GarageBand Tutorial - Complete Course - [Everything You Need To Know For The SUPER Beginner]

this is going to be a garage band tutorial for the super beginner like if you find yourself in the position where you have no recording experience at all you've heard of garageband before but you want to dive deeper into it to get more comfortable with it then this video would be for you and by the end of it my promise to you is that you'll have a better understanding of the full complexity and the possibilities of garageband but you'll also be able to start making music and then exporting that music so you can share it with some of your friends so this is a very long video you don't have to watch the whole thing if you're looking for a specific section they're all like time stamped in the description so you can just flip through the video and go to the section that's right for you so the sections of this garageband tutorial would be we'll go over what is garageband and how to install garageband we'll talk about the function so what the layout is how daws actually work theoretically what you could use it for and what the possibilities of garageband are then we'll get into recording and what are all the recording terms what do they mean what are software instruments what is midi what are drummer tracks how do you record your voice versus the guitar versus a piano we'll get into that and then we'll talk about the interface sections so what the controls and eq mean what the piano role and score mean and what is the library as well then i want to talk about the gloss just do a glossary of terms so what is midi mean what is eq what is compression what are software instruments what does the track versus the master mean what is quantization what are plugins you can kind of skip to this section if you just want to know what those terms are and then the final section of this video is we'll just make a simple little song using a drummer track an audio track and a software instrument track section one what is garageband garageband is a software built for mac it is a free software if you have a macbook and it's as simple as going to the app store installing it and you're off to the races no payment at all so some of the questions i get right off the bat is since garageband is free and it's available on every mac is it professional is it going to make my track sound good or do professionals use garageband and i can tell you that garageband is a professional digital audio workstation there are some limitations and that's when you need to go out and pay for maybe logic pro x or cubase or you know fl studio whatever other paid digital audio workstation you need but to keep it simple yes garageband is a professional digital audio workstation the short form is da that's what will be tossed around in the music industry what daw do you use garageband is a professional dot so once you install garageband off the apple app store or you already have it on your macbook it will be located under applications so we'll navigate to our applications folder and search for garageband and i have it highlighted here so we double click on garageband and then it will open garageband up for us by default garageband will open the last project that you had opened and so in my case this is the garageband tutorial template that i'm going to go over today if you didn't if this is the first time you've opened garageband before you'll notice a window like this and this window is just saying what project would you like to start in garageband and we'll have we have a few options here this simple thing to do is just to start an empty project and that's this box and our only option here but with garageband because it's a beginner digital audio workstation we can go to this learn to play section where we actually can learn a bit about basic guitar here and then we have different tabs at the top piano lessons and artist lessons and then there's a lesson store as well where we can dive deeper into to lessons of learning this these instruments here are our recent projects that we've done that we have used before and here are project templates where you can start with a template that garageband gives you by default so if you are a singer songwriter or you are an electronic producer or you're a hip-hop artist or you're just looking to do vocals um or podcast recording we can open up these templates so if you find yourself in that position try out one of these templates it might be right for you for the simplicity of this video we're going to just start with an empty project so click on empty project and then choose this is the first window garageband gives you and fundamentally with garageband there are only three tracks you can record with so tracks are pieces of audio that you can listen to and you can have hundreds of different tracks inside one song so you might have um one let's take an example you have you're working on one song and inside this song you have a piano track you have a vocal track you have a banjo track you have a drummer track you have another guitar track so you within this one song you might have hundreds of tracks and so what a digital audio workstation does what garageband does is helps you build tracks to compose a entire song a piece of music so a level deeper than that tracks are made up of um in garageband they're made up of either a software instrument track an audio track or a drummer track and they're color coded for us here green software instrument blue audio track or a yellow drummer track and we're going to go over all these types of tracks in this gb tutorial so let's just start we'll go left to right and we'll save the explanations of the tracks for a bit later because i still want to talk about kind of the possibilities of garageband and what garageband actually is if you prefer just skip to that section of the video another point that's good to make here is this little section that says i hear sound from so you'll see a different name here this usb pnp audio device are my speakers that i have right here and if you have speakers or if you have headphones or if you want to hear the sound from your laptop this is what this question is asking where do you want to hear the sound that you're going to make so you would click on maybe you can see with different options if we click this little arrow here it's going to bring up the settings and under output device we want to choose where we want to hear the sound from so you'll have different naming names here but if you just choose your system setting that means it will come out of whatever your audio system setting is or if you have like your headphones plugged into your computer that would be the built-in output but i have mine coming out of my speakers here so i'm going to do us pnp audio device and x that so let's create a software instrument track and then create so this is the interface of garageband and we'll go over all the little details here so you'll feel comfortable with knowing what everything is here so how garageband works is basically everything run goes down in this square here we have kind of this area where we'll see our tracks and then from left to right here i'm going to drag this cursor this is where all the music goes down and from left to right we're going we would have audio and we'll have a number of tracks that go top to bottom here so i'll just give you a quick example of what a busy song could look like you might have all these different tracks you probably wouldn't have a lot of these classic electric piano tracks but you would have maybe you know this track could be an audio track this track could be a drummer track i just want to show you that to give an idea of what um eventually i saw a finished song would look like you'd have multiple tracks going top to bottom and then their audio signals would eventually be in this section going left to right so i'll just delete these tracks for now and we'll start with just one at the top here we have our fast forward kind of rewind stop play and record button and this is a cycle or a loop button so here when we press play this cursor will start playing and you'll see it's going left to right so if we would have audio in that section there which we will in a little bit then it will play from our speakers or our computer wherever we have that audio signal coming out another just couple things i want to mention here at the top are this kind of control bar where we actually see the bar and beat so as as i move my cursor you can see these numbers are going up and this just helps us know where we are in the song so our cursor is now at bar five beat one if i just move it over a little bit to that next little um a line there it would be bar five beat two beat three beat four and then to six and that's the kind of language of music it's very much a grid format music is made up of bars and beats and there's most of the time in every song four beats in one bar obviously you can have different tempos and sorry different tempos but different time signatures but let's we'll just stick to four beats in one bar tempo which is the tempo how fast or slow is your song the higher the tempo the faster your song will be the slower the tempo the slower the song and if you've heard of a metronome before it looks like this little purple thing here that's clicked i can click that on or off and the metronome is like a click that will show you how fast your song is so if i play this with the metronome metronome on you're going to hear the click and it will be quite fast so you can hear that click so that means we'd have to play within that tempo if we just click and drag our song down to 68 which is the tempo of hey jude it would be much slower right hey jude don't make it bad right much slower but slow songs are great now let's let's still talk a little bit about the layout here of what we're looking at and then we'll get into like specific icons and these what all these little things are like what does this one two three four thing what is this um thing here and what are all these icons we'll get to that in a glossary of terms where i'll just kind of go through them and talk about them but i want to continue this tutorial in context of what we're actually looking at here so we've gone over this main window and then garageband is also split into this little this section at the bottom and then this section on the left so on the bottom we have um controls and eq and we can switch what this