In GarageBand, the measures are indicated on a numbered beat ruler (identified in Figure 1-1) that helps you figure out where you are in the music.

(You can think of a beat as one foot-tap, if you were tapping along with the music.) It’s usually two, three, or four beats long. As you may recall from your childhood music lessons, a measure is the natural building block of musical time. Jump back, or ahead, a measure at a time. (You can never drag it inward past the end of the music, though. In that case, you can fix the problem by dragging the End marker inward until it lines up with the end of the colored musical regions. Sometimes you’ll trim a piece to make it shorter-and wind up stranding the End marker way off to the right, so that GarageBand “plays” a minute of silence after the actual music ends. It’s the point indicated by the small left-pointing triangle on the ruler. You’ll find them listed under the appropriate chapter numbers.Īs far as GarageBand’s playback is concerned, the end of your piece isn’t necessarily where the music stops. If you’re in a hurry or using a slow connection, you can also download the various tutorial pieces one at a time. Copy them to a folder on your hard drive, if you like. If you open it up, you’ll find all the files for this book. (If Safari is your Web browser, just relax and wait as the icon opens automatically.) This is the actual “CD” icon. When you double-click it, you’ll find a second icon on your desktop, resembling a hard drive icon, shown here at lower right. That’s a disk image file, shown here at lower left. When the download is complete, you’ll find on your desktop a file called GarageBand Examples.dmg. It contains all of the sample music you’ll work with in this book.

Click the “G” tab under the GarageBand heading, click to download The Examples CD disk image. You arrive at a page listing the downloadable files for the entire Missing Manual series. First, go to At the top of the page, click the “Missing CD” button. Throughout this book, you’ll find references to GarageBand project files, some finished and some intended for you to complete, on something called the GarageBand Examples CD. That stripe-the cycle region-tells you which part of the song GarageBand intends to repeat.Ī few examples make any learning process easier and more fun-and this book is no exception. Or just press the letter C key on your Mac’s keyboard.Įither way, the Cycle button lights up, and a yellow stripe appears on the beat ruler (the numbered “ruler” strip at the top of the screen). To loop a certain section of your piece, start by clicking the Cycle button (identified in Figure 1-3). Sometimes, it’s useful to loop a section just for the sake of listening and analyzing-when a clashing note, for example, is driving you, well, loopy. By cycling the section you’re editing, you can hear the effects of your edits even while you’re making them, in the context of all the other playing instruments. In Chapter 5, you’ll see that you can edit the notes in Software Instruments sections-adding or deleting notes, rewriting musical lines, and so on. GarageBand adds all your passes together.Įditing. So if your keyboard skills aren’t especially dazzling, you can play one hand’s part, or even one finger’s part, on each “pass” through the loop. When you’re laying down new music from a MIDI keyboard, GarageBand merges everything you play during all repetitions of the loop. If you’re getting error messages like “Part of the song was not played,” “The hard disk is not fast enough,” and “Disk is too slow,” flip immediately to Chapter 10 for some explanations and solutions. It craves memory and horsepower like Donald Trump craves publicity. The point is that GarageBand is a very hungry program. But if you have even a little musical talent-even the ability to sing in tune-you can get even more out of the program by adding musical gear like a microphone, synthesizer (electronic MIDI keyboard), or guitar (see Chapters 4 and 6). You can use GarageBand happily for years using nothing but your Mac and its mouse. That’s what you need to install GarageBand, although there are some sneaky tricks for moving GarageBand onto a different hard drive if necessary (see Section 9.2). Then again, they can’t run GarageBand anyway.Ģ gigabytes of hard drive space. That would rule out, for example, blueberry and tangerine iBooks.

Ī screen with at least 1024-x-768–pixel resolution.

If GarageBand complains that you don’t have this software, download it from But if you expect to create compositions much more elaborate than that, 512 MB is the bare minimum. Well, you might be able to record “Chopsticks” with two fingers with this much memory. Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) is ideal.Ģ56 megabytes of memory. True, but you can’t use the Software Instruments (see Section 1.7) unless you have a G4 or later chip. A Mac whose processor is a 600MHz G3 or faster.

Add instrumental to garageband