Garage band

Garage Band

Garage band is worldwide multimedia product for the Mac. It allows you to create your own pieces of music to add to other multimedia themes such as: Films etc. Here is a quick tutorial on how to use garage band and how to use it to its best ability to get the best music tracks out of it.

Step 1:

Once you open up garageband, on the left hand side you can see the all of the different options on what you would like to choose to create your own music. If you click on the App: Magic Garageband. It will open up an interface on the right hand side with all different options of music such as: Rock, jazz, reggae, punk etc. This will allow you to pick any music type between the 9 different genres you wish to create your own music on. Each of the different genres has one music song but you can altar the music within the genre.

Step 2:

Before you start to choose the music type you wish to play with and develop, you can listen to a small preview of the song. You can do this by hovering your mouse over the any of the different genres and a small icon will appear with the word preview. After you have the icon appear all you simply do is click the little arrow next to the preview button and It should start to play you a song to give you the taste of the genre music. Once you find your music you want double click the genre and it should take you to a window where there is different instruments.

Step 3:

After opening up the correct genre you would like to develop further in, it will give you a 6 instrument to set up for different music sounds when you are making your own music piece. Firstly on the far left is the guitar; this will allow you to play the rhythm track. Also on the left hand side is the bass guitar. In the middle at the back are the drums. In the right hand corner at the back is the keyboard, and in the left hand corner at the front is the melody. In the middle at the front is the “my instrument.” This allows you to plug in your own music to play with garageband. If you don’t want this there is another option of making garageband do the work for you.

Step 4:

If you double click on the centre piece so the “My instrument” Icon, it will take you to a little icon at the bottom of the screen which looks like this:

From here you can choose your own voices or music instruments, this is what the customize icon does. On the far right you have the option of deleting the “My instrument” icon, this will remove your instrument so you can just let garageband do your own music. If you decide to remove your instrument your screen should now look like this.

Step 5:

This is now where you can start to create your song, by doing this firstly under the instrument icon you will find a time line of different sections of the song. At the start of the timeline you will find the intro, Verse 1, Chorus and finally verse 2. Also below the song timeline you can see the icon “change genre” As you can tell that icon allows you to change the genre if you disagree on the genre you have chosen in the first place. Also under the song timeline there is the icon where it shows snippet and entire song. This allows the user to either use small parts of the song or they can use the whole song for creating their own music. Next to the snippet and entire song there is a play button and a volume icon. Finally next to the volume, there is an icon called “Open in Garageband” This allows you to send your creation to Garageband to create a more advanced creation.

Step 6:

Once you have completed what you want in step 5 you are ready to start adjusting your music. To do this firstly, click on the play button so it starts to play your song. Once you get to a point where you would like to change the song you pause the song and then go to the main screen and highlight a certain instrument you would like to change, like this:

Once you have highlighted the instrument you would like to change in the song, Double click the instrument and should bring you an instrument tool bar.

Once you have got to this screen it will show you a variation of different instruments similar to the one you have picked to change the song piece you are creating. Each of the different instruments has a certain sound and a certain way of playing to create different effects in the music you are going to create. You can listen to each of the different instruments by clicking play and choosing the instruments whilst the song is playing to create the perfect sound track. After you have finished with your first instrument all you do can repeat the same way for all of the instruments on the stage. If you don’t like a certain instrument in the music piece you have delete it, this is done by highlighting over the certain instrument and click the no instrument icon. This will make the instrument disappear and not in your music piece. Once you have the perfect piece, which suits your taste, it’s time to transfer your piece to the main frame of Garageband. To do this all you do is go to the icon “Open in Garageband” and click on it. And it should bring you to do this Page.

Step 7:

After you have opened up the page Garageband will display your different samples making up your own personal song. At the bottom of your page will show your own personal LCD window. If you click the little music icon on the left of the LCD window, it will show a little drop down menu with four different options. Theses are: Time, Measures, Tuner and Project. To move to the different points what you do is click the little up and down arrows next to the music icon to change to the different options.

Time

The option time allow you to find out how long your music track is and also allows you to put it up next to the play head at the very end of your music piece.

Step 8:

Second from last step, (This step is optional) if you wish to make your song slightly longer you can, this is done by holding down holding down your mouse on a section you wish to copy just like in the picture. This will repeat the section you are going to copy so you can move it to the end of the song to make it become longer. Next you hold down the option key and click and drag the selected section in your song to the end of your song to make it become longer. Last step now is to upload the song you have made to another multimedia product. To do this you go to the toolbar on Garageband and click the option share. This will open a drop down menu with the option to either: Send to itunes, send as a ringtone to itunes or send podcast to iweb. Once you have selected your option to take it to share it will bring up a box, which you have to fill out. On the box it’s important to check the compress button otherwise you can’t upload it to your area. Lastly all you do is press upload and then it will play in your area.