Welcome to Introduction to Garage Band. I’m assuming that you are a beginner at this like I am and maybe completely baffled by all the gadgets, toggles and widgets you’ll find here.
What we’re going to do then, is to learn about some of the controls so we can actually produce and tell an audio story, with sound effects and music.I don’t know about you, but when ever I go online for a tutorial, the person giving speaks at the speed of light, moves the curser around the page, or the slide show roars from slide to slide like a like they only have a minute and a half to live. You get so frustrated, you close the whole thing down and forget about it.This program can be a powerful tool. I’ll go slow and I’ve broken it down into a couple of sessions.
No, I don’t think so. Mine is Garage Band ‘’09 Version 5.1 (398), There are older ones, and maybe newer ones out there, but what I am goingTo show you is very basic and although different versions of Garage Band will have different toggles, gizmos, and widgets, innately, for recording And mixing of sound, is the same no matter what version or audio program you are on. In our case, it is going to be telling a story will sounds.
Left hand side: learn to play/lessons/magic Garage Band/ iRingtones/ and recent projectsIcons; Piono/ guitar/ voice/ loops/ keyboards/acoustic guitar/song writing/ and podcast. We will be done sound effects and maybe voice for this project
To start out tour we are going to be clicking on the podcast icon just to get a look at what we are going to be working with
This window will open, and is shows you were you can save your creation. It says my song two here, as that is the default tile it gives you.
So we now have our title, where we are going to save it and now press create!
So here we are on what I like to call, the audio deck. This is for the mixing of your tacks, be they audio, music and video. Pay no attention to those silly drawings and pictures of my cats…that is from something else I was working on.
Let’s look around here… the circle indicates where you will actually be doing the editing, when it comes time for that, and we well see that later,The arrow is you time code is displayed, so you can find and see where you want to edit for instance, and just how long your piece is
The controls highlighted in yellow are your record button in read, rewind, fast forward, play and stop
The blue arrow points to the edit feature which shows up where the red circle is. This is where all the fun work begins as well will see.Notice the large square on the right were once my silly pictures were from a previous project …
On the upper right hand side, there are toggles for audio/ photo/ and movies. We will just be concerning ourselves, for this, with music. You’ll notice that you can get into your iTunes, movies and podcast just by moving the curser to the appropriate tile you want
No on the upper left hand side, is where the multi-tracks that you will want is going to appear. You can have as many or as few as you like, but again, for our purposes were are going to delete what we don’t need here
All the control tracks, no matter how many you want to use, all look like this. The red button is set that track up to record. On the female one, that is for the muting a particular track…., and on the jingle control, the little lock is there so that when engaged, you don’t accidentally erase it while working on other tracks during your recording.
The yellow arrows pointing to the ‘t’ is for making the track a solo one, or not, again, for what were are going to be doing, we don’t need to concern ourselves with that right now. The black arrow over the upward pointing upwards and downwards is for when you are “ducking the tracks which we are not bothering with now, and the round button is for moving the sound from one speaker to the other … it is called panning. The arrow pointing to the downward triangle on the female track opens up the master audio controls, and in the next slide show, we will definitely be using that.
At this point, let’s not get bogged down with these widgets as yet. The round button is for panning the sound back and forth between the two channels of audio.……….
Time to get rid of what we don’t need. Go to the menu bar and click on TRACKS. Show arrange track/new track and so on. We want to delete here so highlight with your curser on what you don’t want – click delete and repeat until you have just one or two tracks on you console.
So okay, now were are back on the editing deck as it were. Notice that I am only using for now two tracks
You’ll notice that there is a big square space on the right that I have not mentioned as yet. Remember, you saw some of the goofy pictures and drawings that I was playing with in another project. But in this space….
Is like a note pad where once you have what you need, music, movies, and sound effects, will appear to be dragged into one of your channels.
So we’ve had a wee walk around the edit suite, and we’ve seen where the most important buttons are for what we will be using for or project. There is so much more to Garage Band, and if you’re like me …. You’re easily overwhelmed. So we will end this session here, and in Part Two, will be showing you how to create a story with just music and sound effects. Sounds simple? Yes, Sounds fun? Yes. And best of all, a good start to see what you and Garage Band can do
This is a great free E-book that I found that was a great help to me. Check it out at www.makeusof.com.So I’ll catch up with you in part two where the real fun begins.
