Menu
Cutting and editing music in Garageband is as simple as using the (Command + T) option on your keyboard.
Mar 21, 2011 5 Essential Workflow Tips for GarageBand for iPad. Tip 1 - Start Playback from Anywhere. You may have discovered that by tapping or dragging on the Ruler you can reposition the Playhead. Tip 2 - Show/Hide Track Controls. Tip 3 - Go to Touch Instrument View.
For instance, you line up the “Ruler,” to the point you want to isolate, and then use the (Command + T) function. You can do this in two separate areas of your workspace, in the “Piano Roll Grid,” or in the regular workspace.
One can also edit the music using the Marquee line within the “Piano Roll Grid.” For example, when you zoom in on the audio file, you can highlight the part of it you want to eliminate down to the tiniest detail.
You simply highlight it by hovering the ‘+’ sign over the Audio Region, clicking and dragging over the part you want to delete and then hit the “delete” button your keyboard. This comes in handy for audio rather than MIDI recordings.
However, you have to make sure that you’re isolating just one track, whether it be a sample, an audio recording, or a software instrument track, etc. You can’t cut and edit more than one piece of music at once. It has to be just one.
How To Undo the Previous Command (Command + Z)
In case you make a mistake, you can always hit the (Command + Z) function to go back to where you were before.
One of the great things about Garageband is that all of the commands used for day-to-day use on the computer are transferable to the software. It’s all fairly intuitive.
Many of the commands that you’ve grown accustomed to as a Mac user are all the same functions for Garageband.
How To Zoom In And Out (Command + Left and Right Arrow Key)
You can zoom in and out on your MIDI region to see the audio file in more detail by separating your fingers or moving them closer together.
This is especially useful for when you’re trying to edit minute details, that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see and thus, isolate.
You can also zoom in and out through the (Command – Left or Right arrow key).
Merging Tracks Together (Command + J)
Another incredibly useful editing tool in Garageband is the (Command + J) function, which allows the user to essentially combine or merge the tracks together.
This stops the user from having to copy and paste every little individual track. Instead, one can just merge all of the music together as one track, and then put it on a loop.
To do this, just select the two or more regions you want to combine and hit the (Command + J) function and it will all come together.
It’s a great way of saving time and energy during the editing process.
Using The Cycle Area For Editing
The cycle area on top of the workspace in Garageband is used for repeating the same bar of a recording over and over again. There are a few purposes for this, including practicing a part just before recording, multiple takes, and editing.
Garageband Ipad Instructions
For instance, a user can loop the same part repeatedly to judge whether the proper changes have been made during editing.
In other words, if you’ve recorded vocals, and forgot the lyrics during one part and said “um,” or something like that, you can loop the same part over and over again, and figure out what needs to be eliminated down to the last millisecond, without having to press “Play” repeatedly.
You know that Cycle Mode is on when it’s displayed as a yellow trip in the top portion of the ruler. When it’s turned off, it’s no longer yellow.
There are two ways of turning it on and off:
You can press the Cycle button within the control bar, or simply press ‘C’ on your keyboard.
Changing at what point Cycle Mode starts and stops:
Select the top part of the ruler, then drag your cursor to the desired starting and stopping part of the recording.
How to Edit Using The Re-Size Pointer (Trimming)
Another way of editing the music is through the “Resize Pointer,” which is at the end of every piece of the “event,” as Garageband’s “Quick Help” section calls it.
Take the cursor and grab your recording, moving it from side to side, left to right. Using the “Snap To Grid” setting/function allows for the music to literally “snap” back to the line, and thus, stays more in time.
Snap to Grid Function (Command + G)
It’s a lot easier to edit music in Garageband when you have this option selected within the “Edit” menu on the toolbar on top. You can turn this function on and off, by hitting the (Command + G) function.
Essentially, as I mentioned above, what this does is it literally “snaps” the music right back to the lines on the grid, that way whenever you edit a piece of music, it falls back exactly on the beat.
If you want, you can turn this function off and see how difficult it is to edit music in Garageband. It becomes super annoying, however, there are moments where it’s worth your while to turn it off.
