Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand Page 3 of 3

Make Your First Tune

Add Melody Instruments

It’s time to add some color and melody. If the song is playing, hit the spacebar to stop it. In the Search window at the bottom of the Loop Browser, type Horn and press Return. Then, in the search results list, scroll down to RnB Horn Section 05. Listen to it if you want; it has some space in it and sounds as if it will fit with your tune pretty well. Drag it up to the track mixer. Notice what happens: it’s longer than the other loops you have there. Hit Play. It sounds fine, but the playback cycles back to the beginning before you hear the whole horn line.

To fix this, extend the yellow cycle bar so that it lines up with the end of your horn part, and hit Play. You can hear the whole horn part now, but the drums and the bass drop out halfway through the cycle. You need to make them longer. Point your mouse to the end of the drum region, but don’t click yet. Watch what happens: if the pointer is over the top half of the loop, it’s a line with a little circular arrow (the loop pointer); if it’s over the bottom, it’s a line with a straight arrow (the resize pointer). Note that the pointer must be over the region; if you move it even one pixel past the end of the region, it reverts back to the usual arrow pointer.

You want to use the loop pointer now, so position your pointer over the upper-right edge of the drum region (Figure 10). Now drag until the region extends to the end of the yellow bar and lines up with the Horn part. Do the same with the bass line. Notice that the two loops have little indentations in the middle; these show you where the loop starts repeating itself—a handy visual cue.

Move your pointer to the upper-right edge of a region to use the loop pointer. Drag to where you want the region to end; the region automatically repeats to that point.

Tip; What’s the difference between a loop and a region? A loop is a short fragment of music that you can use as a building block for your tracks. A region is what you get when you drag a loop into the timeline. A region can be the same length as the original loop, a cropped segment of the loop, or 20 repetitions of the loop. A region is always contiguous. Two regions butting up against each other are just that: two separate regions.

Hit Play again. Now it’s starting to sound like a song. You’ll probably need to turn the horns down a little using the track volume control. You want them to blend in and not overpower everything else.

Add one more track—Edgy Rock Guitar 01—and extend it to the same length as everything else. You can turn this track down a lot too. It should just be a background texture, adding a funky rhythm but letting everything else shine through.

Tip: Make sure you have Filter for More Relevant Results turned off in the General preference pane or you won’t be able to find Edgy Rock Guitar 01.

Learn Editing and Mixing Basics

If you’re not wearing headphones, I suggest putting on a pair at this point, because the effect of what I’m going to show you next is much more obvious when you’re wearing headphones.

Find the pan knob to the left of the volume control on the Horn track (shown right). Grab it in the middle and move the pointer up and down. The horns travel from the left speaker to the right speaker, depending on how you set the knob.

The default position is directly in the middle, equally balanced between the two speakers. The L and R next to the knob correspond to—see if you can guess—Left and Right. If you turn the knob all the way to the left, the horns come out of only the left speaker. This technique is known as panning in the audio world, and by using it you can position sounds in an imaginary space in front of the listener.

Now drag left or right on the outer part of the knob. (It also works if you drag just outside the knob, or even if you click in that vicinity.)

The knob snaps to each of the marked notches. If you want more exact placement in between two of the notches, drag in the middle of the knob. Move the horns to about the 2 o’clock position and the guitar to the 10 o’clock position. You may notice when you do this that these two instruments seem to get a little quieter; turn them up if you like. Notice how much more interesting the mix is now that there’s some stereo feel going on.

You have all the elements in place. Now you need to give the tune a beginning and an end. To give you an overview of what you’ll end up with: the song will start with just the drums and the bass, then the guitar will come in, and finally the horns.

Pause playback and click the Go to Beginning button (or press Z) to return the playhead to the beginning of the song. Then click the Cycle button (or press C) to turn off cycling, so that the song will play through without repeating. Use the loop pointer to extend the drum and bass regions to measure 17 on the timeline; this will be the total length of your song (shown below). Both loops will start at the beginning of the song and repeat all the way to the end. Now drag the horn region so that it begins in measure 9, and extend it so that it ends with everything else at measure 17, repeating it once. Finally, drag the guitar region out to start at measure 5, and loop it so that it lines up with the end of the song at measure 17.

Tip What’s a measure? Most songs have a regular rhythmic pulse. This is particularly obvious in the drums, but all the instruments follow the pulse and add to the song’s rhythmic drive. Tap your foot along with the song you’re working on. Chances are you’re tapping on every beat. This song (like most popular songs) has four beats in a measure. Listen to the drums and the bass; each of these loops is two measures long, but in both cases the second measure is a variation of the first. The bass plays two high notes at the start of each measure, and then drops down and alternates between two lower notes in the second half.

Listen to your song. It starts off pretty well, but the ending is a bit abrupt. Position the playhead toward the end of measure 16 (drag the triangle in the beat ruler). Then grab the triangle in the zoom slide and move it to the right so that it’s between the right two tick marks. You should be zoomed in on the end of the song now.

Use the loop pointer to carefully extend each of the loops so that they look like this:

Basically, you want each instrument to sound one final note or chord to end the song. In the case of the drums and the horns, the note is one beat long (each of the darker tick marks in the timeline is one beat). The bass is about 3/4 of a beat, and the guitar gets to play for only 1/4 of a beat. Listen to the result and feel free to experiment to see what the end sounds like if the loops are longer or shorter.

Double-check your master levels again to make sure they’re not clipping, and you’re done. You’ve created your first song in GarageBand! Here’s what your finished song should sound like. It’s short, but you’ve learned a lot about the program already.

[ Jeff Tolbert is a musician, painter, and graphic designer living in Seattle. Along with Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand , he has also authored Take Control of Recording with GarageBand . ( TidBits Electronic Publishing, 2005). ]