bottom section looks like you'll also see a window like this where it says piano roll and score and so i go to the top here and i'm going to toggle these and you'll notice the bottom part changes so that's going to change depending on what you want to do and the controls and eq section is basically what this section does is you can add effects and you can add effects to your track so whatever track you have here let's come let's just duplicate a couple more of these again to give you an idea every track has their own controls so this track has their has their own controls then i can click another track and that will have their own controls too same thing goes for the scissors window every track will have their own separate window at the bottom and that this means that when you have a track highlighted and we go to the control section we can just tweak the dials on our track so in our case we have a classic electric piano and if we have audio in this track we can then increase the treble or decrease the bass increase the drive like so on this specific track okay so we'll get into more of these later and actually dial in with real audio to to show you what that actually does then on the left here we have library and that's this folder this window this icon here sorry where we click on and off that will slide out our library the library is where we choose different types of presets or instruments that garageband gives us for example we have a track here called classic electric piano and you can see that this track comes from vinta vintage electric piano and then classic electric piano so let's just ignore that for now so if i wanted this track to actually be a verlitzer you have made some changes to your current yes that's fine now this track is a verlitzer sound so i can actually play a verlitzer sounding um piano or keys and then we can go through different sounds that garageband gives us the main idea to keep here is on this left hand side is you have your library and then we'll dig into a little bit of actually how to use those sounds when we're in the recording section of the video now that we've gone over this brief layout let's dive deeper now into actually recording audio software instruments and drummer tracks and then we'll dig into each of these sections that i mentioned here to go over more of the terms and so you can get comfortable with it let's remove these tracks here classic electric piano classic electric piano and the warlitzer so we're going to open up a new software instrument track and create and i want to hear the sound for my speakers and if you have to change that by the way um it's good to know where the settings are you can go to the top where you have garageband and here you have this all the settings in garageband under preferences audio so you have general audio metronome loops my info in advance you'll really only have to use audio you can keep everything default as what it gives you and where you are going to want to change things is under audio output and input we'll come back to talk about input device when we're recording audio for example when we actually want to use a microphone or we want to plug in a guitar to our computer we're going to have to come here and change the input device so we can tell garageband hey i want you to record my microphone and we'll come back here and we'll choose our microphone from this drop down window so by default garageband gives you this classic electric piano as the default software instrument so we can go and if we don't want that if we want a base we just click over here on base finger style base we can see it's changed and you can also see the controls have changed at the bottom because the controls down here have to do with the track right so let's for simplicity purposes just choose you know if you're going through this tutorial with me choose whatever instrument you like um i'm going to choose a piano a steinway grand piano and i have different controls here and i have a track ready to go to start recording music how do i actually record right that is a great question so you can do it through two ways and we'll do both those ways in this video right now the first way is the easiest way in the way i recommend if you can go out and buy a midi controller a midi controller is just kind of it looks like a keyboard but it's not actually a keyboard for example i have my midi controller right here and i'll put up an image on the screen just so you can see what it looks like a midi controller's purpose is to actually play the sounds of the instruments you choose in your digital audio workstation or garageband for instance for example if we have a midi controller and choose piano we can go and actually just press the keys on our controller and it will use the sounds the garageband gives us the same thing doesn't actually have to be a piano sound if we want to play a drum kit and we go to drum kit and we put in brooklyn we can use the same midi controller and press the keys on our midi controller and it will sound like a drum for example i can do that right now it has brooklyn track here that's a drum set and i can go over to my midi controller and just press on it to find where the drum sounds are and that's tom that's a kick that's a snare and i can just record right now by just clicking r and recording some sounds [Music] so that's how you would actually do that well we're going to keep moving and we'll dive into the recording in a little bit so not to get too deep into that right now just delete that and we'll go back to my piano so i want to do mention the other way to record using these sounds if you don't have a midi controller and that's to use musical typing inside garageband we can go to the top here and press window and then show musical typing and this just gives you an interface of what your actual keyboard looks like on your computer and you can press these notes like if i press this j on my actual computer keyboard it will be the piano note um which is here is a b and then k is a c so that's a c so if i play a d g that's a c major chord and so i don't have to have any type of extra hardware at all i can just use my own keyboard so that's that that can be a bit limiting because you're kind of using your keyboard it's nice to actually have a layout of a midi controller where you can it looks really like a piano so those are the limitations that come with musical typing the same thing goes with musical typing if you go back to you know we can we can play a hard rock guitar here [Music] we can go back to drum kits play a heavy drum kit [Music] it's the exact same thing these this is just a controller to what sounds you've chosen in garageband so i'm going to x this and we'll go back to my piano and steinway piano i personally like to start if i'm going to compose a song my bias is towards using piano because i play piano but maybe you use guitar or you want to start with a beat that's completely fine we're going to use software instruments audio instruments and drummer tracks in this video to go through what those actually are in garageband so that is a software instrument track and we only have these software and sprint tracks available to us in this library here so we have bass drum kits electronic trump kits sorry guitar mallet all the way down to arpeggiators and we can use any of these instruments and it will load in vintage clav 70s clav and we can go through these and we can have multiple tracks again if we want to add another software instrument track for example another green one we can have maybe a 70s clav and then we have a bluebird drum kit and then let's say we want to add another software instrument track let's add a base we'll add a liverpool base and then we'll add another one and we we can keep we can add many many um tracks here to make up a song let's add a synthesizer let's add a bell synth and some arabelles and so we've already have four tracks in our song composition right now and we can actually you know bring up our musical typing and record different elements within this uh left to right window here then record some drums record some bass record some air bells and you know we're kind of off to the races making a song and we'll do that in just a little bit but i want to get on to what audio tracks are and what drummer tracks are in more detail before we actually start composing this song so that's what software instruments are let's look at what audio tracks are so i'm going to close this down and i'm just going to go right click and delete these tracks right now and i'm going to delete this one and automatically when you delete and track where you have no more tracks left it will bring up this window so we're going to do an audio track we can it gives us two options in garageband here it says record using a microphone or line input or drag and drop audio files and or it says connect a guitar or bass to your mac to play and record through future virtual amps and pedal effects so um it doesn't matter but let's first use uh sorry it does matter but it doesn't matter in our case because we're going to go both we're going to go over both those ways so let's first record using a microphone or a line input so this is what i meant when we were talking about the settings page and where we're going to have to tell garageband what our input is so here is where you might have a row block if you don't have a certain piece of equipment this piece of equipment is called an audio interface so what that is is basically like a little box where you can plug your microphone into this box and from that box into your computer because if you think of a microphone in the cord that is connected to a microphone on the other end it's like a it's called an xlr and it's like a big little circle kind of cylinder with three um kind of prongs in it and you can't plug that into your computer so you need this thing called an audio interface to be the middle man between your computer and the microphone the only other option around that is if your microphone that you're using has a usb plug to it it can actually go right into your computer so if you do have that then you don't need an audio interface but most of the time if you're using a microphone like this one right here or any professional audio you will need an audio interface so in my case i'm using apogee one as my audio interface so my microphone is connected to my apogee one and that is connected to my computer so you just really