How to Get Music into Garage Band

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Loops

Loops are pre-recorded fragments of audio. You might consider them musical puzzle pieces. The classic example of a loop is a drum track, a series of one, two, or three measures worth of music with a drum rhythm designed to repeat. Loops do not need to be just drums, however. Loops can also be melodic phrases, strums of a guitar, or even sound effects. Garage Band ships with a good collection of loops to get you started. They also sell Jam Packs with additional loops. Other companies also sell loops that are compatible with Garage Band. Loops of recorded audio appear blue in Garage Band’s timeline.

Beats and Measures. When speaking of music, musicians will use the terms beats, tempo, and measures. But what are these? A “beat” is what you feel in the music, something that happens in real time. Think of a beat as the pulse you hear in a song that makes you nod your head, or tap your foot. Beats are spaced equally apart. Garage Band measure the speed of loops in a unit called BPM, or beats per minute. A slow song may have a beat rate of 65 BPM. A fast, dancing song may have a beat rate of 130 BPM. This “beat rate” is called tempo.

Garage Band Loops Browser.
Garage Band’s loop browser allows you to search for loops by type, and allows users to “check off” favorite loops for easy navigation when composing. Combine different categories to “drill-down” to more specific results (for instance, combine “world” and “dry.” The Scale pull-down menu helps users match the mode of the loops to their composition. Blue loops are recorded sound, and do not change tempo or transpose as well as green loops, which contain MIDI data. Drag a loop from the browser into the timeline to add it to your composition.

Listen to an excerpt of Heart and Soul at 132 BPM which is the normal speed. Try tapping your foot to it, this is the "beat."
Listen to a different portion of the same piece at 94 BPM. Too slow?
Listen to Heart and Soul again at a whopping 180 BPM! See if you can't tap your foot to this. Remember: changing the beats per minute is called changing the tempo.

Music Speak: Beats and Measures

Beats are usually combined in larger units called measures. A lot of popular music has music arranged in 4-beat measures. Other music may have measure lengths of 2, 3, of even 6 beats. Garage Band measures the length of music in measures along the top of the timeline. The first beat of each measure is the strongest beat. When you first start a new Garage Band composition, it will ask you the tempo and how many beats per measure you want to use. 4/4 and “C” are the most common. 4/4 means four quarter notes per measure. Visit Notation Machine’s website to learn more about different types of notes.

Record Audio

Garage Band also records audio. Connect an electric guitar to GarageBand, and it records the sound of your guitar. In fact, if you tell Garage Band you’re using a guitar, you can shape the sound by choosing a number of different software-based amplifiers, each with their own style of sound.

You can also record any “real” instrument, such as a flute, acoustic guitar, or someone’s voice using a microphone.

There are a number of settings for different instrument and voice types in Garage Band which help make each sound their best. These settings are called effects.

Record MIDI

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was designed in the 1980s to let music synthesizers to “talk” to one another. The MIDI standard has evolved with personal computers. You can connect almost any MIDI instrument to your Macintosh and record the digital impluses of notes into Garage Band. Garage Band “plays” these notes back as “software instruments.” In effect, Garage Band ships with a number of different synthesized instruments using different types of synthesis. Examples include Grand Piano, Space Harpsichord, Jazz Organ and strings.

MIDI data appears green on the timeline in Garage Band. In fact, some GarageBand loops are MIDI loops rather than recorded-audio loops. With MIDI, Garage Band creates the “sound” of the music on demand, as it’s played.

To record MIDI into your Macintosh, you will need a MIDI interface, a serial adapter that translates the MIDI signals into signals your computer can understand. A number of new keyboards produced use USB—the MIDI interface is already built-into the machine.

Questions

What is needed if you want to record your voice into Garage Band?
What are the settings called used to enhance instruments, such as your voice, in Garage Band?
Why don’t all keyboards require the use of an external MIDI interface to work with Garage Band?
See if you can’t find some sites on the Internet offering loops for sale, for GarageBand. Which ones do you like? Where did you find them?
What color are MIDI-based loops in Garage Band’s timeline?