Kick Out the Jams: GarageBand Overview

by Tony Bove

Adapted from: The GarageBand Book by Tony Bove

Nothing moves you quite like a song. People have always gravitated around the source of music since the dawn of time. Making music is a tradition in every culture on the planet and serves as a global language that everyone recognizes and understands. Blind Lemon Jefferson wrote songs over a century ago, traveled around the dusty countryside singing and playing the blues, and died penniless, but one of his songs was included in a probe that is heading out of our solar system. The man's music will live on forever. Your music could, too.

Making music has been part of the Mac culture since day one, when Steve Jobs introduced the original Mac to an audience and used it to play music (simple tones, but it was the first personal computer with built-in sound). Jazz great Herbie Hancock jumped on the Mac bandwagon early, using it to control synthesizers and compose music, as did electronic music godfather Vladimir Ussachevsky and pop/rock icon Todd Rundgren. The first true program to make music on the Mac was MusicWorks from Hayden Software, written by Jay Fenton (who went on to create VideoWorks, the basis for Macromedia Director). Today, the Mac is the dominant platform in professional music and audio recording, and Mac software has won awards in the music industry--Digidesign's Pro Tools even won an Oscar. GarageBand brings the lofty capabilities inherited from a legacy of innovative music software down to the level of the rest of us who just want to make music.

Like the name implies, you can kick out the jams and record studio-quality music in your garage, or home, or wherever you use your Mac--even at your favorite coffeehouse. GarageBand turns your Mac into a portable recording studio with built-in instruments, special effects, thousands of pre-recorded loops, and the wisdom of at least one or two recording engineers. You can use royalty-free loops in your songs, play the synthesized instruments supplied with GarageBand (and add more from extra instrument packs), and even plug in a real guitar and use GarageBand's built-in amplifier simulators.

You may not think you are capable of reaching the top of the pop charts anytime soon, but GarageBand has other important uses, such as making original music for your slideshows. You can then post them on the Web or distribute them with legal music you own. Professionals and small businesses sometimes need jingles and music for advertising spots and videos. Maverick directors need music for their independent under-funded movie projects. Why pay exorbitant licensing fees? The music you make is yours to distribute and copy as you wish.

"Composing music is experimental by its nature," says Pete Sears, keyboards and bass player with Jefferson Starship, Rod Stewart, Hot Tuna, and many others (with sessions spanning hundreds of albums). "If you can experiment with sounds, chord progressions, and rhythm tracks whenever the moment strikes you--a professional musician could be incredibly more productive just in getting sounds and melodies together, and composing bits and pieces, then playing them back. GarageBand is a very powerful tool for pulling ideas together."

What You Haveä and What You Need

GarageBand is part of the iLife set of applications that comes with every Mac--iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD (some say GarageBand should have been called "iMakeMusic). If you don't already have it, you can get the entire suite from Apple on a DVD disc (the fastest and easiest way) for under $50 (as of this writing).

The iLife suite helps you organize your media in your life. You can use iTunes to download songs from the Internet or rip CDs, and you can export songs you create in GarageBand to your iTunes library. You can then bring the songs into iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD, burn CDs with them, and use them in your iPods. You can import photos from digital cameras into iPhoto, where you can enhance them and arrange them into slideshows with your songs, and send them out into the world on Web pages, in email attachments, and on DVDs. You can transfer video from DV camcorders into iMovie to organize into clips and edit into movies, with special effects and your songs for a soundtrack. You can then burn your own music videos on DVD.

GarageBand lets you combine separately recorded tracks--your performances with instruments, and pre-recorded loops, are stored in each track in a way that makes it easy to isolate and change the sounds without affecting other instrument or vocal tracks. GarageBand offers two types of tracks:

* Real Instrument tracks: These are used for vocals through a microphone (such as your built-in microphone in your Mac), and for performances and loops recorded with actual musical instruments (such as your favorite electric guitar, or any kind of instrument through a microphone or through a line-in connection). Real Instrument tracks are represented as waveforms in the GarageBand window--the sound comes into GarageBand already digitized into audio information in the form of a sampled analog wave, just as if you had ripped the music from a CD. You can't adjust each note or transpose notes to other keys with excellent results, as you can with Software Instrument tracks. And although you can tweak the sound of an instrument after recording it, such as making a vocal sound like it came through a megaphone, you can't easily make a Real Instrument sound like another instrument (such as making a guitar sound like a drum).

