This Garageband Tutorial covers the basic functions of How To Use Garageband music recording software.

The numbers at the beginning of each paragraph are the video timings so you can quickly scroll to the area you want to watch

00:02 Hi this is John Bennetts here from Total Rock Star Blueprint and in this short Garageband Tutorial I’ll be showing you how to set up instrument and audio tracks and recording using of course, Garageband.

00:15 In the arrange page, at the top, you’ll see the Time Line which illustrates the bar lines we’ll be working with.

00:21 On the left hand side is the area where all the instrument and audio headers will sit as we create them.

00:24 At the bottom of the page we have our Transport Controls with the Record, Playback, Fast Forward, Rewind and Loop Buttons.

00:33 To set up an Instrument Track we go down to the left hand bottom corner of the page and click on the button with the Plus sign which gives us three options to choose from.
The first is the Software instrument for the Garageband onboard instrument selections,
The second is Real Instrument which is for microphone input, keyboards or guitars and the third choice is for Electric Guitar which you can choose if you want to use the onboard guitar amplifiers and effects.

We’re gonna choose Software Instrument – click Create and this will add the default Grand Piano instrument onto the Arrange page.

1:01 I’m going to change that now to a drum sound so I’ll click on Drum Kits, and I’m going to choose the hip hop kit.

1:10 Before I begin recording I need to set up a Metronome and Count In click and this is done in the Control drop down menu. Click Metronome and Count In to activate them.

1:20 Then at the bottom of the page I’ll set up my Tempo. It defaults to 120 Beats Per Minute so I’m going to change that to a more Hip Hop Tempo of 92 Beats Per Minute.

1:29 So next I click the Record button or I can just click the short cut, which is the Letter “R” to activate the record mode and start recording our track.
Ok I’ve now got a rough drum track so lets clean that up. Double left click on the recorded region to open up the Piano Roll and Score Windows.

1:58 In the Piano Roll window, highlight all the MIDI notes and then we can choose how much we want to Quantize our track using the “Align To” function. I’m going to choose 1/16th note Heavy Swing to lock in our groove.

2:19 Now we’re going to loop our part so, put your cursor over the top right hand corner of the region till you see the circle with an arrow then left click, hold and drag the region to as long as you want the section to play for.
I’ll just play this from bar 4 and you can see the loop repeats at bar 5.

2:36 Ok, so I have my first instrument track, tempo and created a loop so now I’m going to create an Audio or “Real Instrument” track.

2:45 When creating an Audio instrument we need to make sure we set the Input Source. Just click the “Input Source” button and generally it recognizes the input and in this case, it’s found my RODE Podcaster microphone.

2:58 To test my input level I Mute the Drum track track and hit Record and adjust the volume level. I want a nice strong signal but not too loud that it distorts.
This here is the audio wave form.
Once I’ve got this set up I turn off the Metronome so it doesn’t bleed through onto my audio recording.

3:14 Normally when you’re recording an audio track you’d use headphones to stop any spill going through into the microphone.

3:21 I’m just gonna record a bit of guitar along with my drum track…
…and that’s it. Just keep repeating this process till you’ve put down all your music and your vocals. And have fun!

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