how to use those.
41. Using EQ: Okay, these next two plugins are not specific to
garage band at all. You'll find these in
any audio program. However, my goal for this for this class is to get you making music in garage band. If we're going to talk
about making music, we need to talk about how
to use EQ and compressors. This will be a very
basic quick overview of how these two tools work. If you're comfortable
with these two things and you know how to use
an EQ and a compressor, then feel free. Just skip ahead. But if you want to
learn a little bit of recording theory and how all
this works, stick around. So let's talk about an EQ. EQ stands for equalizer, and there's one on
every track by default. We can find it right here. Okay, now, there's a ton
of different equalizers. You can find them as programs. You can find them as plug ins. They're all over the place.
They all look different, but they all work
basically the same. And here's how. What we have here is a grid showing
all sound that we can hear. On the left side is low sounds. On the right side
is high sounds. Okay? Let's look at our
signal through the EQ. We're just going to
look at our vocal. Now, in order to do
that, I have to turn on this little analyzer
button at the bottom. Let's turn that on?
You being good. Now we can kind of
see our signal. Again, low stuff. Why is
there nothing down here? Because we're listening
to a woman sing. There's not a lot of really
low frequencies there. Let's look at our kick drum. You being good this ****. You being good this ****.
There's our kick, right? Okay, so what does this mean?
Why do we care about this? The reason is we can adjust it. Okay, check out this big
white line in the middle. That means zero, okay? Keep that in mind for a second. If we go above that line, that means we're boosting
those frequencies. If we go below that line, we are cutting
those frequencies. So let's say, in
this drum track, I want more kick. I want more i. Or thump. So I'm
going to take my EQ. I'm going to put my
mouse over a spot, and I can move it
to where I want. And if I want more of something, let's take this down
there, and let's grab this one and push it, okay? So my kick was right
around this area, so I'm going to give
it a little boost, and that's going
to boost our kick. That's too much. What if I want to get rid of
the kid? Barely any kids. I kind of like the extra
little thump on it, so I'm gonna give it just a
little bit. Extra push there. Now, we've got different kinds of shapes here that
we can put in. Let's go back to our vocal. All right down to centi. And let's say this
is too bright. I want to, like, darken
it a little bit. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do
something like this. Okay? What that's
going to do is, as the pitch goes up, it's going to start making the volume get quieter as the frequency
goes higher, right? Because this is high stuff. So once we get to
really high stuff, the volume of the high
stuff starts to curve down. This is going to pull out some
of those high frequencies. Technically, this is called
a low pass filter because it lets low things
pass through it and high things get chopped off. So here's what
that sounds like. You'll be good this year. A lot less bright stuff. In I listen to Shot Alright. So now I've taken a lot
of the his out of that. Let's just listen to it in
context and see if we like it. Alright. Pretty
cool. Let's keep it. So that's a very basic
introduction of how the EQ works. Remember, you've got
one on every track.
42. Using Compressors: Next, compressors. Compressors are a
very important thing in music production because they make
mixing a lot easier. Here's what a compressor does. Let's look at our let's
look at our drum file. Okay, so you see
these waveforms here. There's big ones and
there's little ones, okay? Now, let's say I wanted there not to be
big ones and little ones. I want them all to be the
same. In other words, I want my snare hit to be
as loud as my high hat. This is what a compressor
is really good at. What it's going to do is, like, if this is the
waveform of the snare and this is the waveform
of the high HA, right? What it's going to do is it's
going to smush or compress the volume of the snare until but it's not
going to touch the volume of the high HP. So it's going to smush that down until they're the same volume, and then it's going to
boost the volume of everything so that
they're the same. So it's going to compress loud stuff but leave
quiet stuff alone. That's essentially what
a compressor does. It takes down the
volume of loud stuff. So let's go here. There's already
one on our track. So, here it is.