How To Copy and Paste in Garageband (Command + C and Command + V)
Once you’ve isolated the part you want, hit the (Command + C) function to copy it, and then the (Command + V) function to paste as many copies of it that you want.
Usually, after I’ve created a melody with the Steinway Grand Piano, I’ll open up a new “Software Instrument” track, and then copy and paste the music into a different instrument track.
This function allows you to fill out your mix, without coming up with an entirely different musical section. In many cases, you can create an entirely different piece of music, just by copy/pasting it onto a new Instrument track.
Another Way Of Copying And Pasting an Instrument Track
1) Select the Audio file you want to copy.
2) Hold down the “Option” key.
3) Drag the cursor to the left or right
4) While holding down the “Option” key, release the mouse and voila, you’ve just copied and pasted a new MIDI region.
Important Things To Note When Chopping Music
Whenever you want to isolate an audio recording, it’s worth noting that it may be helpful to understand at what beats-per-minute the song is, that way you can trim music at a specific beat.
This is especially important whencreating music with samples (link here)
For instance, in a track that I made using the theme song written by Bear McCreary for The Walking Dead, I had to figure out the BPM of the track, that way I could make a different drum track for it.
![Garageband ipad tipps tricks youtube Garageband ipad tipps tricks youtube](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125638438/515320410.png)
If you don’t have the proper BPM set up, it’ll be almost impossible to make drums for the song, because nothing will line up, and will sound unsynchronized.
Then, when you try and add other melodies through software instruments and so on, synchronization will be almost impossible. So knowing the Beats Per Minute is essential.
The best way of doing this is just counting along to the song by hitting the table with your hand or bobbing your head along to the beat.
Then, grab a metronome – or use one online, on your phone, or in your DAW – and match the tempo of the song with how fast you were slapping the table.
I’d recommend using a real metronome because they’re better to use, you can read about the one I recommend here.
There are other ways of figuring out the BPM of a song, of course, but this is how I do it.
(Every person knows how to count the BPM intuitively because whenever you’re jamming along to a song by bobbing your head, you move along to the beat. I’ll write a more in-depth article on this topic later).
Moreover, you can check whether you’ve calculated it properly or not through the way the MIDI Region lines up in your DAW.
*There are other options available online, including songbpm.com, and beatsperminuteonline.com. The latter is superior for calculating the beats-per-minute because it’s manual and can be used for the most obscure of music. However, the former is more for commercially available songs.
Using the Score Editor to Fix Your Music (For People Who Can Read Music)
I imagine this topic will be too much for the average DAW user, because frankly, most music producers, especially nowadays, don’t know how to read music. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just the way it is.
1) You can access the Score Editor simply by double-clicking on your music or “Midi Region.”
2) And then go down into the Smart Controls, and click on the button that says “Score.”
In this section, you can edit the music through standard notation. I actually use this every once in a while, because I learned how to read music when I was a kid (although, I’m not nearly as good as I was as a kid).
I usually use it for creating bass lines. Sometimes, it’s harder to hear if your bass line is off-key, so you can either push it up a few octaves so you can hear it or, you can look at the standard notation to figure out if the music is off-key or not.
Naming Your Tracks
If you want to name your track, use the “Secondary Click” function (“right-click,” and that’ll bring up your options where you can see where it says, “Rename Track.”
You can do the very same thing to the actual MIDI Region.
This seems like an obvious one because it is. If you’re going to be making music in a DAW, naming each track region will save you a ton of time, running through each one, trying to figure out which one is the kick and which one is the snare.
Reordering Tracks Through Drag and Drop
By clicking on and dragging the “Track Headers,” Garageband users can actually easily move each software instrument track to and from wherever they want.
For instance, grouping the guitars together, or the kick and bassline. You don’t have to manually move the MIDI Region either; it will move with the Track Header.
Time Quantizing
Rather than dragging and dropping each note so it falls exactly on the grid-lines in the Piano Roll, which is normally what I would do, you can use the Time Quantize function down in the DAW’s Smart Controls.
For instance, if you’ve recorded music with a MIDI Keyboard, and some of the notes are offbeat, using the Time Quantizing function will bring each note to where it needs to be, rather than doing it all manually.
1) First things first, in the Software Instrument track, choose the option “Region,” rather than “Notes,” in the Smart Controls.
