GarageBand Masterclass: Making Awesome Music on your Mac | J. Anthony Allen | Skillshare
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GarageBand Masterclass: Making Awesome Music on your Mac

teacher avatar J. Anthony Allen, Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:55

    • 2.

      About Your Instructor

      2:55

    • 3.

      What is GarageBand?

      4:23

    • 4.

      Installation and Setup

      2:04

    • 5.

      Let's Make a Song!

      21:15

    • 6.

      Files and Sessions

      2:40

    • 7.

      Your First Window

      4:12

    • 8.

      Software Instruments

      3:10

    • 9.

      Making Sounds

      4:04

    • 10.

      MIDI Setup & Musical Typing

      4:08

    • 11.

      Audio Tracks

      2:45

    • 12.

      Audio Setup

      4:50

    • 13.

      Apple Loops

      4:11

    • 14.

      Drummer Tracks

      3:11

    • 15.

      Drummer Controls

      4:31

    • 16.

      The 4-View Layout

      3:19

    • 17.

      The Transport

      4:22

    • 18.

      The Smart Controls

      3:04

    • 19.

      The Library

      1:08

    • 20.

      The Timeline

      2:55

    • 21.

      Reading the Time and BPM

      7:23

    • 22.

      Importing Audio

      4:01

    • 23.

      Importing Midi

      3:22

    • 24.

      Using the Piano Roll Editor

      3:21

    • 25.

      Using the Notation Editor

      2:16

    • 26.

      Quantize

      2:57

    • 27.

      Moving Regions

      1:46

    • 28.

      Using the Audio Editor

      2:55

    • 29.

      Flex Time Editing

      4:33

    • 30.

      Effects and Plugins

      4:21

    • 31.

      Automation

      3:40

    • 32.

      Setting Up to Record

      1:38

    • 33.

      Your Audio Interface

    • 34.

      Recording Instruments and Voices

      3:47

    • 35.

      Pedals and Amps

      15:30

    • 36.

      Choosing a Drummer

      2:23

    • 37.

      Customizing the Drum Sound

      2:02

    • 38.

      Customizing the Drum Groove and Pattern

      2:41

    • 39.

      Effects and Automation

      1:13

    • 40.

      Using External VSTs and Plugins

      3:20

    • 41.

      Using EQ

      5:05

    • 42.

      Using Compressors

      2:32

    • 43.

      Lets write another song!

      26:36

    • 44.

      Balancing

      6:52

    • 45.

      EQ, Compression, and Patience

      5:55

    • 46.

      Rebalancing

      2:50

    • 47.

      Mastering in Garageband

      4:42

    • 48.

      Export Settings

      2:48

    • 49.

      Uploading to Soundcloud

      1:09

    • 50.

      Uploading to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Etc.

      2:10

    • 51.

      What Comes Next?

      1:24

    • 52.

      Bonus Lecture

      0:36

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About This Class

Look over my shoulder as I guide you through creating real music in GarageBand! In this comprehensive class, you'll watch me build complete tracks from scratch, showing you exactly how a professional producer uses GarageBand to create finished songs.

What You'll Learn:

  • Navigate GarageBand's interface with confidence
  • Create tracks using software instruments, loops, and live recording
  • Master the AI drummer and smart instruments
  • Record and mix vocals & instruments like a pro
  • Apply essential effects and mixing techniques
  • Export your music for streaming platforms

This class is perfect for beginners - no previous experience required! You'll see the entire creative process unfold naturally, including real-world production decisions and problem-solving techniques. I'll share professional workflows while keeping everything accessible and practical.

As a professional producer and composer with a Ph.D. in music composition, I've taught over a million students worldwide. I know exactly where beginners get stuck - and more importantly, how to get them unstuck.

Required Tools:

  • A Mac computer with GarageBand installed (free from Apple)
  • Optional: Microphone, MIDI keyboard, or instruments for recording

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

J. Anthony Allen

Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Teacher

Dr. J. Anthony Allen is a distinguished composer, producer, educator, and innovator whose multifaceted career spans various musical disciplines. Born in Michigan and based in Minneapolis, Dr. Allen has composed orchestral works, produced acclaimed dance music, and through his entrepreneurship projects, he has educated over a million students worldwide in music theory and electronic music production.

Dr. Allen's musical influence is global, with compositions performed across Europe, North America, and Asia. His versatility is evident in works ranging from Minnesota Orchestra performances to Netflix soundtracks. Beyond creation, Dr. Allen is committed to revolutionizing music education for the 21st century. In 2011, he founded Slam Academy, an electronic music school aimed... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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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.