have to answer this question here my instrument is connected with uh in this case it says my speakers so i don't want that i'm gonna have to go here to click this arrow and i'm gonna have to change this to the app g1 v2 so i'm gonna have to click that and that will um sync up the two it will tell grashpan okay that there's a microphone connected to this so i can actually start recording with that microphone and then like we did with the software instrument track you will answer the question i want to hear the sound from the speakers or my headphones or the computer and so you can kind of if it's not the right answer here click the arrow and then choose the right answer where where you want to hear the sound from then next that we'll click create and then we'll have an audio track here so the symbols are a bit different the audio track gives us this blue little audio signal here and then we also have our controls window at the bottom and our library window too same thing with software instruments those windows come up the library window is a bit different because we can't go and choose like the base or classic electric piano and all those things because those are software instruments now we're in audio tracks and the same thing we can have many audio tracks here and we can have different types of audio in each track going left to right but for now let's just focus on one so this is my main audio track and we can always for you know just a quick tip here you can double click these and maybe change this to vocal track or or just vocal and we have a couple i want to go through what the library is for audio tracks similar in a way to software instrument tracks where we have kind of sections here voice acoustic guitar electric guitar and bass so what these are these are called presets and if you've heard the term you will hear the term um if you continue on this journey of music production presets are things that um are preset for you that make will make it sound what your look what you what you're looking for so let's use it let's talk about an example so there garageband gives you these voice presets which means you can go and click bright vocal classic vocal compressed focal dance vocal maybe you're doing a podcast and you want a narration vocal these are giving you the presets that will make it sound like whatever you choose here so if you want a dance song then it will give you the presets for a dance vocal so let me show you what i mean by going to the controls window you can see these knobs here like the compression is set to around here we have low mid don't worry too much about the terms just kind of look where things are placed if i go over here and then change it to edge vocal the things the knobs have changed so that's what i mean by presets garage band has twisted the knobs for you so you don't have to go and twist the knobs and if what i recommend to start out is don't go and twist the knobs right away if it's too overwhelming eventually you're going to want to get into it but you can just use these presets on the side so i would you know let's do a classic vocal we can shift it here and we can start recording our vocal and the same thing goes for acoustic guitar electric guitar and that's a good segue into using the other type of audio track that garageband gives us so if we go to track a new track this other audio track here where it says connect the guitar bass to your mac to play and record through virtual instruments amps and pedal effects so we're going to create this audio track and make sure we want and you answer those questions here where your instrument is connected to whether it's directly into your computer or you have an audio interface and then you hear the sound from so here it's given us this um guitar amp for us and garageband gives us all these amps under these sections here so we want a clean guitar and we want clean echoes then this is what it looks like here and this is what the knobs are for this amp and it kind of it looks like an amp right well if it is an amp but it's the preset sounds of this amp and we can scroll left to right here going through the different amp sounds that we want that's what audio tracks are let's get into what drummer tracks are so we can delete these tracks and we'll bring up a drummer track so again i hear the sound from wherever you want to hear that sound from and it will bring up a really different interface that we haven't seen yet so um right away it's already given you a track we have a library here and then we have a different window down here it didn't kind of we haven't seen this before so it has you can see what the drum set actually looks like and we can edit what the drum sounds are so similar to how we were choosing the vocal presets we liked or the guitar presets we would do the same things with the drums so right up at the top here we can see by genre like rock alternative songwriter electronic hip-hop uh percussion and then hip-hop sorry so let's just go say let's say we're a singer songwriter and then we have these different guys and girls here who are like drummers so let's go darcy double click on darcy and it's given up giving us a different track here it's giving us hey here's what we think a pop songwriter drama kit default by default sounds like so let me just play this for you [Music] so default that's what it's given us and keep in mind why is it so slow right it's slow because our tempo is still at 68 so if we were like hey i like the sound but not the tempo we can click and drag up let's go back to let's do 1 10. and it's going to change how fast it will automatically change how fast this sounds so we can play that now and that's at 110. and if we don't like the sounds of that we can go and completely change the drummer to let's say graham or we can go back to darcy and just edit below here let's say we want some claps in there just click on the hand or we want some tambourines instead or some shakers we can go and click on these things and then you by using this quadratic circle area here we can we can see that the higher we go the louder it is the lower we go the softer it is the more left we go the more simple the beat will be the more right we go the more complex so if you want really loud and complex go to the top right if we want really soft and simple bottom left and you can see that in the signal right super lots of space super soft as soon as we go loud and complex very full and and much bigger signal if you want a happy medium go right in the middle so you get the idea you can change different a lot of different things you can change here and what i would recommend especially for drummer tracks how it's really mostly just clicking around trying to get the idea of what you want to sound what they want what you want the sound to be just go and move this circle around the square and click if you let's say you want toms click on the toms click on the symbols you can also be scrolling through the type of tom patterns or kick and snare patterns you have available to you and percussion patterns and then play the track [Music] let's say you don't like that all right we don't want the toms let's bring back the high hats [Music] and let's say we do oh we don't really like those let's go to number three [Music] and you see what i mean it's different it's a very subjective way to do it and then you can see here we have beat presets here and that's just choosing a different type of drum set like if you go to the store and buy a drum set you're going to choose a different every drum set sounds a little different just like guitars or pianos would so you're choosing a different type of of drum set that's going to give you a different sound if you are more into the electronic songs where you have maybe a more punchier kick and snare but like electronic sounds you can go to electronic choose like an electronic guy here and it's just saying you've made some changes here do you want to change the drummer yes we do want to change the drummer so now you can see it's more of a beat machine much wow that's much much heavier right very much more electronic same idea we can just go around and click things to change and then click the actual preset here which changes the the drum machine which will give us a different sounding drum set so that's what drummer tracks are so we've gone over software and sprint tracks audio tracks and drummer tracks these are the fundamental tracks available in garageband to make music now let's get into the next section of the videos where we'll dive deeper into making an actual little song with each of these types of different tracks and we'll go over all the the elements and things you can change within each track let's first start with a piano track you can choose what other type of track you're going to get and will build a chord progression so a chord progression is basically a a progression of music that is the staple of a song and we'll do that right now so what i'm going to do is delete this drummer track and we will add a software instrument track and if you prefer to choose a base instrument to start or some strings you can totally do that too but i'm going to do a piano and then and then we're going to change kind of some of the controls some of the eq we're going to get into the piano editor and score window to show you how you can work with these elements as well so first couple things we'll want to decide before we actually start recording are um do you have a midi keyboard and do you have that plugged in or are you going to be using musical typing so whether uh if you are using musical typing you can just open that up and start right away if you have a midi keyboard then what you're going to want to do is um it's likely usb input so just plug it in to your um like put the cord into your midi keyboard and then plug it into your computer and garageband is smart enough to recognize that hey you've plugged in a midi controller so i'm just going to work automatically for you and so it will just work if that doesn't happen no worries go up to garageband preferences and go to audio midi and here you'll see midi and you'll see midi status too many inputs detected and if you don't if it says zero midi inputs detected you can reset the midi drivers and that will kind of refresh the scan but most of the time garageband i pretty much all the time will recognize that you've plugged that in and will automatically work that out for you so i'm going to be