* Software Instrument tracks: These are used for performances and loops recorded with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) instruments such as the on-screen keyboard or an external USB MIDI keyboard. The notes you play on such a keyboard are actually MIDI instructions to an instrument generator that generates the sound. That instrument generator can create any sound you want, so you can switch instrument sounds at will--if you recorded a drum part into a Software Instrument track, you can change it later to a guitar or piano. You can also adjust and transpose the notes you played to other keys.

Sounds like fun, right? Let's get started.

The minimalist Mac musician

A minimalist artist needs very little to make art; and so it is with music. You could use GarageBand's royalty-free loops, and record vocals right through your Mac's internal microphone, without any further equipment or software.

Besides loops, GarageBand can also simulate instruments and make every kind of sound you might care to make, and it provides a means, albeit primitive, for making wholly original music: the onscreen keyboard. You are probably already aware that digital synthesizers can sound like nearly any type of real instrument (as well as a good many imaginary ones). Your Mac can act like a digital synthesizer with GarageBand's onscreen keyboard, mainly because GarageBand and the Mac support MIDI, the Musical Instruments Digital Interface (see sidebar).

That said, the onscreen keyboard leaves a lot to be desired. While you can simulate playing the piano keys harder or softer with your mouse--clicking lower in a white or black key plays the note harder, while clicking higher in the key plays the note softer--you can't click more than one note at time. What about chords? What about trying to play faster than a snail?

Tip

Run, don't browse, to the Version Tracker download site (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16702) and get MidiKeys, a free and very useful alternative to the onscreen keyboard. Written by Chris Reed (http://puck.homeip.net/~creed/), MidiKeys simulates a MIDI keyboard with an onscreen piano keyboard similar to the one provided with GarageBand. The big difference is that you can also type on your alphanumeric keyboard and press several keys at once to play chords. MidiKeys is especially useful with a PowerBook on the road because all you need is the PowerBook's keyboard. To read about MidiKeys, see Chapter 6 of my soon-to-be released The GarageBand Book.

Get your MIDI mojo working

To play the Software Instruments provided with GarageBand, you need a keyboard of some kind--either the onscreen keyboard (or MidiKeys), or a real MIDI keyboard. Fortunately MIDI keyboards are easy to buy and the newest ones can connect to your Mac using the USB connection, as shown in Figure 1. You can connect a USB MIDI piano keyboard directly to your Mac through USB, or through an audio interface device that offers a MIDI connection. (You can also use the same audio interface device to connect real electric instruments and microphones and record directly into GarageBand.)

Figure 1: New band takes form in garage using a USB MIDI keyboard.

Like any USB device on a Mac, a USB MIDI keyboard is plug-and-play, literally--just plug it in, start GarageBand, and you can play your piano and organ riffs and have them translated into Software Instruments. Just follow the same instructions as if you were using the onscreen music keyboard. One popular model is the M-Audio Keystation 49e, available from the Apple Store. You can find a list of compatible MIDI devices on the Apple site: http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/compatibility.html.

One good reason to get a USB MIDI keyboard such as the M-Audio Keystation is to use the pitch bend wheel, as shown in Figure 2. The pitch bend wheel bends a note up or down. Press and hold a key while moving the wheel to hear the effect.

You can use the pitch bend wheel to simulate a slide guitar or pedal steel guitar, as well as get those spacy sliding sounds from electric keyboards and synthesizers. Although you can do just about anything to a Software Instrument note played on a software keyboard emulator (such as MidiKeys) using the Track Editor, it is way too much work to bend pitches as smoothly as with a pitch bend wheel on a MIDI keyboard.

Figure 2: Getting spacy sounds with the pitch bend wheel on a USB MIDI keyboard.

You don't have to use one keyboard on your USB connection, or even a keyboard for that matter, for MIDI input to GarageBand. If you are already a MIDI wizard, know that any MIDI instrument or device can be connected through an audio interface, which is a box of connections for connecting various types of audio equipment. The Emagic Multichannel Interface A62 m is a good example--it connects to your Mac's USB and offers six audio inputs (for line-in music, electric instruments, or microphones), two audio outputs (for speakers or preamps), and MIDI input/output (for connecting MIDI devices). Apple provides a utility called Audio MIDI Setup that works with audio devices connecting via FireWire, USB, PCMCIA, or PCI.