Compressor threshold is really just how loud we're
willing to let this get. Ratio is kind of like the
curve that goes up to it, and then attack is
a matter of speed. How quick does it kick on
and pull that volume down? And then gain is an
extra gain boost. If we're trying to
clean things up, we're going to use a
little bit of compression. Now, the reason this makes
things easier to mix is because if volume is
going all over the place, when we try to mix it,
we have to do all of this automation and stuff
to get it under control. But if we put a compressor
on it so that it's a pretty self contained amount
of volume in that track, then it's a lot easier
to mix and deal with where it sits in our song. So again, really quick
overview of compression. Check out some of the
presets in the compressor. And also, just like the EQ, there's 100,000 different
compressor plug ins. They all look different, but they all basically
work the same.
43. Lets write another song!: Okay. I've done a lot of stuff. Let's make another
track, shall we? Alright, so this is going to be a long video where I'm going to make another track
from beginning to end. I'm going to make kind
of another mini track. So and I'm not going
to do much editing. I'll edit if I like,
say something stupid. But so this will
be weirdly long. So if you want to scan
through it, that's cool. If you want to skip
it, that's cool. Or if you just want to sit there and watch
watch me make something, it's probably helpful, and
that's why I'm doing it. So, here we go. Command N. Do I
want to save this? I don't think so, 'cause
I think I just saved it. New Track. Alright.
Empty Project. And actually, maybe,
you know what? I'm gonna hit Cancel and
show you one thing here. We do have some
project templates. So let's maybe
grab one of these. Uh songwriter, I guess we'll do electronic 'cause we just
did electronic, though. But electronics kind of my jam. Okay, I popped open on a new
display. I don't know why. Alright, so it
created this kind of big room sound for me. Let's monkey around with the drum track a little bit
just to get it started. It's a little fast
for what I'm feeling. Okay, I kind of feeling like kick I want let's kick. A little bit of a swing feel. I'm gonna go to a
different person. Modern house. Change hammer. There go. That's kind of cool. Okay. That kick trum is
a little move for me. So I'll just fix it with an EQ. It's okay. All right. All right. I'm just gonna
use these instruments that it loaded in the preset. So let's find something for
this bass on my keyboard now. I'm just gonna play
around for a minute and try to find something
that works here. Kind of like that. Alright, in the interest of time,
let's just do it. This is, like, way more upbeat
than I'm used to doing. Okay, so I'm going to
record this baseline. I've got a count off,
so I should be good. Alright. That was cool. Let's tidy that up by doing a little quantizing. I didn't really do anything bigger than a quarter
note, I don't think. Should be good. Alright,
let's see what they got here. Okay, I kind of got a
cool groove for this right here. Here we go. Okay. The only problem with
that is that I played it horribly because I
was trying to figure out what I wanted to do.
But now I think I got it. I just need to know
that Uh, let's go. Got to work. Okay, here we go. Alright, nope.
It's kind of cool. I could quantize
that, but why bother? Honestly, I don't really need to because it's got that
arpeggiator in it, and it's popping around notes. So I can do it or not do it. I don't think it'll matter.
So let's leave it alone. Here's another base
thing it gave me. Well, let's try doubling.
Same base part. Okay, I think that's
like, too much base. So let's maybe keep this for out there. Let's see
what we got here. Okay. This is cool. Let's do, like Alright, I guess I'm gonna have
to play around with this one for a minute
and see what we can find for organ. Here we go. Okay. Now I got a decent
idea. Let's do it. Alright. That was out of key note, but I
kind of liked it. This I am going to quantize
'cause it's rhythmic, and that is important. Should go to an eighth note
because it's on the offbeat. Maybe I want that up and octave. Let's do Command A, and then
we're just going to go Whoa. I didn't want me to move
those, did it? The real. Technically, this
note is out of key. Let's try it as an A flow. Geez. Let's try it as an A flat. I like the A natural. It's
out of key, but it's great. I like it. If you're
wondering why these looked like they were off
of the grid for a minute, it's because I think
I just nudged them when I wasn't paying attention.