using my midi keyboard so i'm not going to x the musical typing and we will start from from scratch here the next thing we'll want to to look at is the tempo of the song so are we going to want to make a song a fast song right now or a slow song i'm going to want to make kind of in between uh about like an 85 i think i want to uh start that at and we can always go and change this you usually want to have a good idea at the beginning of of what your tempo is because as soon as we start getting into audio tracks is when it will be a lot harder to change the tempo for instance if we if we make a song in the tempo of 85 which is nice and slow to medium and then we sing over that but we want to speed it up then it's going to stretch our vocal signal and it will sound bad so let's now go place our cursor at the beginning of our window here and what we can do is press record or we can actually press r on our keyboard and we'll want to make sure the click the metronome is on so we know that we are playing in time if you don't play with the click or if you don't have any sort of tempo then it's going to really hurt you down the line when you start adding different tracks especially drum tracks because drums are all about being in time so if you have if you're not playing in time and you had a drum track and if you've noticed you've done this before and it just sounds really bad it's because your track is likely out of time things aren't locked into the grid and we want things to be locked into this grid here and how we do that is make sure we have a tempo and make sure we are playing with a metronome so what this one two three four is is giving us an idea of what the tempo is before we start recording for example if i press record it's going to do the click four times before it actually starts showing up in red here and now it starts recording and you can hear the click continue to go on so we are recording right now and um it's not recording my voice at all because the microphone's not connected as soon as i go over here and press on my piano it's starting to record piano notes so i just record these three lines here and then you know i can just play any like just whatever right so i'm putting all these notes in there so you never obviously want to do this but this is the idea here we've just recorded all this information it's a green midi track here so i can always just be clicking on this and pressing backspace on my keyboard and that will just get rid of that audio and what i'm going to do now is press record and play a c major chord and aim g an a minor and then an f so this is a simple chord progression that uh you can you can rip that off of me here i've it's a it's a i've ripped it off from other people it's a standard chord progression and um we'll use this as the kind of building blocks for our song so i'm going to record just kind of turn my body here and record that in okay so this is what a what it looks like we can see these lines here right and i'm going to zoom in i'm just how i'm zooming in here is i'm pinching on my trackpad but if we if you don't have a trackpad you can go over to the right here and by clicking this slider left and right we'll see it will zoom in for us so we zoom in to get a better look at this and we'll see here that it's just lines right midi data is just lines there's no like actual musical notes midi you can think of midi because it's digital it's just lines so if we want to see this even more zoom here is where the piano roll editor comes in so we're going to click the scissors and we'll drag this window up so we see in detail here this and this these two things are the same so we have another slider on the top right here where we can zoom in and out okay so let's look at this in closer detail and what i've done what this yellow bar is at the top this is what this is the cycle bar this icon here and the cycle bar is helpful because you can quickly like click and drag and then whenever you press spacebar it will start where you've cycled it so i'm just gonna i can just press spacebar and we'll start at bar one if i if i just wanted to hear bar two and three it will loop that over just that cord right there so you get the idea it's kind of a loop and you'll notice this becomes very helpful when you start working garageband so here is our midi information that we've recorded in and what we can do here is click and edit any of these notes as you you see when i click on them it's actually playing them the note for me so you can see here i actually like didn't hold the note on the keyboard long enough so it's super small right so i can just click the end here and drag it to make it to fix it because the only the other alternative is just to re-record the whole thing and sure you go ahead and do that if you'd like or you can just click and drag and now you have the note in there and you have the chord so these are these are chords this is your c chord this is your g chord a minor and then your f [Music] so you can literally look at where i've put these on the keyboard here and you can just copy that if you don't know how to play the the music on your keyboard or controller or you can look up um midi note information on google and just look at like what do the midi notes um what what's the midi information for a c major chord or a any chord you'd like but this is c g a minor f so that's the information for you here i never really go to the score because i don't i don't work with i don't work with sheet music but this is what the actual sheet music looks like i'm usually in the piano roll editor because i like to work with midi information and this is if you're kind of old school and classic or very um you know you understand music theory we can work with actual score here and we can actually drag the the notes if you're more comfortable looking at it in this fashion two things i want to mention in this piano role editor for the super beginner is you can click and drag notes to make them longer and shorter but you can also click and drag the notes to make them sound more in time we can do this manually and we can also do this automatically so to do it manually you can see here like i just zoomed into this c major chord you'll notice where the cursor is like right where it is on this number one that's where the notes should should all begin if you if we're talking 100 in time on the grid that's norm where they should be when a human plays there will always be a bit of error and so you might be a bit before the line or a bit after the line or on the beat or off the beat so typically in electronic music everything would be like you would you would be on the grid so it would look like something like this and we would say this is like 100 percent in time you can see here my natural playing on this bar if i zoomed in i was before the actual beat so we could go and if we fix that and this is this is um the idea of doing this is to make sure your music is in time it's okay if it's a little bit you know before or a little bit after you won't hear it um that much and sometimes it can give your music a more human feel if you do that but where you will want to fix that timing is when it sounds bad like if it really is off a lot in this case what we'll want to do here is go through and make sure our notes are lined up and that's what you'll want to do with your tracks with any midi you know this is goes to for drums this goes for bass all midi information will look the same and we'll have this type of interface will be lines and you can go and do the same thing let's say we um actually played the wrong note and was up here we can just fix that by clicking it and bringing it down and if we didn't want this note we can just click that and delete it or we can do you know come here and say edit undo delete and it brings it back for us so that's gives you the idea of how flexible midi is the automatic way to do this time fixing the the actual term is called quantization is where you can see here it says time quantize so we can do this automatically and how we can do that is what we need to say we need to highlight all the notes so we can do that by clicking and dragging we can also do that by going command a which is like the select all term and when we do that you can see here time quantize and there's this time quantize drop down and then there's this q here so we want to quantize by in our case we want to quantize by one whole note so this will be might be tough to grasp if you don't know much about um time signatures but i'll try to explain as best i can so basically within these bars here we have one bar two bar three bar and four bar right and within these big bars we have smaller bars and so those smaller bars can get up to 1 64 kind of bars if you will so we want all our lines on the first part of the bar right we want all these ones on the one we want all these ones on the first part of bar two and these ones on the first part of bar three and these ones on the first part bar four so that means i want to quantize by one whole note so i can do command a go to one whole note and it see it shifted it all for me what you can do almost as a safeguard uh you can most the time quantize by 1 16th note and that should do the trick because 1 16 is a small fast note within the bar and if you quantize by 1 16 it will usually lock it into place it's basically saying shift it to the closest closest bar that's that's near where you played i realize while i'm explaining this that it is quantization can be confusing if this is the first time you're hearing about it what i do recommend is going in there and you're gonna have to like mess it up for the first bit and you'll understand eventually how it works and i don't know if there's a better way to learn if you're starting from basically just scratch and so velocity is much more easy to understand than quantization if we wanted that high note of the c major chord to be soft we can bring out this velocity down to 19 or 20. and then you can see within that note there's a smaller line that's mean that means that this note is played soft and this note is played a little harder this is a bit softer a bit softer and this is soft so if you wanted maybe more of a base note in the piano we can bring this velocity up we can get a preview of it again by clicking on it it's much harder if i want a bit softer a bit softer and so velocity helps change midi into more of like a human instrument because with midi it is very