From the course: GarageBand for Mac Essential Training

Browse the Loop Library - GarageBand Tutorial

From the course: GarageBand for Mac Essential Training

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Browse the Loop Library

- If you don't play an instrument but you still want to create music. You can take advantage of GarageBand's large library of loops. Loops are brief prerecorded snippets of music that were performed by professional musicians. And there are more than a thousand of these snippets included in GarageBand. Each loop is designed so that its end point flows seamlessly into its starting point. Meaning you can endlessly cycle or loop them for as long as your song requires. Even if you do play an instrument loops are perfect for those times when you need an instrument you can't play or just don't have. Like a cello or as xylophone. Sometimes it's just easier to use loops if time's a factor, you'll probably find it much quicker to pick a drum loop than to set up real drums and mic them all. Another centrally important feature of Loops is that even though they were created in certain keys and tempos GarageBand makes it so that any loop you drag into your song instantly matches the key in tempo you selected when you created the song. This means that you can combine just about any loop with any other loop and you can be pretty sure that they'll sync up almost perfectly. Now of course, you still have to make sure you're combining loops that mesh well together. But a lot of that is about personal taste and preference. So let's start by creating a new empty project. And since we have to select a track type, I'll choose softer instrument. And I'll close the musical typing keyboard. And I'm just going to close the smart controls here. So we have more screen space to look at. Now before we start adding loops to our song, let's take a look at how you browse through them in GarageBand. Again, GarageBand has thousands of loops included with it. So finding what you need can be a little bit daunting unless you know how to efficiently browse through your selections. In fact, the initial installation of GarageBand doesn't include all the loops that are available. This is to save hard drive space. If you want to acquire more loops go to GarageBand, to sound library and here select download all available sounds. I've already done that so it's currently grayed out. Now you may not want to do this if you're using a MacBook or MacBook Pro or any of their portable Mac's which generally come with a smaller drives and the entirety of the loop library can take several gigabytes worth of space. But you can decide for yourself how important it is to have all the available loops. Now, to look through your loops you need to open up the loop browser. You can open and close the loop browser either by clicking this button here in the upper right hand corner. Or by pressing the O for open key on your keyboard. There are several ways to browse through your loop library. You can see we have this list of loops here in the main portion of the browser window. If you see any loops that are grayed out, those are the ones you haven't downloaded to your computer yet. You'll be able to click the download button next to those loops to download them individually instead of downloading everything. Now at the top of the browser we have this loop packs menu. The default here is to display all packs of loops. So basically you can see every available loop when this is selected. And you can see at the bottom of my window here, that I currently have 6,224 loops in here. If you want to narrow the scope you can click this menu and select a different genre. For example, vintage bricks. And now I'm seeing that I have a hundred loops available on this genre. I'm going to switch back to all packs for now. Below that we can filter the loops by instrument, genre or descriptors. Clicking each one, gives you these buttons showing different items within that main category. So selecting instrument gives me several types of instruments I can browse through. Like, electric piano. And now I see all the loops that contain an electric piano. Currently I have 80 of them. And you can click the X button to clear those filters. Now depending on the display resolution of your monitor, you may or may not see all the category buttons in the top half of the browser here. If necessary, you can drag the border between these two sections to adjust the size. You can also drag the left border to widen the loop browser pane or to decrease its width. Now dragging it too far to the right will close the loops browser. But you can just toggle it open again. So let's say I wanted to define a guitar loop. I'll start with instruments selected and I'll click guitars. And now the list of loops are all guitar related loops. Notice that along with the loops name, we also see its length and beats. Which can help you find longer or shorter loops. Depending on what you're looking for. Each loop also has a favorite checkbox. And I'll talk more about that in a moment. Now you might've noticed that when I click the guitar button up here, several of the other buttons in the loop browser got grayed out. That's because the buttons in the browser can work in combination. When you click an instrument button, all the other button categories into which that instrument falls will remain available. So when I clicked the guitar, all the instrument buttons got grayed out. But I can still click on types of guitars like acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo and so on. I can also click the genre or descriptor buttons now to further filter the choices. And you'll notice that with each button I click, fewer and fewer loops are displayed down here. This is because I'm narrowing