Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand Page 2 of 3

Make Your First Tune

Now let’s walk through the process of adding your first loop:

With All Drums, Urban, and Cheerful still selected, scroll through the loops on the right until you see one called Vintage Funk Kit 03.

Click it and listen to the peppy groove. Click it again to turn it off.

Drag it to the track mixer (see Figure 2). When you release the mouse button, GarageBand creates a track called Drum Kit.

Click the Play button in the transport controls. Notice that GarageBand plays through the loop and keeps going, even though there isn’t anything left for it to play.

Click Play again, and GarageBand stops playing. Click the Go to Beginning button (also in the transport controls), and the playhead jumps back the beginning of the song. (You can also press the Z key to go to the beginning.)

It’s frustrating to stop and click Go to Beginning every time you play your song, so click the Cycle button. Notice the yellow bar that appears above your drum loop; this shows the cycle region—how much of the song loops when you hit Play.

The drums fill only half of the yellow bar, so you have two choices: make the drum track longer or make the cycled portion shorter. Move your pointer to the right edge of the yellow bar, and notice that the pointer turns into a vertical bar with arrows on each side (shown right). Drag to the left until the yellow bar lines up with the end of the drum loop. This should correspond with the number 3 on the beat ruler. Now click Play. When the playhead gets to the end of the yellow bar, it jumps back to the beginning of the cycle region.

No good rhythm section is complete without a bass line. Click Reset in the upper-left corner of the loop browser. The loops on the right disappear and all the buttons return to their default states. Click the Bass button, scroll through the search results to Slap Bass, and click the Slap Bass 01 loop. It sounds OK, but it’s not quite right. Click Slap Bass o2. That’s more like it! Drag it to the Tracks section, under the Drum Kit.

Tip: If you want to preview your loop choices along with your song, just click Play before (or after) you click your loop in the search results. There may be a slight delay before the new loop starts playing; GarageBand tries to synchronize the two, so you may have to wait a moment for the loops to line up. You can scroll through the loops in the browser while you’re doing this as well: either click the next loop you want to hear or use the Up and Down arrow keys.

Notice that the drum track is blue and the bass is green (pictured right). The bass also looks different in that it’s made up of horizontal lines, while the drums are two horizontal lines with jagged vertical lines crossing them. The drum track is actually a recording of a performance on a live drum set, called a Real Instrument track in GarageBand. The bass, on the other hand, is a Software Instrument: the sound comes from samples of an electric bass guitar, but the performance is controlled by data in the MIDI format.

Note: The two jagged lines in the drum track are a visual representation of the waveforms. Each of the spikes is a peak—a loud point in the track. In this case it would be an individual drum hit. The larger peaks are the snare and the bass drums, and the smaller peaks are the high-hat. There are two lines because it’s a stereo recording: the top line is the left channel (which comes out the left speaker) and the bottom line is the right.

Click the Play button. It sounds pretty funky but seems a bit fast. The right side of the time display reads “120 Tempo” (see Figure 3). Hold down the mouse button on the “120,” and a slider appears; drag down a little until the tempo reads 110. That feels better.

With the music still playing, look at the master level meters to the right of the time display. These show how loud the whole mix is. If the two dots on the right end are red, that means your audio is clipping (see Figure 4). Clipping occurs when the audio gets too loud and the high peaks—the loudest points—are chopped off. You don’t want your audio to clip; it creates nasty-sounding digital distortion.

Tip: Analog distortion is the stuff of rock music. Without it there would be no Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, or Van Halen, at least not in the forms we know them in today. Analog distortion is warm, rich, and thick. Listen to Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil,” for example. Digital distortion, which is what you get when the master levels clip, is harsh and awful sounding. Avoid letting your audio clip! (If you want to hear what digital clipping sounds like, listen to this .

Look up at the drums and the bass in the Mixer column and notice that they each have their own level meters. First, check whether either track’s clipping indicators are illuminated. If so, turn down the track volume until the level meter barely pops into the orange. Then reset the track’s clipping indicators by clicking the red dots. If the indicators remain off, your track is no longer clipping. If they come back on, you need to turn the track volume down a little more. Do this for both tracks.

Tip: Remember that unless you reset the clipping indicators, they’ll stay lit until the end of time (or until you quit GarageBand). Even if you turn the volume down to zero on all your tracks, the indicators will stay lit. You have to reset them after you adjust the volume.

Now check whether the master level is still clipping. If so, turn it down as well and click its clipping indicators to reset them. When you’re done adding instruments you can check it again and see where the levels are. Ideally, you want the master level to be loud enough that it jumps into the orange without setting off the clipping indicators.

Tip: Obviously, your individual track levels don’t all have to jump into the orange. You can set them much lower if you want, but you can’t set them any higher. You probably do want the master level to be as loud as possible without clipping; otherwise, your final song will seem awfully quiet compared to the other songs in your iTunes library.

Figure 2: (1) Track mixer; (2) Timeline; (3) Drag from here to the track mixer to add a loop.

Figure 3: The top bar shows musical time (measures, beats, and beat divisions, also called ticks); the bottom bar shows absolute time (hours, minutes, seconds, fractions of a second). (1) Time format buttons (for switching between time formats); (2) Playhead position; (3) Tempo display.

Figure 4: Master Levels: (1) Master levels display—green is good, yellow is OK, red is bad; (2) Clipping indicators; (3) Master volume slider. The levels in this image are clipping. Lower the master volume or the individual track volumes to prevent clipping.