plasticky electronic but we can get it to sound very human with using velocity as a tool to change the feeling of the notes because if all notes were just played the exact same pressure the whole time then it can sound very plastic we can also change the velocity of the all midi notes at the same time by and that goes for anything if you want to change multiple things at once we can highlight all the notes and we can go to um velocity and just you can see all them are raising up and all of them are are going down to where their respective velocities are so it's they're not all going to 40 55 but relatively they're being all pushed up now and then relatively they're all being pulled down right now another way to actually if you don't have a midi keyboard and you don't have musical typing is you can actually just from scratch draw the notes in and so let's say you are at your computer right now and you don't have a keyboard or anything and you can just look at my computer and you can see that this c4 note and you can see that um one two three four up from that and then one two three up from that these are three notes you can go in and just click and draw those notes into your own garageband interface right now and i'll show you how to do that so let's say these weren't here clicking and highlighting them well let's say none of these were here right well let's just do the first chord what we do is when you press command on your keyboard it's going to change our cursor to a little pencil and that means that we can now click here in our window and we can just draw notes in you know without playing them so i'll draw that c major chord here and you can do the same if you don't if you would prefer to do it this way so c [Music] now i clicked it in the wrong timing so i'm going to have to click and just drag it over and then there so that's a c and then i can add the base notes which is c3 make sure it's on the cursor and then a c2 and drag it over and now we have [Music] a c major chord and again if you don't know how what a c major chord is or if you don't know how to draw these notes do quick google search on like what it looks like on the keyboard and you can just you know turn your head a little bit left and and and see it's like oh it looks like this it's this note this um this this note and this note and you can draw those in so now that we have this piano chord progression we'll add another track on top of this another software instrument track we'll add a bass track because it's always nice to have a bass track in place to fill up some low end so what we'll do is um drag this down and we'll go up to track new track and new software instrument track and we will go to base and we'll add a just a muted bass and what we're going to want to do now is if we press spacebar we're going to we're going to hear our piano [Music] oh so that's a wrong chord [Music] so you you heard that right it sounded quite bad on bar 2 here so something's going on there and let's dive in to fix that so i'm going to what i can do here is double click on this green thing and that will open up this piano roll editor that we had so that chord was i was doing a g chord right so i want g there's a g so that's a g so i just had to go up [Music] so i quickly fixed because i because i know what notes are needed in a g chord i was quickly able to fix that and so if you don't know that yeah you will be you will be in a more tricky position position there but you can look at okay what notes are in a g chord and then tilt your head and fix it that way main window here we can just drag this down we can also click the scissors to get that out of the way if we want and what i will do now is record a base uh track with my piano track and for simplicity purposes let's do it drawing drawing it in here what i'm gonna do is press command again and i have a little pencil here if i just click on these windows it's going to bring up these empty midi things and i can click regions they're called and i can highlight them and just delete them or i can go over here and you see when i highlight here you have this two icons you have this um this is a loop icon where it loops it then it's a stretch icon we're going to want to stretch a region because we're going to want to record in base notes that are the full progression and then from here we can loop both sections as far as we want and we're going to do that in a little bit for now let's just focus on the base so let's double click in this green area and we'll bring up an empty drawing board here for us and just like what we did with the piano we're going to want to do bass because bass notes usually only happen like they're monophonic which means like one note at the time one note at a time most of the time it's like that so we're going to want to find a c note and we're going to click command so to change our cursor to a pencil so the c notes are laid out for you here we have all the way up to c8 and then we have all the way down to c negative 2. and that just means um the numbers are like where on the piano are is the c note is it like a way on the base the low end of the c that would be like a negative 2 a very low c and this c8 would be like a very high c so we want kind of like a because we're in a base instrument probably want like a low maybe c3 c2 so we're going to press the pencil and then draw our node in and let's so this is what a c 2 sounds like not sure if you can hear that this is and then if we want to see no sorry that was a c3 here's what c2 sounds like [Music] so that's better bass sound i think c1 would be too low yeah two too too low too subby so c2 i think is the best so and we'll stretch it to bar one to part two and then we'll the next chord we had is a g chord so we'll look for the g note which is here oh right so um you can see here if i just hover over it says pitch g sharp 2 velocity 55 so we don't want a g sharp we want a g so we'll just drag it down one now we're in a pitch of um just hover here g2 and the velocity 55 so that's good we want g2 full length and then we want next is a an a so go up to a and then we have an f so go down to f so we have c g a f and that will play nicely with our piano we can just scroll the cursor to number one and hear what that sounds like [Music] a good thing to mention now that we have two tracks and let's say we listen to that we're like man this is just too slow i really don't like the tempo because we just have midi still we can go up to the tempo and we can be clicking and dragging but we can also double click and just type in our keyboard let's say we want 120 let's like really make this a dance song then we can see what that sounds like so that's much that's much faster right and we might find that our creativity now it it becomes easier to find new ideas because because we've changed the tempo and you you can do that as many times as you want if you're just using midi now we have two software instrument tracks and now let's record a drummer track or not really record one but just add one and it will you know beautifully add one for us without much work like we saw before so new track drummer create and you'll see it added this 8 bar drum track for us the big room magnus electronic kit so we can right away just press space to see what that sounds like way too loud so i can quickly just highlight this fader here and i can bring that all the way down you know this is what mixing is basically you mix well the fundamental of mixing is choosing how loud things are [Music] and if i'm listening back to i can also just turn the click off so it's not so annoying you can just listen to that again [Music] okay and so what happens now that we don't have any tracks here is where we go back to what i was saying earlier is we can just loop these now and heck we could loop it for forever i can zoom out and just loop it to bar 30 if i want for now or yeah let's just say bar 30. so now we have a bit of a song here right considering it is the same thing throughout we might eventually want to add a new um section so it doesn't sound so much of the same thing or we could add another track where it comes in maybe at bar five and then maybe another track comes in at bar 13 for example um or we could also you know not not have the bass come in to bar five where it just starts piano then bass goes also for the drums maybe the drums don't come in two until bar nine and we can loop loop it like that this is this is more getting into music production and how we create dynamics in the song to keep it engaging for the listener so this is simple music production where you create different levels of excitement as the song goes on and perhaps you know you could take the drums out and then bring them back in so if you want to you know cop we can copy and paste this section over here so we can click on it do command c on our keyboard then go to the place we want to paste it so let's say 21 make sure our track is selected make sure we're not pasting it into the base or the piano track make sure our drum track is selected to command v and then we have a drummer track here so drums come out [Music] you know maybe it's a slower part of the song um something else happens then the drums come back in and maybe for that drum part we don't want the claps so what we would do here is if we highlight this drum track we can see here we have the editor or window we can drag this up why isn't that dragging up thought maybe you can't do that a limitation in garageband we can't drag this editor up but what we can do here is let's say this drummer track here or let's consider this our course let's say with this drummer track here we want we don't want to build come in too intense so let's move this circle down to soft and simple and we'll just start small right here just something [Music] just something to set the mood maybe it's a more of a verse and so using these drummer tracks give us the flexibility of creating a lot of dynamic without us having to actually play any sort of drums i mean i haven't i haven't really done anything other than i still even haven't changed the default drummer i'm still using this big room magnus and only changing the dials at the bottom here i can completely get rid of all this and start from scratch with a new drummer let's say i want a more organic feel so i go to the songwriter maybe let's do a 60s songwriter it's going to ask us we thought we've already made changes do we still want to change the drummer