Don't Shoot the MIDI Player

There's no good reason to be snobbish about synthesizers and computer-made music. Primitive societies used brass, animal horn, bone, ivory, even gold--the oldest extant lyre is Sumerian and made of gold, with gold and silver strings. Technology marches on, and instruments change with the times. In the 16th century many "new" instruments were made of wood, and by the 18th century the technologies of woodworking and metalworking made the piano possible. By the 19th century Adolphe Sax was so brazen as to combine a wind instrument and a brass horn to invent the instrument that now bears his name, the saxophone. It's not surprising that the technology of electricity, and eventually of the microprocessor, would change musical instruments and the thereby change the music.

In the å60s and å70s, synthesizers were large, odd looking and odd-sounding machines based on analog electronics that used electric voltages to create and control sounds. Higher voltages made higher notes and lower voltages made lower notes. Special keyboards were made for musicians to play them. Early synthesizers could play only a single note at a time--to get more notes, you either had to buy more synthesizers, or record parts on tape. Moog and ARP synthesizers were bending quite a few ears by the mid-Seventies with bands such as Emerson Lake & Palmer and Genesis. Musicians like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman used extravagant multiple-keyboard configurations in which each instrument was set up to produce a single sound per show. Joe Zawinful of Weather Report developed a unique technique for playing on two keyboards simultaneously, placing himself between a pair of ARP 2600 synthesizers, one of which had its keyboard electronically reversed, going from high notes on the left to low notes on the right.

Over time these devices were equipped with programmable memory that would be useful for storing and recalling sounds created earlier by the musician for live performance. The layering of sounds upon sounds became an important tool, almost like a trademark sound for many artists. Then, in 1979, came the next big step: new keyboards were equipped with computer interface plugs so that they could be connected to other synthesizers. Development moved swiftly as more companies got into the act. The diversity of keyboards, drum machines, sequencers, and other musical devices grew rapidly.

To move up another notch in technology and accessibility, the synthesizer industry decided to learn a lesson in compatibility from the computer industry and develop a standard for interconnectivity. As electronic instruments began to go digital a number of manufacturers, including Roland, Oberheim, Sequential Circuits and Fender Rhodes, developed digital interfaces which allowed their own digital instruments to work together, but these proprietary interfaces did not permit interworking between devices developed by different manufacturers.

Dave Smith and Chet Wood, then working for a company called Sequential Circuits, devised a Universal Synthesizer Interface to overcome this problem (probably with some input from Roland). Their proposal was presented to the Audio Engineering Society in autumn 1981, and provided a starting point for the development of the MIDI standard.

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it is now an international standard developed that specifies how musical instruments with microprocessors can communicate with other microprocessor-controlled instruments or devices. The first synthesizer to speak MIDI was the Sequential Prophet 600 in 1983, played by some of the greatest keyboard players in jazz and rock.

MIDI communicates performance information, not the actual audio waveform--a MIDI device can register what note you played, how hard you played it (how much pressure was applied to the key of a keyboard), how quickly you released it (or took your finger off the key), and other controls such as sliders, wheels, switches, and pedals. The information is then passed to another device that "plays" the music based on this performance information. GarageBand can take the MIDI information and apply it to any Software Instrument, effectively turning your Mac into a fully functional music synthesizer.

The newest development in MIDI devices is compatibility with USB (Universal Serial Bus) cables, so that you can plug the MIDI keyboard directly into your Mac, and not only transmit MIDI information through the USB cable, but also supply power to the keyboard from your Mac through the USB cable--making it super easy to take a PowerBook and a USB MIDI keyboard to any location and play music.

The M-Audio Keystation 49e is typical: it's a 49-note, full-size, velocity-sensitive USB MIDI keyboard with modulation and pitch blend wheels. You can shift the pitch of its keys up or down in octave using the Octave buttons, bend notes with the pitch wheel, and modulate the sound with the modulation wheel. Although you can use an optional power adapter, the keyboard draws so little power that your Mac can power it through the USB connection.

Instruments and Microphones

You can also connect an electric instrument, such as your favorite Stratocaster guitar, or use a microphone to record acoustic instruments as well as vocals, using settings and effects designed for real instruments--called, appropriately, Real Instruments.

You can also record acoustic instruments that have no electric pickups by using microphones. I play harmonica using a microphone connected directly to an iMac line-in connection. You can sing with a microphone connected the same way, to get a better vocal sound than you would from the internal microphone (which picks up everything in the room, including the sound of the Mac itself).