2) In your Smart Controls, underneath the setting, “Time Quantize,” select 1/8 Note, and keep your Quantizing strength at around ’75 to 100.’ This should suck in all of the notes accordingly.
Obviously, there are more Timing settings one can use, but this is as far as I’ve ever used the quantizing function.
Some people argue against the use of Time Quantizing, accusing the practice of robbing the music of its “soul.” The argument goes that there are idiosyncrasies and personality traits eliminated from the music through the quantization practice.
For instance, when playing a guitar riff, if something is slightly off-key or not in proper time, the inaccuracy and “incorrectness” of the note may precisely be, the exact thing that gives it its unique flavor.
The Blues Scale, probably one of the most used scales in guitar playing, is the epitome of this. The Blues Scale isn’t classically “correct,” due to its flattened fifth in relation to the minor pentatonic scale, or flattened third in relation to the major pentatonic.
How to Select and De-Select Options Way Faster
This is another one that I just came across. Rather than manually selecting, say, for example, the “Mute” button on a bunch of tracks, and having to go through each one individually, there is a way of hitting all of them at once.
For instance, if I want to hit the “Mute” button on 10 of my 20 Software Instrument tracks, I’ll hover my cursor over the “Mute” button, and then click the track-pad and hold it while I drag the cursor down the screen. This will hit every “Mute” button on the way down.
It’s the same practice for turning them off.
Conclusion
That’s all for now. I hope this helped you out. Be a trooper and share it on social media.
The quantizer function is an incredibly useful feature in Garageband, and I use it on pretty much every track.
In this tutorial today, I’m going to show you how to use the Quantizer function to its best capability, not only for MIDI music but also for actual real-time recordings.
Explained simply, Quantizing is the method by which the sound is processed so it falls more in-line with the beat and the overall rhythm of the track. Teamviewer mac os x el capitan 10 11 6 download.
In other words, it allows us to alter the notes after the fact, to make the music more “on-time.”
To further illustrate what I’m talking about here, check out the two images that I’ve created below.
In the first one, we can see that the MIDI notes fall slightly off the grid, which means they’re a bit off-time.
In the following image, we can see that the MIDI notes have been pulled exactly on to the grid. That, essentially, is what we’re doing when we quantize music.
When I first started using this software, I used to go through each MIDI note, select it, and manually push it on to the grid line, until I discovered that with a few clicks of the Trackpad, you can just do it automatically without wasting so much time.
Without further ado, let’s get right into it.
How To Use The Quantizer Function
The Quantizer function is in the bottom of the Garageband interface within the section of the DAW that’s called the “Smart Controls.” It’s the section pointed out in the image shown below:
Let’s say that you’ve created a track, whether it’s MIDI or a traditional recording.
If you want to bring up the Smart Controls, including the part where the Quantizer function is visible, you can just double-click on the MIDI/Audio region and it’ll bring up the Smart Controls in the bottom of the screen.
You can also hit the ‘B’ part of your keyboard, or click on the dial in the top-left-hand corner of the DAW.
Once you’ve brought up the Quantizer, you can see the parameters, which there are two, the type of note and how strong you want the quantizer to function.
It’s really not too complicated.
While the options are based on traditional musical notation, for instance, 1/16th notes, 1/4 notes, and 1/8th notes, etc, you don’t have to have an understanding of music theory or standard notation to use the function.
When Quantizing Drum Tracks, I pretty much always have it set to 1/16 notes, and then I slide the meter all the way to 100 to pull the notes exactly on the grid.
Essentially, that’s what the Quantizer does. It pushes the notes back or forward until they snap exactly to the grid.
The intuitive part of the Piano Roll is the fact that the grid-lines are split up so it matches, mathematically, the traditional time measurements of standard notation.
Explained in another way, if you look at how many grid-lines there are between the 1 and 2 in the Piano roll, you’ll notice there are 16 grid lines.
If you set the Quantizer function to 1/16 notes, that means it’s going to snap each note to the closest grid line exactly, which is much better if you have a ton of different notes in each bar.
On the other hand, if you only play one note per measure, the 1/16 function wouldn’t be as useful. Let’s say, hypothetically, there is one note per measure, and it’s right near the beginning of the bar.