and yes i do and so um it didn't give us a yellow track right so what so what are we going to do here is you can see at the bottom it says create a region on the drummer track so we can just click that and it's created one for us so we can again click and drag to where we want the drums let's say we do want to come in here and we can maybe change the dynamic to simple and soft and then we can copy and paste this down the line to perhaps where we want a chorus section then we can make this section more complex and prop a bit louder and this is what this sounds like [Music] now that's how we would go about adding drum tracks to our song and we would can always go back and be switching things on the left library or on the bottom here sounds if we want different types of drum kits and then the specifics about the drum kits at the bottom now let's add an audio track to our song we're building here so we go to track new track audio track using a microphone and i will create this track i'm going to use this microphone here to show you how this actually works so i will click this and go to my input being this one v2 and so this one v2 is my audio interface that i was mentioning so we're going to want to make sure that's on now we have our audio track built up here and one thing i do want to mention with audio tracks are when you're recording you have the option garageband gives you the option to do something called input monitoring and so this is helpful when you're doing when you're singing over a song or you're doing a podcast and you want to hear yourself through the microphone in your headphones and that's what input monitoring means if you want to hear yourself in your headphones while you're singing just make sure this orange button is on if you don't then make sure it's off so let's say in our case we want to hear ourself we want to click that on and you'll notice here at the bottom it's on as well so now let's press r on our keyboard or this red dot and we can start um singing over our track now i haven't used any lyrics because i don't have any lyrics to the song but usually when i'm producing music i normally just hum like that over my music that i'm working on to get ideas for lyrics anyways so now we have a vocal recording here and you can notice the different colors we have green for midi yellow for drums and blue for audio so now that we have all the three fundamental tracks in here that garageband gives us let's dive into each one and move on to the next section of the video and add different effects so we'll talk about controls and eq for each of these tracks so a lot of this comes down to mixing and it's it's in between mixing and producing um because now we're going to start changing the sonics the actual sounds of our tracks so what i mean by that and we won't get too technical we're really going to focus on what garageband gives us here under controls and eq so each track has controls and eq and they all look a bit different so let's let's first focus on controls so you can see the controls for the steinway grand piano look a lot different for the controls of the muted bass as they do for the drummers and as they do for the audio let's start from the top let's do piano so it will give us um different dials we can turn so we have low high tone dynamics which is compression and effects delay ambience and reverb and so i'll give you an idea of what that actually sounds like and we don't have to change any of this by the way you don't feel pressured like you gotta go in and change the dials because we are already using a preset sound it's called the steinway grand piano that's a preset sound that garageband has said okay this timely grand piano um has that dial turned here like i was saying before right and it's preset those dials for us by the way if you don't like the steinway grand piano anymore you always have the options to click on it and just change the entire instrument let's say we we did want a synthesizer a synthesizer we want a pad let's say so we have all these pads here we can just click on any one of these pads it's a dream voice pad we've just changed our entire track to a dream voice track even though it says steinway grand piano up here if we play this it will be the dream voice a trap pad for us and what we can do to highlight only the sound of this track is by clicking on this headphones button here and that's kind of um like a solo option yeah where you can only hear this track and we can also we can do like solo the dream voice and also we can solo the vocal if we want and now we'll only hear these two and that's really helpful to dial in on certain tracks that you want to listen to so let's just take a listen to this dream voice pad because we've completely just changed changed the vibe of our song it sounds kind of cool right it definitely sounds pretty high why don't we roll with that the idea is once you have that midi information in there like we have these midi lines we can just go around and change whatever instrument we want in regards to the software instruments and just yeah choose anything we want but let's get back into the controls section so let's scroll this up a bit so you can get a better idea of what we're what we can change here and because we can dial in two different sounds so under this dream voice track we have transform controls and eq yeah i should mention some tracks do even have more options so they have not only controls in eq which we've already mentioned they have transform where you can go and click different options so for example hollow voices will sound a bit different [Music] and let's do so we don't like that we're shifting excuse me shifting pad say we don't like that let's do fade in fade out that's kind of nice right comes it up up and down so let's say we like that now let's move on let's go to controls and here is where we can change the dials as well um specifics again will be in the glossary section but go ahead and change these things and you'll drastically change you you have the option to dramatically change the sound of this synth [Music] so i'm just i'm you know what i don't really know what i'm doing like i know what all these things mean but i'm just like heck you know let's just have some fun and do some things here let's say we we do like that and we can go with it and let's move on to let's talk about controls for the bass track when it comes to synths there are so many controls you can do with a synth and which is why i'm saying just kind of go through it and have some fun with it because synths are so powerful because they give you the flexibility to do so many things you'll notice with bass guitar it's there's you know very little we can do to the bass because bass is not as flexible as an instrument as a synth is so when you're in synth you'll notice you can do a lot more editing and transforming when you're in kind of the more standard instruments there'll be less to get confused by so let's take the solo off and we'll solo the bass and we'll press spacebar to hear it and we'll change some so we can boost it if we want more of a power punch in the boost of the bass we can increase the tone change change these as well and also again keep in mind this is already a preset of the muted base if we want to change the base to a liverpool base it will say hey you've already made changes you sure you want to change it yes you want a liverpool base that will be more punchy you can hear that already okay in the drummer section the controls are more or less the same it's giving us details of the drums we have kick snare toms hi-hat symbols percussion and then compression and effects here and we can change how um how loud these are basically the volumes of the kick if we want the kick drum to be really loud have it loud maybe the snare equal length but the tom's not so loud the hi-hats may be a bit down we can have those um we can change the volume of the specifics inside this controls okay now we can take a look at the controls on our audio track here so we'll scroll down to audio click off solo and click on solo for our audio track and we can also just call this vocal and what the other symbol does here on the the left is a mute track so let's say we list want to listen to all these three tracks except our vocal track and we can just mute tracks and we can also mute multiple tracks at once okay so let's solo this audio track and take a look at the controls we can shift here now a good thing to mention with audio tracks are because we we recorded an audio track from scratch we haven't used any presets yet so none of these dials are shifted automatically for us like they were with our other midi instruments so basically what that means is this audio recording here is also known as like raw audio there's no effects being happen um on it right now there's no compression there's no eq there's no reverb we'll get into what those terms actually mean in the next section what we want to do is add those things so it makes our audio track sound better we can do that manually or like i was mentioning at the beginning of the video when it comes to audio tracks are we can use presets so under our library section we can go to voice and we can go to our classic vocal track or a dance vocal wherever we want let's say we want a natural vocal so notice that the knobs down here will change when i click on natural vocal now it's going to ask me do you want to change it yes i do so it's kind of giving me a full new control section with different knobs and different effects so now if we play this audio track it will sound more it will sound better i'll give you the comparison actually so let's um let's undo and do load of patch so it's just a raw audio here this is what that sounds like [Music] so that's my voice and kind of embarrassing but let's add the natural vocal patch on let's see what that sounds like it's much more compressed some more reverb maybe [Music] so already with just a couple twists of the dials here i can make it sound a bit more professional let's now actually move on to the next section of the video where we talk about what these terms actually mean a glossary of terms section of the video or let's talk about compression eq reverb echo and some of the other terms plugins track versus master and what all this stuff means down here and how you might want to use that to make your tracks sound a bit better so because we have our audio vocal track here let's stick with this one and