So I nudged them back. All right, see what else we got. Okay, let's take this
cords and try that. And Okay, let's take a
closer look at this one. It's got a lot of
low stuff here, and it's too much low stuff. I've already got a lot
of low stuff going on. So we could. Yeah, this one's really using
my sloppy attacks here. So, here's what we're
gonna do for this one. Let's This one I really
need to tick up. So that double hit right there that you got
to get rid of. Let's make sure we
exit perfectly. I could quantize this, but I've got these little
extra notes in here, and I just want sometimes
we just need to, like, clean stuff up. This is the tedious
part of writing music. There we should start hearing this get cleaner
as I'm doing it. Like that. We can go into the
settings for the synth and adjust it so that we get less of
that weird attack. Which we'll do in a minute. Okay. That is All right, here's. There's that. That look fine. Okay. All right. Now let's go to
this and see if we can control that attack. Alright, so we're
going slower attack. There's this
rhythmic stuff, too. Man, this is There we go. I think we got it a little bit contained. Let's hear it in con. All right. That's cool. Let's see what Chicago Cords is. Um, I don't need to use
all of these by any means, but, um, we could try this. That's gonna just give it a
short attack on each cord. That's all it's doing? Hey, I don't like that. Let's
move that out there. I generally don't like
deleting stuff when I'm still just kind of
in the exploring phase. So I might just move it
out there. There's nothing bad about it. It
just doesn't fit. So I'm gonna move it out
over there and then see what we can get later with it. Alright, buzzing metallic lead. Pretty sure I know what
this is gonna sound like, but let's hear it. Okay. Can I do
anything with this? Here's what I'm
gonna do. Let's see if we can find a melody. If you've taken any of
my composition classes, you know how I approach
writing melodies. But we're gonna do
anyway. Oh, wow. Okay. I don't want to give
this sound just chords. That's gonna sound terrible. And it's actually
not gonna work. It's a monophonic synth anyway. But let's try seeing if we can find some kind of melodic thing in here. Let's go. Let's have it start
on second Let's not. Let's Get rid of those. And
then what do we have here? You have an E flat.
You have E minor. IF. And then G. Stretch that out.
Get rid of those. What quarter are we on here? We're back on a C minor. And that's a D, so or Let's go Alright, let's try that. Sit there for a minute. And then maybe, like, some kind of leak as our out I'm just playing
around in the space seeing if I can find
something that works. There. Alright, let's try that. I don't know if this
melody is gonna work. I really don't want a
melody here right now. One of the biggest problems that young producers have is trying to make melodies everywhere. You don't need
melodies. You can just have music groove for
a while. It's great. Anyway. So, here it is with our melody.
Let's see how it works. Okay. I don't like it. Let's try first taking
it up and down. Okay, let's try um Let's try pulling
back that buzz. Um let's go with that. Maybe it comes in over here. And let's see what our last
instrument is Titanic waves. Try that with this. Make it there. Okay, so now I'm going
to extend this out. We'll have a B section
right here. Automatic. I love this. Alright, it comes to our B section made of
leftover material. Go back to the original. Right. Ah, I kind of liked that. Check this out. What if we
let's keep our drums going? And we'll just go down to those for a second. Oh,
this will be dope. H Alright. So right here, we're going to go down
to just these cords for about 2 bars and this
kind of wavy synth. Actually, let's maybe
put it down there. And then chop this
off right there. And then this we'll
come back in. But we'll have it come
in there. Okay, I gives us a little shift. This would be kind of
cool. Check it out. Something got all
off the grid there. I think I also want the
drums to stop here. So in order to do that, I'm
going to loop to there. Then I'm just going to
whoops loop to there, and then but I'm
gonna command click here to kind of break it up because I want there
to be a gap right here. Let's just let that go the
whole way. Let's pull it down. Okay, so here's our song. Ready? We'll find an
end for it later. Your job will be to
find an end for this. Here we go. Give me the
trouble. It's a screw. Don't like the melody at all. This is where the vocal goes. Let's get rid of that melody. Now check this out. Something is just off in that. Why did that not
come back right? When one of these
regions gets plopped down at not perfectly on the
spot, I think it's this one. Why did that one all mess? Why
is that one all messed up? Yeah, it's this. It's not
starting at the right. So we got to make sure this
is lined up correctly. So yes, I should have check
this up in the first place. That. There. That should do it. Okay, so when we
get to this break, the No Cool. Let's stop there. So there's our tune. So I'm going to save
this as let's see. This is going to be
Lecture number 46. And we're going to call
this let's call it Groove, some kind of groove,
funky Groove. Let's call it Funky Groove. Alright. And I'm going to
give this to you to download in the next Session, download it, play around with
it, do whatever you want. Have some fun.