down the loops that fit all of these categories. And I can take a listen to any loop in here simply by clicking it. (guitar music playing) I can click it again to stop it. Now as I'm browsing through loops, if I come across one that I particularly like. Even if it's one that I might not use in this song, but I might want to use at some point or another, I can check its favorite box. This will make it easier for me to find the loop later. If I reset my loop browser. And then I clicked the favorites button, I'll see that loop sitting in here. So when you go through the loop browser on your own and start listening to loops. And it can be pretty addicting when you first start out. If you come across something that you think you might use later on check its favorites box, so you'll have an easy way of browsing through loops that you liked. Another way to narrow down your loop choice is to use the scale menu here. For example, if I select bass loops. I can see here that there are 527 loops to choose from. But if I know that my song is in a minor key, I can tell GarageBand to only display loops in a minor key. And now I'm down to 409 items. And I could continue to narrow down my choice by clicking other lube categories. Like say jazz and melodic and relaxed. And that gives me only two to choose from. (bass guitar music playing) I'll reset that. Yet another way you can search for loops is by using the search field. This is really useful if you're not quite sure what category and instrument might fall into. Like for instance, bell. Or if you're looking for a particular genre that doesn't have a button like reggae. (upbeat music) Or maybe you're looking for a loop but the only thing you can remember about it was that it had the word exotic in its name. Now I'm not seeing any options here because they're all minor. Let's switch back to any. And obviously the two loops that have the word exotic in their names. (upbeat music) Now one last thing about the button view in the loop browser. The buttons are arranged in a pretty logical fashion, with drum loops being grouped together, guitar loops being grouped together and so on. But it's your copy of GarageBand. So, if you want to move things around so that they make more sense to you, it's pretty easy to do. First of all, you can grab any button here and drag it on top of any other one to switch their places. Another option is to right click or control click on a button to open up this contextual menu. And from here you can select what you want the button to be. So you can reassign any existing buttons that are here. For example, if you want a button specifically for browsing for animal sound effects, you can select that. Now I see animals here. And when I click on that, I can find sound effects. (cat meowing) Now, if you totally mess up your buttons. All you need to do to go back to the way things were, is to open up GarageBand preferences, go to loops and here click reset next to keyword layout. Now the other way to navigate the loops is by switching from this button view to column view. This view is useful if you find it difficult to navigate the button view. In column view, you can start by clicking on a category like all, which essentially gives you all the choices that appear in button view and more. And you can select from genres, instruments, moods or other favorites you might've checked off. Just continue selecting to the right until you find the loops you want. (guitar playing) Now in column view you can't combine search terms like guitars and melodic like you can in button view. But column view is for those times when you want to browse the loops in a nice organized fashion. And you can still specify what scale you want the loops to be in and you can still use the search field. I mostly use the button field myself though so I'm going to switch back to that. Now, one last thing about browsing for loops. Depending on the key of your song, you may not be seeing certain loops listed in the loop browser. That's because by default GarageBand doesn't display loops that aren't within two semitones of the key of your song. What I mean by that is as I mentioned earlier, GarageBand automatically transposes the key of loops to match the key of your song. So if your song is in C, but the loop is in say D, it will transpose the loop to C. And by default, it only does this with the loops that are close enough to the project's key. Because transposing a loop more than two semitones might give you weird sounding results. So it hides those loops from appearing and the loop browser. Let us for example, if I select guitars again. We see that there are 230 items available. But if I come up here and switch the key of this project to say, A flat major. Notice that pops it up to 244 items. You might also notice that doing this make some buttons unavailable and makes other previously grayed out buttons available. Now, if you want to be able to see all loops regardless of how close to your songs key they're in. Go to preferences, to loops. And here uncheck filter for more relevant results. Notice doing so it takes me up over 10,000 loops here. But be prepared to hear some possibly weird sounding loops, if you happen to pick one that has to be transposed really high or low relative to your songs key. Also while on your loop preferences, you might want to check display original tempo and key. Which as you can see, reveals columns for the tempo and key of loops were recorded in. This can help you to determine whether to sample a loop. Because again, if it's too far away from your songs key and tempo, it might sound a little strange when you drag it into your project. All right, so that's a rundown of how to browse for loops in GarageBand.

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