we'll start with eq so eq stands for equalization we have these bands at the top and then we have different shapes and we can click and drag these shapes overall like high level eq basically if you take if you look at an audio signal and it's basically waves and it comes there's low end and high end and there's the middle and we can cut or increase or decrease different frequencies within your track so let's do this as an example to walk through so we have let's solo our vocal track and you can see what i mean here let's make let's just take out take out all these shapes that we've kind of have by default i'm just going to unclick these at the top so we're going to have an empty an empty eq pan let's just go through an example to show you what that looks like in real time if we take our vocal track here and i click on analyzer that's going to show me where the audio signal is actually happening in real time with my voice so you'll be able to see what that looks like [Music] so this is all the signal here so you can see there's lots of low end [Music] the bulk is happening around here so typically in a vocal um you want to take out some of the low end so i can click on this low end band here and i can drag this across and anything that's like the red stuff here that means whatever is in this shape won't be heard so if i play my voice if i play the track now you won't hear anything other than what comes out in this section and that won't be much at all it will sound very thin for example i'm not sure if you can even hear that that's a better example you can hear that so that's a drastic example of what an eq would do and you would never want to do that with a vocal probably not but you might do it at around a 100 where you really don't need this space or even here it's nice to cut out that in certain tracks because it's not necessary that you have that signal coming into your mix and we create these shapes to decrease frequencies like we want to cut out all the frequencies here or we want to increase them and we want the frequencies around 500 and 100 to really um be be pushed up and so you'll see what i mean if i if i increase it around 1 1k it will push those frequencies up in my voice [Music] it sounds a bit more thin in that area because we're doing a drastic increase but when you're doing increases in areas you might only want to bump it up like a gain of maybe two or three depending on what really what you want to go but you can see here um see a gain of four plus that means at one thousand hertz i'm bumping it up for now and now i'm bumping it up 12 db more so i can go up to my base or sorry my drums here and solo this and i'll also have a different eq will be completely different and see if i go back to my vocal here come on i'll have my vocal eq there it is and my liverpool base will have its own eq so in a base a lot of the time you don't want some of the high end so we can come on drag that in there oh come on there it is we can drag some of the high end we don't want really this high end we just want the low end here see the base is very pretty much all here so we can cut that high end out we just don't need it in there and the dream synth pad will also have its own eq you can see frequencies really happen around and since we have a bass guitar we can cut some of those low ends because we don't need him because we're covering with the base [Music] and that's night maybe we want some maybe we want the synth to be really airy we can bump it up some of those frequencies by doing a bump like that and that can create some more air space with the synth eq is really about training your ear to what what you have to hear in order to what in what to increase or decrease so it is more of an experience thing when it comes to eq to notice what you should be cutting out increasing or decreasing let's move on to delay compression and reverb so let's go to our vocal track and here we have reverb and we have compression and then we also have this section here where it says plug-ins so i can drop this down so plug-ins plug-ins are pieces like effects that you can add to a track and so because i've put a preset on this vocal this natural vocal it's come with all these plugins you can see there's little kind of like on buttons for each one and now so now all the plugins are off now they're all on so i can turn them off and turn them on these are what plugins are and you can click in the middle of each one and we'll open up the plugin window so for example open up this little box here right that's what this plugin looks like this is the eq plugin that we just did that's it's now in a separate window this is compressor plug-in opens up a separate window for that so these are what plug-ins are and they're all different little windows that we can go in and change the dials on each track and if you want to add more plugins to the bottom window here where um you kind of it's a bit highlighted under my mouse it opens up this box now this is a box where you can search for different plugins and all of these come for free with garageband we have amps delay distortion dynamics eq filter imaging modulation pitch reverb specialize in utility so i don't want to go through all them but i do want to mention delay i do want to mention um compress compress compression and i want to mention reverb and then we can quickly get into some cool ones like pitch pitch shifter and vocal transformer those are really cool effects to add to your vocal let's first start with we've done eq so let's go on to compression so it's under dynamics and compression so what is compression for the super beginner compression is is like think of it like you have an audio track and there are quiet parts and there are loud parts and a compressor will make sure that the listener listening to it on the other end that the quiet parts aren't too quiet and that the loud parts aren't too loud that everything sounds more or less the same volume even though that there are quiet parts and loud parts so think of it like if you think of the a volume fader of like a knob you can think of it like when there's quiet parts in the song the volume is being turned up so you can hear the quiet parts better but then when there's the loud parts in the song it's being turned down so it's kind of matching what the quiet parts are like a compressor really evens out the loudness of the song in a way and what we can do here is use the presets that are given to a compressor so on this window we don't have to learn right now about threshold ratio attack and gain as a super beginner i would stick to the defaults here so go under this drop down and because we are a vocal track these are different compressors that we can choose so if you want like a wrap vocal focal this is a suggested compressor preset for wrap vocals i recommend using compressed compressors on your track because it's going to glue think of it like glue on your track i wanted to kind of show you what's under the hood with the plugins and what what's happening behind the scenes really but you you really don't have to ever open this up if you don't want to it it's happening behind the scenes anyways if you're using the library and the preset sounds here so don't feel overwhelmed like you have to get in there and start adding this stuff we um because you can see i've i have added this compressor but there was already this compressor on there because we're using the natural vocal preset so i'm gonna go ahead and um turn this one off but what we can do is use the control section here and just use this compression knob if we want more compression we just increase it more and i'll try to give you an example of what that sounds like if i over compress something you'll hear it sounds crunchy so let's under compress it right now our vocal [Music] and now let's over compress it [Music] can you hear that it does sound more crunchy in a way that it's squishy in a way that's as far as i want to get with compression i would stick to it's good to know what's under the hood here but then you you can just stick to this dial and add compression to your tracks and then we have echo and reverb what is reverb reverb is basically when you are in a room talking normally your voice is bouncing all over the room and it's reverberating all over the room that's what reverb is and if you're in a living room it's going to bounce a lot faster off the room and it's going to sound maybe like you're in a smaller room and if you are in a room with full of curtains and there's no there's no way really the sound can bounce anywhere because it's being like sucked in the by the curtains then there won't be much reverb at all it's really dry so that's a dry room and a big room would be like a cave if like if you're in a cave and you're speaking and like you're yelling and there's an echo behind behind you that's reverb it's it gives the audience or whoever is there context of what space you're in for example this vocal track here without any reverb it sounds very dry and now with lottery verb [Music] noticeably a difference right so you would add tasteful amounts of reverbs to whatever taste you would like echo is different than reverb because echo actually can duplicate your voice so if you have a signal here where if i zoom in and i have these three audio signals if i want that to play again automatically i can use echo to have that happen behind and echo is a really nice tool to use with vocals or guitars to create a feeling of a lot of depth because it provides um it provides a lot of space in in the mix so i use echo on pretty much everything the couple of the other things here so we've gone through plugins recording settings and then we have track and master up here so um the recording settings are basically what we've gone over we have what our input is and our input monitoring if we want to hear our vocals in our headphones and then we have track first master which is something to to mention so when you compose music like i was saying a song is made up of multiple tracks so our song here is only four tracks but we have one master track so what a master track is basically like it's where it's kind of like a tr it's it's the track where it includes all of these tracks if that makes sense and we can put different effects on the master track so if we want to like put reverb on the entire track like we want to have the same reverb for all of these four tracks then we go to the master track here and we can add