When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about mixing,
mastering, exporting, bouncing, finishing this
stuff up and getting it out so other people
can hear it. Off we go.
44. Balancing: Okay, in this section, I want to talk a little
bit about mixing. Now, again, there's nothing super unique to
garage band here. I'm just going to show you how
to do this in garage band, but you could do it
really any program. The principles are the same. So mixing and mastering are
two separate processes, and they're very complicated, and there are professionals devoted to just
doing those things. There are people who just mix, and there are people
who just mastered, and there are very
highly trained people, and I am not one of them,
although, you know, I do mix a lot of music and
I master a lot of music. So I know what I'm doing. But
I only tell you that it's a highly trained
thing to tell you that when it comes to my music, I usually write my music, do a mix of it, but then
I send it to someone else to do a really good mix. So considering hiring someone to mix for you if
that's possible. But if it's not, you
can do it yourself. And I'm going to show you
how. So there's basically a three step loop
that I use, okay? This is my kind of method. The first is balancing. The second is EQ, compression, and automation.
Bunch of effects. The third is rebalancing, and then we loop it again. So we're going to
go compression EQ, rebalance, compression
EQ, rebalance. So that's how we're
going to do it. So first step is just balancing. No, balancing means we're only going to mess with
volume right here. Maybe a little bit of
panning if we want to. We don't really need to
for any of this because these sinths are so lively and have a lot of
panning going on. We don't really need
to mess with that, although we could play
with it if we want. Okay, so I'm just going to focus on one spot and
try to balance it. Let's go right here.
These two measures. So if I can balance
these two measures, I'm probably balancing
this whole section. So the way I do this is I just
hit play and I earball it. I just listen and
listen and adjust and adjust until I got it to
where I'm pretty comfortable. Okay? So here we go. This is kind of like I think this one is
causing too much trouble. Yeah, this one, I'm just
gonna leave the out. Because now that I've
got my mixing ears on, I am looking for any other weird little
things. I should point out. I have a whole huge class
on mixing that goes into a ton of details about every process
that I'm doing here. Right now, we're doing, like, the 50,000 foot view just to get a feel for how to get our
music sounding pretty good. So there's a bunch of
stuff sticking out in this track that's
causing some problems, so I'm going to
mute right there. We're not really
missing anything by leaving it out to me. I actually typed it. Alright. I'm feeling it. It feels good. Alright. Now I'm
going to go out here. Now, I'm going to go to the next section
and balance that, but note that I don't want
to just adjust volume here, right, because I'm going to
unbalance what I just did. So if I do any volume
adjustment here, I've got to do it
with automation. I'll show you what I mean.