Most Mac models offer a line-in connection that accepts a cable with stereo mini-plug, which is common in many music-lover households. You can connect any kind of mono or stereo audio source, such as a CD or DVD player, or electric instrument, such as an electric guitar, or a mono microphone, or a stereo set of microphones.

For home stereo gear, all you need to do is find a line out from your stereo system, and connect a cable that uses RCA-type left and right stereo plugs or a stereo mini-plug to your stereo system. If you use RCA-type plugs, you need to use an RCA-to-stereo-mini-plug converter, or a cable that offers a stereo mini-plug on the other end.

For electric instruments such as guitars and microphones, you need a phono-to-mini plug converter such as the Monster Instrument Adapter, which is a short cable that has a mono 1/4-inch phono connection on one end and a 1/8-inch mini plug on the other to connect to your Mac's line-in connection.

Tip

If your Mac doesn't offer a line-in connection, you can purchase a USB audio input device, such as the Griffin iMic or the Roland UA-30, and use it with the Mac's USB connection.

If you intend to connect more than one instrument or microphone at the same time, get an audio interface. An audio interface is an adapter or device that lets you connect audio sources to your Mac, and they come in several formats including USB, FireWire, PC card, and PCI. You may already need a MIDI-compatible audio interface to use a MIDI keyboard, as described earlier; many audio interfaces offer both MIDI and connections for other audio devices. The Emagic Multichannel Interface A62 m, for example, connects to your Mac's USB and offers six audio inputs (for line-in music, electric instruments, or microphones) as well as MIDI connections.

Although we don't recommend it, you can use the Mac's built-in microphone if you have no other choice. It will pick up sound from the room, so be aware that your recording might sound like just what it is--a recording made in a room with a single microphone.

We recommend using an external microphone for vocals and acoustic instruments because you can place them closer to the person or instrument. Of course it is best when singing to sing in a completely quiet room, if not an actual soundproof vocal booth. Nevertheless, the Mac's internal microphone can be useful on the road with a PowerBook especially when recording sound effects or ambient sound.

Welcome to Your New Studio

The icon that looks like the giant guitar at the Hard Rock CafÈ Las Vegas--yes, that's the one--should be in your Dock ready to click. If you don't see it, you can always find GarageBand in the Applications folder--double-click it to launch it.

When you first start GarageBand, you have a choice of creating a new song or opening an existing song, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Your first choice: to create or to open.

When you first create a song, you set the song's parameters: tempo, time signature, and key. We explain this later in this section.

Opening a Song

The iLife installation DVD contains GarageBand songs you can open and use for whatever purpose. To open a song project, click Open Existing Song, and use the Open dialog box to browse to the GarageBand Demo Songs folder on the DVD, which contains folders of sample songs. Select a song such as "Shufflin' Guitar Blues.band", "Daydream.band", "Half Dome.band" or "Shufflin' Piano Blues.band" (song project filenames all end with the extension ".band").

Figure 4: Welcome to the machine.

The GarageBand window, shown in Figure 4, shows a timeline of horizontal tracks with regions representing music. We clicked the open-eye icon (to the right of the "i" icon) to show the pre-recorded Apple Loops you can use in your songs.

Here's a quick overview of the sections of the GarageBand window (refer to Figure 4):

* Track header: A track contains the music from a single instrument or set of instruments. Each track has a header that shows the instrument icon and name. Click the mute button (with the speaker icon) to mute the track, or click the solo button (with the headphone icon) to hear only that track.

* Track mixer: Drag the pan wheel to adjust the left-right placement of the track in the stereo field, and drag the volume slider to adjust the track's volume. The level meters show the track's volume level as you record and play.

* Tracks with sound regions: The track's audio information appears here as a region within a track, with its duration measured by the timeline beat ruler. A region is the colored rectangle that indicates the duration of a particular rack in the timeline. The region shows a waveform representing a Real Instrument sound, or a set of notes representing a Software Instrument sound. Tracks are where you record performances and drag loops--each performance or loop is a region. You can drag the regions within the track to arrange the music.

* Timeline beat ruler: The timeline area of the GarageBand window offers a beat ruler with a playhead you can drag to different locations within the song; you can also use the ruler to align regions to beats and measures.

* Zoom slider: Use this slider to zoom into the timeline for a closer view of the regions at a particular time in the song.