more reverb we can have more compression um a limiter which is good for mastering and we can also eq the entire track you may or may have not heard of mastering before which is the process of of finalizing a song and it's called mastering because on a song you have a song is made up of tracks but then all tracks go to this one track called the master track and when you're mastering you're really only looking at this one track you're not going through you're not mixing anymore you're just focusing on this kind of stereo output one it's mostly usually two tracks but sometimes it's just one um two tracks because you have a left and right signal but let's just say it's one track and it's called the master track and we just focus on tweaking the master track here and there to glue everything together and you do that through more compression a bit more eq maybe adding a slight um you know effects uh like reverb and delay here and there but because you're dealing with a master track everything is um all the small little things you do will have a big effect on the entire sound because everything is going through this track the other thing i always said i wanted to mention too was the pitch correction which is something cool that is not totally visible in garageband with with some of these things like oh controls and eq so if you go to our vocal go to track and then under plugins some scroll up to make some space and i just hover over here where that little white line or blue line shows up i can go to pitch and then pitch shifter or vocal transformer so vocal transformer will take the pitch of this and if i pitch this down 12 notes that's one full octave it's gonna sound like really really low so on its own it doesn't sound super cool but that can be cool to put in your song little bits here and there and what the formant does the formant is think of it like the texture of the voice so if i keep that at like zero it will sound high [Music] but it's trying to keep my natural texture of the voice if i increase the formant it will sound like more in this case it's kind of matching the pitch so it's going to sound a bit more chipmunky that's a really cool tool though to use with with your productions and making music with garageband for the beginner let's take this track now and do a bit of a simple song we'll and give it some music production by adding the right compression reverb and delay to things so as i was saying earlier we want to try to create some dynamic of the song so we have this nice dream voice synth playing at the beginning and maybe our vocal comes in with a simple drum sound so we will go to our drums and we will go to we don't want controls in eq we want the editor so we can go to our scissors and then we can play around with the simplicity or the softness of this let's say we only want the kick and snare at the beginning and we don't want the snare let's say we want claps instead so it's nice and simple and i don't want this like weird fill happening right here if i solo this i'll show you it's a bit soft that's a bit soft because i put it really soft here so i can bump that signal up a bit [Music] so this is a this is an example of a fill it kind of has a bit of a crash and a tom roll so i don't if i don't want that just put this down you can see that they go away here so i want the synth to start and then i want the vocal to come in with the drum set i'm going to drag these over i want the bass to come in let's say the chorus and i want the drummer track to be yeah a bit more complex a bit more loud maybe add the claps [Music] [Music] okay just getting some ideas here of course and what i've done here quickly is a little shortcut is i've just clicked this i've held option and then i'm dragging this over it's a very quick way to to make copies of the tracks and um drag them places like this hold option and then drag [Music] so it's not i don't really like that synth anymore so me personally so i'm going to here's what i'm going to do i'm going to switch this back to a piano by going um so right this is helpful for me to work through this so you can kind of just see what it's like in the workflow so i've clicked on this track and i can't see piano here because i need to go back up a folder like um level so i'm going to go to synthesizer here and now i'm back at this like main level click on piano so i'm gonna have the steinway grand piano but i i want i'll also want a synth pad behind it so what i can do with with the same chords so you can right click and um duplicate track new track with duplicate settings and then i can go to my synthesizer pad and let's do the arrow airways let's see what airway sounds like so now i'll do the same thing like what i did with the vocal i can hold down option and drag down and now i'll have sorry hold down option drag down and now i'll have two of the same um two tracks with the same midi notes one's piano and ones on this pad so this pad sounds like this [Music] i'm not sure when i accidentally um transposed this but we can see here if i drag these out that it says plus five semitones and through this tutorial i must have accidentally increased the semitones so how we can get that back is by two ways we can click on it and hold option on our keyboard and then press the down arrow on our little on our keyboard we can go back to zero because i just was wondering why it sounded so high [Music] that sounds much better so the other way to do that is just to go on the track and then go to the editor scissors and to where is it the region and transpose here so i must have i think just click that once when i was editing the velocity probably so let's go back here and let's we basically want the piano and this airway synth to work well together so let's see what the piano sounds like [Music] now i'm going to solve the airways with [Music] it so i'm just gonna lower the volume of the airways to sit underneath the piano so that's sounding vibey um let's add a drum the drums to come in maybe some just some snaps so what i'll do is go to my i'll take these off now let's just solo the drummer track and let's get something maybe a bit more electronic for now just some well we go to our electronic drum kit and then just go to let's try the boutique 808 and just click on the track and then open up the controls oh sorry the editor and we'll just see what this sounds like so i want it a bit louder still simple and i do want this let's see um i don't really like the pattern so i can click on the kick and snare and just go to start at one let's see what that sounds like i don't like that either so i'm going to second kick maybe something a bit more standard let's just see what that sounds like in context if we solo the three tracks here let's say we don't like the clap but we want the snare instead so let's add the snare in that's kind of cool it's a bit more groovy you can sing over top of that okay so what i'm going to do here is delete these tracks and i want to loop the drummer and at bar 13 i'm going to want to add a base so i'll drag the bass over and unsold the bass to see what that sounds like in context [Music] okay cool let's say we want the base notes to be a little more um a bit more rhythmic so it's coming in here we want to be like [Music] not only on the whole notes but the half notes as well so what i can do here is double click on this base and that will well it was already open but if i double click it's going to bring open my scissors window right and i can go in and now these are my base notes you can see here these ones are you can't edit these ones because it's been looped right so this is the loop here and whatever you edit and these nodes will change on the loop you can see it's changing over here too okay so let's what i wanted to do was i want to shorten these notes to happen that that they're more like this to sound like this [Music] so i can do that in two ways what we had here is like this if i wanted to do it to all them i can highlight them all and drag them across like this and now they're all super short and i can also be pressing command on my mouse and that will change into a pencil and just be clicking the notes where i want it to be i can drag that one over and so now if we solo the bass i can also just quick tip is if i want to unsolo all these i can just click on one and then drag my mouse down and that will unsolo all them pretty easily and quickly to do it just provides a bit more rhythm if i'm gonna play it with everything it sounds like this there's my fantastic vocal [Music] and now we're starting to build a bit of a better song here with that creates more dynamics so we can consider this bar the intro this bar kind of like the first verse maybe a bit of a break and then this is the first chorus where we'll want let's say another drum section here that has more complexity let's say let's just drag that bass out and then we will click this copy it you do right click copy and then we're going to want to put our cursor to where we want to paste it and then we do right click paste now we can double click or we've already have our editor window open for the drummer track we have so let's say for the chorus i do want to add a hi-hat and a clap and have it a bit more complex so here we have in context coming in to the chorus [Music] so i mean high hats adding hi-hats create a lot of rhythm and it's nice to separate hi-hats between choruses and verses because it really creates dynamic so this is what a song could look like let me know in a comment of what you're struggling with or what you need help with i'd be happy to help out or i'll try to help out the best i can please feel free to subscribe and take a listen to some of my own music i'd love to know what you think and i hope to see you in the next garage band tutorial or music production tutorial

Channel: Charles Cleyn

Views: 135,364

Rating: 4.9748955 out of 5

Keywords: garageband tutorial, garageband tutorial mac, garageband tutorial song, garageband tutorial easy song, garageband tutorial for beginners, how to use garageband, garageband full course, learn how to use garageband, music production with garageband, what is garageband, what is garageband sound library, learn everything with garageband, everything you need to know about garageband, how to set up garageband to record, how to set up garageband on mac, how to set up garageband

Id: RpOfou3K-L8

Length: 113min 22sec (6802 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020