Let's take these two measures. It isn't really doing
a lot for me, either. That's okay. Okay,
so maybe right here, I want this base to
come up a little bit. In this case, there's
nothing before it, so I could just raise it. The volume. But let me show
you what I would do normally. Automation mode,
serves my volume says volume let's just inch
it up a little bit. One I'm attempting to take out, but I'm gonna pull it down. Maybe pull this one
up. That's cool. Okay, now, again, this automation doesn't really matter because there's
nothing before it, but it's a good habit
just to automate. Now, I can go through
and automate effects and everything else in
the world that I want. In this case, I'm
feeling pretty good. Let's go here feels out here. Okay. Okay, so my balance is
feeling pretty good. Let's add some effects.
That's going to mess up our balance, and
then we'll rebalance.
45. EQ, Compression, and Patience: Alright, this next process I just like to call EQ
compression in patience. Now, remember that every setting in EQ compression and everything
else can be automated. So this isn't usually as simple as let's throw
some compression on it. Let's dial in an EQ and just let it ride for
the whole track. We're going to want to adjust things for the
different sections. These sections are
fairly unified, so I don't think we're
going to need tons of automation, but it's possible. So let's listen for spots where we might need
EQ or compression. Now remember what I'm
listening for with EQ? Any frequencies that are popping out or any frequencies
that are lacking. Like, if we don't have
enough base and I want more, I can use an EQ for that, although it's not
great for that, but we can kind of do it. And then if there's frequencies
that are jumping out, I can pull them back with an EQ. With compression, I'm
listening for any sounds that jump out in terms of
volume, not frequency. Just jump out or are kind
of missing. So here we go. I'm going to listen through
and just see if I can find anything that needs
that. Beginning. The drums don't
need compression. That's usually my
first sign my ego. But these Apple drums
or the drummer tracks. They're very compressed,
they're very clean already. So they don't need very much. Here. A lot going on at the bottom, but
I just don't think. I wonder if we could
do a little something with this to liven it up. So let's go to this clip. Okay, let's go to Controls. The EQ on this is fine. I kind of like it, but
I'm really looking for plug ins here. Let's go. Compression that's going
to be under dynamics. Okay. Let's look at one of
these presets, keyboards. Club keyboards,
kind of like a pad. Let's do this organ preset. Sounds a little bit better. I almost want it a
little brighter. If I want it brighter,
gonna push that. Alright, that's
feeling pretty good. Let's get this break here. That gap I didn't like. Let's touch that up. I'm
also in this process just, you know, really tightening
up any weird thing. We definitely have
weird things here. I want this to be this there. So now when we transition
to that break, it's just Okay. Now it's too loud. So kind of rebalancing
myself here, but zoom in. So I want this volume
to drop really quick, right here, like,
really far down, and then maybe we'll boost a little bit on
our way out of it. Make a little more
extreme ramp right there. Let's try to smooth that out a little bit. Okay. Okay, so I think I've added everything I want
to add for this. But now, by doing these fades and tightening up those things and a little
bit EQ and compression, I now should probably rebalance
it again and just make sure that everything
is sitting where it is. So let's
go do that again.
46. Rebalancing: Okay, now that I've
done all that, let's get out of
automation mode, although I may need
to use some for this, but let's give it one more listen and see if anything
pops out for volume. So basically, I'm going to go through this loop
of compression, EQ, and then balancing. I'm going to do that
loop over and over and over until I don't need
to do any more balancing. Once I get back to
the balancing step, and I'm like, A, I feel pretty good, then
we're done. So, here we go. Do beginning. It too much down there. I want that just to snap up
when everything comes in. Alright. So we did do a
little bit of rebalancing, but I think all the way through, this is sounding
really good now. So I don't need to do
any more compression. This was a really
easy one because we used all these
stock instruments. Those are always easy to mix. Recording, like if
there was a guitar and stuff in here, that
gets a lot harder. But these synths and drum stuff, that's all in the
box, as we say, meaning, like, it's all
made in the garage band. They're always
really easy to mix. They blend together really well. That's what the
program does well. So, let's talk about mastering.
