Get real sounds into your Mac - GarageBand Tutorial

- [Instructor] So far, we've seen how to work with Apple Loops and Garage Band, and how to work with and record software instruments. In this chapter, we're going to look at how to set up and record real instruments in Garage Band. Because, as useful as it is to play with Apple Loops, and as great as some of the built-in software instruments sound, sometimes you just can't beat the real thing. I'll create a new empty project. Now when you want to record things like your electric guitar or a trumpet or a violin or your own voice, you have to choose one of these two audio track options here. Unlike a softer instrument track, which contains MIDI data, an audio track is a track containing an actual audio recording. This means you can't fix wrong notes, or off-key performances on a real instrument track as easily as you can on a softer instrument track. But unlike softer instrument tracks, real instrument tracks let you record anything you can hear, as long as you have a microphone, or an instrument cable. You just have to be a little bit more on the ball with your performances when recording real instruments. But Garage Band does have some powerful tools to help you correct minor imperfections in real instrument recordings, such as the ability to fix timing issues, where you might not have been playing on the beat as accurately as you intended. We'll be taking a look at these tools a little later. When it comes to choosing one of these two audio track options, you'll only select the guitar option if you intend to record an electric guitar or bass through Garage Band's built in guitar amps, rather than miking a real guitar or bass amp. It actually really doesn't matter. You can change the tracks properties after selecting it here. Meaning, if I choose the mic option, I can still change it to an electric guitar track at any time. This guitar option just gives you a shortcut to creating a guitar specific track. For now, I'll double click the mic option to add a track. And you can see that plays as a track called Audio 1 in the project. So the audio track just gives you a place to record straight, live audio with no processing. If you want, you can come over to the library, and if this were going to be, say, a vocal track, I might want to select voice, and then choose one of these processors to apply to the track. If I were recording a guitar, and I didn't choose the guitar option earlier, I can just select electric guitar and bass, and choose my amps and sounds from here as well. But whether you're recording vocals, guitars, saxophones or drums, the first thing you have to do is figure out how you're going to get your sounds into Garage Band. Now, in order to get sounds into your Mac, you're going to need an audio input device. If you're only interested in recording through a microphone, you could get something like the MiC+ from Apogee, or the Yeti from Blue Microphones. Similarly, you could buy a USB adapters that allow you to plug guitar cables directly into your Mac. But really, if you're serious about recording, what you'll need is a full audio input device. Audio input device is a general term for any external device that connects to your Mac via a USB into which you can connect various audio devices, such as guitar cables or microphones. This allows you to use existing guitar and microphone cables without the need for any specialized adapters. The sounds are run through the audio input device, and into audio recording software, in this case, Garage Band. A couple of examples would be products like the Focusrite Scarlet2i2, the M-Audio M-Track Duo, or the PreSonus Studio 24c. Each of which allow for two simultaneous inputs. You can see that they each have combination XLR and quarter inch ports, meaning you can plug in either type into a single jack. We'll see a little later, that you can perform simultaneous, multi-track recording in Garage Band, meaning you can record multiple instruments or microphones to individual tracks at the same time. But, in order to do so, you'll need an audio input device that can accept multiple inputs at once. So, that's another factor to consider. You want to think about how many tracks you might want to record at one time. If you need more than two inputs, you can look at other devices by these same companies, and many other companies out there. Let's go back to Garage Band. So once you've figured out what gear you'll be using to get your sounds into Garage Band, you'll then have to let Garage Band itself, in on the information. One way to do this is to simply plug your device into your Mac while Garage Band is open. I have an input device from Behringer here called the UMC202HD, and I'm going to plug that into my Mac right now. I saw a quick message saying "Initializing Audio." In some cases, you might even see a notification from Garage Band saying it recognizes the device that you've plugged in. Now, if Garage Band wasn't running when you plugged in your device, or if you have multiple devices connected to your Mac, and you want to specify the one you're using, in Garage Band, go to Preferences, select Audio/MIDI, and here choose your device from the Input menu. You can see it already selected my UMC202HD here. So that's the device I'll be using to get sounds into Garage Band. Now you should also choose your output device here as well. As a general rule, most audio input devices have a headphone or a speaker jack built in, and that's what you should use to listen to your playback. Doing so cuts down on latency issues, which is when there's a noticeable delay between when you, say, strum on your guitar, and when you actually hear it coming out of Garage Band. I know that many people prefer to use the speakers connected to their Mac to listen back, and if you aren't experiencing any latency issues, that's fine, but if you do run into that problem, try setting your output settings to your audio input device. Now, for the purposes of me recording these movies you're watching, I need to keep my output set to my system setting. But again, in most cases, you'll just select the same device you're using for input. So that's the gist of getting ready to record real audio into Garage Band. Figure out what you want to record, get the appropriate hardware or audio input device, plug it in, and let Garage Band know it's what you're going to be using. Next we'll take a look at how to make sure you're getting the proper input levels from whatever you're recording.