Can you name tracks in garageband

You can also hold down the arrow keys, or the onscreen Rewind and Fast-forward buttons, to zoom faster through the piece. Both of these techniques work even when the music is playing. Jump right or left one screenful at a time. Press the Page Up or Page Down key. Zoom in or out. They stretch and collapse the ruler, respectively, making the onscreen representation of your music take up more or less space.

Understanding how GarageBand produces music—or, rather, the two ways it can create music—is critically important. It will save you hours of frustration and confusion, and make you sound really smart at user-group meetings. GarageBand is a sort of hybrid piece of music software. It can record and play back music in two different ways, which, once upon a time, required two different music-recording programs.

They are:. The files on a standard music CD are also digital audio files, and so are the ones you can buy at iTunes. Digital recordings take up a lot of room on your hard drive: 10 MB per minute, to be exact stereo, CD quality.

Digital recordings are also more or less permanent. GarageBand offers a few rudimentary editing features: You can copy and paste digital audio, chop pieces out, or slide a recording around in time. In GarageBand 2, you can even transpose these recordings make them play back at a different pitch and change their tempo make them play back faster or slower , within limits.

On the GarageBand screen, Real Instrument recordings show up in blue or purple blocks, filled with what look like sound waves Figure Soon enough, there was a way: the MIDI file.

A MIDI keyboard , such as a synthesizer. It can record your keyboard performances; display your performance as bars on a grid, piano-roll style; allow you to edit those notes and correct your mistakes; and then play the whole thing back. Behind the scenes, GarageBand memorizes each note you play as little more than a bunch of computer data.

For example, you can change the notes —drag certain notes higher or lower, make them last longer or shorter, or delete the bad ones entirely—whenever you like. You can also transpose a MIDI performance change its key, so it plays higher or lower by an unlimited amount, with no deterioration of sound quality. You can even speed up or slow down the playback as freely as you like.

A MIDI file is just a list of notes. It needs a synthesizer to give it a voice—like the synthesizer built into GarageBand. They show up in GarageBand as green blocks, filled with horizontal bars representing the MIDI notes that will be triggered. Figure makes this distinction clear. Because if you confuse the two, you can paint yourself into some very ugly corners. But when you try to sing the vocals, you discover that the key is way too high for you.

If most of your accompaniment is constructed of MIDI green musical material, no big deal. You can transpose the entire band down into a more comfortable range.

Another common example: GarageBand lets you perform a neat trick with Software Instruments. After recording a part using, for example, a MIDI keyboard, you can reassign the whole thing to a different instrument whenever you like, freely fiddling with the orchestration. You can drag a blob of notes from, say, the Electric Piano track into the Country Guitar track.

In fact, you can never change the instrument sound of a Real Instrument. When you work in GarageBand, the timeline is your primary canvas. Tracks are the horizontal, parallel stripes that represent instruments playing simultaneously. Which is lucky, because if this software could play only one instrument at a time, it would have to be renamed GarageSolo. As you read the following instructions, you might want to follow along by working with the Garage Door song you opened in the previous section Section 1.

You can see this button in Figure Or press Option-. Both of these methods open the New Track dialog box shown in Figure Click the appropriate tab—Real Instrument or Software Instrument—and then, on the right side of the dialog box, click the name of the kind of instrument you plan to add. Details in Chapter 6. You can read more about this process in the tutorial at the end of Chapter 2. Drag a loop into an empty gray spot in the timeline the track display area Chapter 2 covers this method in delicious detail.

In any case, a new track appears below all the existing tracks. Save this empty file to your desktop. The number of simultaneous tracks that GarageBand can play depends on the horsepower of your Mac and which kind of tracks they are; Software Instruments make the Mac work a lot harder than Real Instrument recordings.

On slower Macs, four or five tracks is about the limit; 10 or 12 tracks is typical on a Power Mac G4. If you have a fully tricked-out, top-of-the-line Power Mac G5 loaded with RAM, then you can build tracks into the dozens. As you add and work with tracks, keep your eye on the Playhead handle. Consider zooming out—tap Control-left arrow repeatedly—until the entire track fits on your screen.

Then click the track header to select it. The importance of the New Track dialog box shown in Figure depends on what kind of musical material you intend to record that is, which of the two tabs you click :. Real Instrument. This tab lists instruments, all right, but they actually refer to effects presets that contain canned settings for reverb, echo, and other processing effects that have been optimized for each instrument type. The actual instrument sound is determined by your microphone or whatever electronic instrument you hook up to your Mac.

Chapter 6 has details. GarageBand offers a multiple-level Undo command. That is, you can take back more than one editing step, backing up in time.

GarageBand, in fact, can take back the last 30 steps. That fine print may startle people who are used to, say, Microsoft Word, which lets you keep undoing even past the point of saving a document. In effect, it undoes the Undos.

Software Instrument. Details in Chapter 4. How do I record voiceovers on GarageBand for iPads? How do I export my iPad projects? Get Assistance The library offers a range of helpful services. Book an appointment. How do I start a new project? To start a blank project from scratch: Open GarageBand and click on "Empty Project" Expand the "Details" menu by clicking on the triangle in the lower-left corner of the project selection box if you would like more control over project properties such as tempo and time signature.

You can change this later. Click "Choose" in the lower-right corner. To start a project for recording audio: Plug in your external microphone to the computer you're using GarageBand on Open Garageband and click on "Voice" Expand the "Details menu by clicking on the triangle in the lower-left corner of the project selection box Click on the dropdown box where it says "Input Device:" and select your microphone from the list.

You can also adjust project properties such as tempo and time signature in the Details panel. Click "Choose in the lower-right corner. There are 4 track types in all. Read the descriptions to figure out the type of track that you want to create. If you choose an "Audio option", GarageBand allows you to plug in an external microphone or electric guitar to record or play.

Click on the "Input" dropdown and select your external device from the list. Click on "Create". Select the track that you will be recording to by clicking on the track header in the tracks panel Click on the red circle or press R on the keyboard to begin recording Click the square stop button or press the spacebar to stop recording. Click the square stop button or press the spacebar to stop recording. Select the track where the original take was recorded by clicking on the track header in the tracks panel Move the playhead to the start of the original take Click on the red circle or press R on the keyboard to begin recording.

The audio "overwriting" the original take is automatically saved as an additional take. Click on the number in the top left corner of the recorded segment to see a list of all recorded takes. Select the take that you wish to keep and click "Delete Unused Takes" to delete all other takes. Click on Finder in the Mac Dock Locate the file that you wish to import. Click and drag the file onto an existing track or a new track in GarageBand.

GarageBand supports the following formats:. Submitted by Cliff on Tuesday, February 19, Had a little issue coming up while working on a project in garageband with VO. I can't seem to find a way of changing the track name, only the recorded region will let me change it's name. Since the track originally get the name from the effect preset that you choose, I can e. Can this be done with voiceover or will I have to keep renaming each region in stead? Kind of frustrating, since each track can contain several regions, and changing the region name don't show up in the list of tracks.

Hope you gurus out there can help!