* Function buttons: You can add a new track (+ icon), open the Track Info window ("i" icon), open the Loop Browser (the open-eye icon), or open the Track Editor (which occupies the same space as the Loop Browser when open).

* Transport controls: Use the record (red) button to start recording, or the CD-player-style controls to play at the point of the playhead, go to the beginning, go fast-backward, or go fast-forward.

* Time display: This indicator tells you the playhead position measured in musical time (using musical measures, beats, and ticks) or absolute time (hours, minutes, seconds, fractions of a second), and the tempo. It also provides buttons to change the tempo or to change the time measure.

* Loop Browser: This section offers either a grid of keyword buttons to refine your search for a loop, or a column view that lets you browse to a loop. After choosing a software instrument, you can scroll the matching list of loops on the right, or click more buttons to the right of the instrument button to refine your search. You can hear a loop by clicking on the loop, and you can drag a loop directly to the timeline to create a track.

* Master track: This track controls the master volume and lets you adjust the overall volume by dragging the volume slider, or adjust the volume of sections of the song by dragging points of the volume line in the track.

Playing a song

The timeline offers a vertical-line playhead showing the location in the timeline of the song's point of playback. A beat ruler appears at the top of the timeline showing beats and measures (units of musical time).

To record or play music, use the transport control buttons (from left to right as shown in Figure 4):

* Record (red dot): Click the record button to start or stop recording.

* Back-to-beginning (rewind): Moves the playhead back to the beginning.

* Fast-backward: Moves the playhead quickly back in time.

* Play (or Space bar): Starts playing at the point of the playhead (you can also use the Space bar on your alphanumeric keyboard as a substitute for the Play button). Play an entire song by clicking the back-to-beginning button to move the playhead back to the beginning, and then clicking the play button or pressing the space bar to start playback.

* Fast-forward: Moves the playhead quickly ahead in time.

* Cycle: Play the entire song or a cycle region over and over as a loop.

You can also drag the playhead in the timeline to a specific region or time in the song, and then click the play button or press the space bar to play from that point in the song forward to the end.

To raise or lower the volume of playback, drag the master volume slider (below the lower-right corner of the timeline) to the right to raise it, or to the left to lower it.

Tip

The volume setting in GarageBand does not override the setting you choose in the Sound pane of System Preferences. The volume in GarageBand can only be equal to or less than output volume set in the Sound pane.

Starting a New Song Project

To start a new song project, click Create New Song when you first start GarageBand (refer to Figure 3), or choose File>New.

Tip

Before choosing to create a new song project, be sure you have enough disk space. Each minute of stereo audio recorded into GarageBand uses about 10 megabytes of space. The audio is not compressed as it is in iTunes, because you are still working on the song and you need the highest quality.

In the New Project dialog that appears, shown in Figure 5, you define your song's tempo, key, and time signature, and click the Create button.

Figure 5: Setting the tempo, key, and time signature.

You don't have to know how to read music to define these basic parameters that characterize a song's rhythm and the range of notes played. But you have to start somewhere, and these parameters are the most important pieces of information for loops and recordings of Software Instruments--when you add a loop, or record with a Software Instrument, GarageBand can automatically adjust the loop or performance to the key, tempo, and time signature. The default settings--120 beats per minute (bpm), in the key of C, with a time signature of 4/4--are typical for popular songs and jingles.

Tip

Of course, you can choose settings and change them later. When you change the tempo and key, you can choose to have all recordings and loops with Software Instruments change automatically to reflect the new settings.

Setting the tempo

You know what a beat is--it's the basic rhythmic unit in a piece of music. Every song has a beat; in fact, the beat is often used to justify the labels we affix to music--from reggae to rhythm and blues (R&B). The tempo, measured in beats per minute (bpm), is a way of measuring the speed of a song.

Most songs stay in the same tempo from beginning to end. A high tempo usually translates into a faster song, at least in terms of beats per minute. You can set the tempo to any speed between 60 bpm, which is slow at one beat per second, up to 240 bpm, which is a pretty quick 4 beats per second. Most pop songs and popular rhythms are in the range of 100-130 bpm. In the New Project dialog (refer to Figure 3) you can drag the Tempo slider left to slow it down and right to speed it up.