47. Mastering in Garageband: Okay, so here's the
misconception about mastering. What we do when we
master is we take our track, we export it. We export it as a
stereo audio file. We say, This is
done. This is good. Here's my audio file, single audio file that we can email to our friends
and all that stuff. We take that audio file, and that's what we master. We don't do mastering
in our session. Mastering is just the
stereo audio file, and what it's doing
to that file. Is giving it a little bit
of extra polish so that it sounds the best on things
like streaming platforms, in your car, on cheap speakers, on nice speakers, on your little Apple earbuds or whatever you're using
to listen to music. That's the job of mastering. Like, right now, I'm
listening to this track with, you know, $10,000 speakers. So, of course, it sounds good, but not everybody's going
to listen to it on that. So mastering is going to kind of help make sure it
sounds as best as it can in as many places as possible. And it's
a whole science. Honestly, for my tracks, I send them out to be mastered. I send them to a studio.
They do the mastering, and they come back
and they sound great. So there is an art
to this but here's a few things you can
do that will get your music to sound like it's mastered in just a
few minutes, okay? First. So this is kind
of like mastering cheating because we're going
to do this in our session. There are some people
that work this way now. It's called inline Mastering, but you can do it. So here's how. First, we need to see our master channel, okay? So I'm going to go up to
Track and show Master Track. Okay? Now we can see our
master track here, okay? So I'm going to double
click on the icon, and I've already got some
effects on it, right? I've got a compressor, exciter, compression, another
compressor, and limiter. So an EQ. So this is already this is basically a pretty solid mastering
chain right there. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to turn
all of these on. There's all my tools. And I don't think I need to do anything with
the EQ right now. The compression and limiter, I'll use to get a little more. I want to watch
this. I want to make sure we're hitting
right near the top. It won't show that's okay. And then the limiter
Limiter just means we can set it's kind
of like a compressor. We can set a volume
and we can say, nothing shall pass
above this volume. That's kind of what you need to do for streaming services. Because you want
to make sure that it hits streaming
services just right. So I'm going to take a look
at this while I listen and dial this last level
of compression in. Blue shows the amount of
compression I'm doing. I want to see a little movement here to know that I'm not
completely flattening it. Pretty good. All right. So go into that master track,
adjust that compression, adjust that limiter, get
yourself a nice sounding mix. But when you're ready for,
like, a real mastering job, call your local recording
studio and say, Hey, do you have a
mastering engineer there who's taking gigs? And they'll say, Yeah, and then send your stuff
to be mastered. If you're going to put
it out professionally, you want to sound as best
as possible, right? Okay. Let's move on and talk
about our last little finishing up things
exporting, bouncing, sharing.
48. Export Settings: Alright, now we need
to talk about getting our track out of garage band and into the ears of
the rest of the world. So here's how we're
going to do that. First, we're gonna go
up to the share menu, and there's a few things we
could do But let's go first. Let's go Export song to disc. That's going to
be just make us a file that has this on it. Okay? It's going to name
it the name of our track, and it's gonna put the
date and time on it. That's a pretty good practice. Because you're going to
end up bouncing these probably after a while
a whole bunch of times, and you're going to say, which
was the most recent one? If it's got the date and
the T, it'll be good. Most of us have, like,
funky Grow final. Funky Group final final. Funky Group final final final for real. That's
how we name files. So don't do that. Use the date. Okay, we can export in a
few different ways, right? AAC is Apple's kind of
answer to MP three. They're fairly common.
