Class Notes #8

Garage Band Project - Assignment/Project #2: Music and Audio

What is Garage Band?

initial state:

loop browser open

 

First Loop track - watch the movie

More tracks - watch the movie

What features have been added to Garage Band 3? (iLife06)

Making Tracks - in class studio work

• Is there a video associated with this track?
• What is your piece about?
• What image/emotion/action are you trying to convey?
• what instruments will you need to realize your idea? How many tracks?
• how long is the whole piece (1' minimum for the assignment, 3' maximum)
• what kind of rhythmic feel dominates the piece?
• how is the total time divided up into sections? 8-bars each? 32-bars; even/uneven lengths?
• open gb, give the file an name and save it where you can get it later
• open the Loop Browser and explore the loops
• find some loops (drums/percussion first probably) that achieve your idea of the piece
• try several, move them around
• try different tempos (master tempo only)
• now search for other loops that contribute - work section by section
• fill out the entire piece first - then go back and refine each part

Adding Effects to your tracks

What is an "effect"?

We discussed the use of "plugins" to enhance and expand the capacity of audio (and video) products.
For example, plugins from dspFX include a wide range of processing tools from reveberation to de-essers.

In Garage Band 3 the effects can be found by clicking on the track header - this opens a
panel on the right of the gb window - then clicking on the arrow at the bottom called "details".

The effects that appear include: Gate, Compressor, open, open, Equalizer, Echo, Reverb.

You can look up all of these in the Garage Band Glossery.

From GB Help

Effects color the sound of a track or project in different ways. Each Real Instrument and
Software Instrument has a set of professional-quality effects, including:

Noise Gate (Real Instrument tracks only)
Compressor
Equalizer (EQ)
Echo
Reverb
You can also add other effects to instruments or to the overall project, including:

Amp Simulation
Bass Reduction
Treble Reduction
Track Echo
Chorus
Flanger
Phaser
Tremolo
Each effect has a slider or a pop-up menu you can use to adjust the effect. Effects with pop-up menus
have presets (groups of settings) that you can adjust. You can also create and save your own effect presets.
To learn about effect presets, see Related Topics below.

The Echo and Reverb instrument effects control the amount of echo and reverb sent from the
instrument to the master echo and reverb effects. If you turn off the master echo or reverb,
these effects won’t be available for individual instruments. The Track Echo effect is independent
of the master echo effect, and can have different settings for each track.

For a brief description of individual effects, see the Glossary.