GarageBand has recently been available to every new user with the purchase of any Mac or iOS device. Let’s find out what it is.
The first time you launch the program, it will download a basic package of the most essential musical instruments. It won’t take long at all. An additional advanced package can be downloaded later for free. It will weigh about seven gigabytes.
When you open GarageBand, you’ll see a window with project presets. In the advanced project settings, you can set the tempo and pitch of your future song.
And you can take guitar and keyboard lessons. In the same section, you can buy more video lessons from famous musicians who will teach you to play your songs on guitar or keyboards.
Getting Started
And now you’ve launched GarageBand. By default, you’ll have one instrument open in the blank project – the classical electric piano. On the left side, you’ll see the “Library” section where you can select the instrument you want. If you click the “+” button above the tracks, you will see a window where you can select the type of new instrument. This will be a virtual instrument, an audio recording, and a “Drummer”.
When you select a track with an audio recording option rather than a virtual instrument, presets with audio effects appear in the Library window. These will be the settings for recording voice and guitars.
“Drummer” is a smart tool for quickly creating a track with drums. It has very flexible settings, not concentrating on the technical component, but allowing you to communicate with it as with a live musician. For example, use a dedicated panel to simply ask him to play a little quieter and use a slightly more complicated pattern, and he’ll do it right away!
If you want to record a voice, guitar or any other real musical instrument, you can do it with the built-in microphone, connect an external microphone or instrument to the audio input of your computer, or use an external audio interface, which I’ll talk about a little later.
Virtual instruments are software music plug-ins. It can be a fully digital synthesizer or an audio sampler-based instrument.
GarageBand already has a huge selection of such instruments, suitable for the widest range of genres. But if you want to try something different, you can install third-party music plug-ins in Audio Unit format. Starting with iOS 9, audio plug-ins are systematically supported on the mobile platform as well. There aren’t many yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
To run such a plug-in, create any virtual instrument, click on the “B” button or the Smart controls icon at the top left, and in the panel that opens at the bottom, click on “i”. You will see a drop-down menu of Plug-ins. There you can also adjust the track’s audio effect or add a third-party effect plug-in, if you have one installed.
In the iOS version, when selecting a new instrument, just scroll down to the Audio Units section.