In that case, it would be best to use the 1/4 note function. However, with all of that said, I find that the 1/16 note option is pretty much always the setting you want to have it at, but I’m sure this depends on for what instrument you’re using it for.
Using the example of 1/1, if you select this option, the Quantizer Function is going to snap each note so it falls exactly on the Grid Line for each new beat, (1, 2, 3, 4,) and not the grid-lines that fall between them. This looks like the image shown below.
If you use the 1/2 (Half-Note) function, it’ll snap each note to the Grid-Line on every beat and the beat between each beat. Check out the picture below:.
Select the Quarter note function, 1/4, and it’ll bring the notes to every quarter grid-line.
Select the 1/8 note function, and it snaps the notes to one of 8 of the closest grid-lines.
I hope you’re able to get the picture from here. ***Keep in mind, each of these images is the same melody, just quantized differently.
It’s really just as simple as that. The Quantizer function isn’t very sophisticated, but it is extremely useful.
Using the Quantizer With Actual Recordings (Not MIDI)
This function is just as useful.
In fact, it’s of incredible value. If you’ve recorded a performance and a note is just slightly off-time, you can go into Garageband’s Smart Controls and push the note over just a tiny bit to make it perfect. It’s pretty amazing.
Click on your Audio Region, the Blue Region, and then hit the Region button.
First things first, you want to check the box that says, “Enable Flex.” This allows us to actually make changes.
Down in the Smart Controls, we can see the Quantizer function, and we’ll set it, again, to 1/16 notes.
Once you’ve done this, you’ll notice that Garageband will drop a bunch of different lines in the Smart Controls between the soundwaves that represent your recording.
From here, you can simply use your Trackpad and the cursor to manually move notes around.
Match up the beginning of the soundwave with the grid-line, as what’s seen below, and voila, you’ve got a piece of music that is more on time.
Drawbacks Of Quantization
An important thing to note is that the Quantizer function, in the eyes of some musicians/engineers, can have the unintended consequence of eliminating the “soul” of the music.
In other words, human performances of music will regularly have mistakes and imperfections, which is kind of what makes the music more human and impactful.
Garageband Mixing Tips
If every note is constantly on key and every note is exactly on time, the effect of this is that it doesn’t have the same amount of humanity.
Whether or not you agree with this, I don’t know, but it’s something to think about.
Using the example of Punk Rock or even Jazz Improvisation, quantizing everything is likely going to make the music seem way less cool to fans of these genres.
With hip-hop and modern rock, and regular pop/dance music, this is less the case, as listeners of this music typically care a lot less about the production methods.
For other editing features, including pitch correction, check out my article on auto-tune and pitch-correction, as well as my post on editing tips.
In these articles, I run through how to use Garageband’s pitch correction features, and in the editing article, I explain some of the most useful commands and editing functions Garageband has to offer.
If you need a video tutorial, I have one at the link shown below.
I run through the exact same principles laid out in this article, but you can hear how things sound after using the quantizing function.
YouTube Video Tutorial
Garageband Ipad Tips Tricks Download
Conclusion
I hope this short article was helpful to you. Do me a solid and share this on social media with your producer friends.
3 When you’re finished recording, choose File Save to save your GarageBand project. 4 Click the Go to Beginning button to move the playhead to the beginning of the track, and then click Play (or press the Space bar) to review the recorded audio. Nov 08, 2015 Hey guys, today we are going to look at multi-track recording, and how to record more than one track at once with GarageBand. To do this we’ll need to open up an empty project, GarageBand can. Dec 14, 2018 How to use monitor/record icons in GarageBand iOS (iPhone/iPad) If you are new to multi-track recording in GarageBand iPad or GarageBand iPhone, then you are probably wondering what the record. May 03, 2017 Multi-Track Recording with Garageband (iPad) Dylan Peters EDU. Multi-Track Recording in GarageBand iOS. How oldschool multi-track recording works. Tascam 4-track - Duration. This is a troll, yes? With Garage Band, as in any DAW (Digital Audio Worksation), you are able to edit any section of a track, punching in is done with an ease that makes one lazy enough to almost forget the art of the analog punch on the fly. Garageband 4 track recording studio.