You could do that. MP three is going to be
more standardized, though, especially if you're emailing
it and sending it around. These files are not
production files. MP three files are little files. Have your music in it,
degrade it a little bit. They're great for taking
your track and emailing it to your friends or
your partner or whatever. But when it comes to
sending these to be published on Apple
Music or Spotify, MP three is not what
you're sending them, okay? So MP three are just for fun. But you can make B
three. That's great. If you want to release
this commercially, you want AIF or wave, and it's kind of
become true that wave is sort of becoming
the standard for this. For either of these, the setting you want is uncompressed. CD quality is good. Okay, we don't need to
worry about this checkbox. Let's export it as a wave. Okay, so it's going
to export it, save it, and give
you an audio file. Keep track of where you
said you were going to save it there so that
you can find it. So that's the simple
export settings. That process is what we
call bouncing or exporting. You can see it bouncing now. It's playing through
it really quick, and then it's going to
save that as a file. Now, if we want
to go directly to SoundCloud or
uploading to any of the streaming services where we can maybe make
some money with this song, slightly
different process. Let's do it now.
49. Uploading to Soundcloud: Okay, so here's what
you're going to do. Go to SoundCloud and sign in. Alright, now we're
going to go to Upload in the upper right corner. And now we just choose File, and we're going to point
to And here down here, it says, provide flack
wave ALAC or AIFF. Flack and ALAC are file formats that we didn't deal with because Garage Band doesn't export them, but wave and AIFFR. So that wave fle side note, if you're wondering if wave
has an E on it or not, some places call it Wave WAVE
and like a dot WAVE file, and some places
just call it wave WAV. It's the same file. Okay, so you're gonna
upload it here. You're gonna put in
all your metadata. You're gonna write
in the copyright, the track name, the artist name, any collaborators,
anything like that. And then you're gonna
upload it. Done. Let's talk about getting
it onto Spotify.
50. Uploading to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Etc.: Okay, so if you want to get this track on Apple Music or Spotify or Amazon Music or
any of those other ones, it's actually not that
hard of a process. You got to take your track, that wayfle you've already
got. You're good there. Then the easiest way to do it is to go through
a distributor. You can now, I believe, go directly through Spotify
or sometimes Apple Music. But if you use a distributor, then you just have to upload
the track once and they will just go and
send it everywhere. That's the easiest way to do it. A distributor, you can kind of think of it as
a record label, but there are some
that you can get on by just paying ten bucks. So I use this one called
Symphonic Distribution. This is kind of more of a
label than a distributor. Um but I really
liked being there. So I will upload
my music to here. I'll just log into
my account, say, new album or new song, and then upload it, and it will distribute out to
all of the places. I'll put in all the metadata, all the info about the track, the artwork for the track, I'll put in, and it'll stick
with it everywhere it goes. Other popular
distributors to use are things like Distro kid, CD Baby. I think Landers doing it now, TuneCore, that's another one. All of those, um, you're going to pay, I don't know, ten, 15
bucks to release a track, maybe 30 bucks to
release an album. It all depends on the platform. They're all different, but
it's not very expensive. So you're going to
upload your track. You're going to or your tracks. You're
going to submit it. It takes a little while for the track to get to
all the platforms, but then you'll
start to get reports about how much people
are listening to it, and you'll start to generate
a little bit of revenue. So, yeah.
51. What Comes Next?: Alright, we've reached the end. Horay. You are now a
master at Garage Band. Um let me tell you in this video what might be good
places for you to explore next now that
you've finished this class. Garage Band is a great
tool for making music, and it's a great
gateway drug to blowing all your money on
production software and plug ins and gear and stuff. So let me tell you
about if you want to blow more money in
this passion of yours. Here's what I would do. Let's learn more about
the process first. So you can look for classes
I have on recording, sound design, mixing,
mastering, music theory. Those are going to be your main ones that you want to work on. If you're interested in
work in film or television, writing music that way, I have some classes specific to that. And then when you're
ready to upgrade to your next big DA, which you don't have to
do for a little while, but when you are, I
would consider logic. I might even consider Ableton. And I have classes for all of those things here on this site. So please come
back, check it out and hang out with me
for more fun time. I already got one
more video for you, and then I'm out of
your life. Here we go.
52. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn
more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for
my email list here. And if you do that,
I'll let you know about when new
courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're
already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang
out with me in one of those two places or both,
and we'll see you there.