While you can change the tempo at any time, setting the tempo first can help you record a performance accurately. GarageBand includes a metronome that indicates the exact tempo by playing a short blip for each beat. (The first metronome was a pendulum device invented by Maelzel in 1816 to indicate the exact tempo of a composition.) You can hear the "ticks" of the metronome while recording if you turn on the Metronome option in the Control menu; the sound of the metronome itself is not recorded. The metronome helps you stay in tempo while you perform with your instrument.

Setting the time signature

Counting beats would be a waste of time if you couldn't measure them consistently so that you know when to play notes with an instrument, and when not to. Music is about repetition--by dividing the beats into measures you can more easily see the repeating musical phrases in a song and perform your own.

The time signature is a way of dividing up the beats into measures and notes. For example, with a time signature of 2/4, you have two beats in every measure, with each beat having the value of a quarter note (4). A measure is simply a handy metric that separates music into pieces; sometimes a measure is called a "bar" (as in the 12-bar blues).

The most common time signature is 4/4, used in such classics as "Yesterday" and "Get Back" by the Beatles -- but check out the Beatles' "In My Life" for an example of a 2/2 time signature. While you are hunting down Beatles songs, "Norwegian Wood" is in 3/4, and you can really hear the difference in time signature when "All You Need is Love" switches from 4/4 (while Lennon sings "There's nothing you can do that can't be done") to 3/4, then back again (when he sings "Nothing you can sing that can't be sung)."

You can set the time signature to 2/2, 2/4, 3/4, 5/4, 7/4, 6/8, 7/8, 9/8, or 12/8 (used in the Beatles' "Oh! Darling" and, along with 6/8, in "You've God to Hide Your Love Away") in the Time pop-up menu (refer to Figure 1-5). The time signature defines how the timeline beat ruler is divided into beats and measures.

Setting the key

We explain a bit of music terminology in this section, but if you want the quick answer to "what do I set the key to"--pick one that sounds right. If you play a musical instrument or sing a lot, you already know that a song is played in a particular key. Singers often have preferences on what keys to sing in.

(As a harmonica player who didn't read music, I learned quickly that all I needed to do was ask the guitar player or piano player--their charts usually say what key the song is in. Some instruments are locked in a certain key--harmonica players use different harmonicas tuned to each key.)

To start with, the pitch in music is the property of sound that varies with variation in the frequency of vibration--giving Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys the ability to tell the difference between good vibrations and bad vibrations. A note is a notation representing the pitch and duration of a musical sound. Each note is separated from the next by a semitone, which is the musical interval between adjacent keys on a keyboard instrument. Two semitones make a whole tone. Although it's never that simple.

In Western music, a scale is a collection of notes either arranged in ascending order or in descending order. Ignoring atonal music for a moment, the key is the note on which a scale begins, ends, or around which a song is centered. There are 24 keys in Western music representing major or minor diatonic scales (a diatonic scale is one that has eight notes). You have 12 keys available for defining your new song: C, C# (pronounced "C-sharp"), D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, and B.

By default, a new song is set to the key of C unless you change it in the Key pop-up menu (refer to Figure 1-5). The key of C (referred to as the "people's key" by leftists with a sense of humor) is popular for pop music, urban and rural folk songs, country ballads, classical music, Latin music, jazz, reggae, funk, R&B, and Southern rock. The key of D is often used for hard and soft rock, country, jazz, and bluegrass, and the key of A is often used for blues, R&B, and hip-hop. There are of course many exceptions; don't bother writing us angry emails that we are clueless about music.

You should choose a key you feel comfortable with, especially if you intend to sing. Often a band will change the key of a song to accommodate a singer who can't reach the high notes (or can't hold the low notes). The way to find out if you are comfortable with a particular key is to choose the key and experiment with loops.

Tip

Whatever key you use, the Software Instruments you play automatically play in that key. Apple Loops with melody and harmony instruments are recorded in a specific key, but when you add them to a new song, the loops are automatically transposed to play in the new key--each note changes to reflect its relationship to the new central note. You have to hear this to believe it. You don't have to change your Software Instrument performances either--GarageBand transposes them to the new key for you.

Tony Bove has been a Mac book author since 1985 and a musician from birth (his latest band is the Flying Other Brothers). Tony's latest set of books, iLife All-In-One Reference for Dummies and iPod and iTunes for Dummies, are available at Amazon and fine bookstores everywhere. This article is adapted from research for a forthcoming book by Tony about GarageBand. To contact him by email, all you need is his last name, the you-know-what symbol, and rockument.com.