Understand the GarageBand layout - GarageBand Tutorial

- [Instructor] But I do have it installed already. So I'll click it's icon. Now, if you've previously worked on a project in Garage Band that project should open when you open Garage Band as we see here. I'm just going to close that. Once you've closed it, or if you've never created a project in Garage Band, you'll then see this window. And from here you can create new projects, open existing projects, access to the built-in music tutorials or even purchase additional lessons. But for now I'm just going to select project templates and I'll, double-click the songwriter project. That opens up a new project, which in this case has been set up with some basic tracks that should be useful for songwriters. I'll just use this as an example to walk through the Garage Band layout. For the most part, everything in Garage Band happens in this single window. The window is organized into several different areas and additional areas and some separate windows can be opened when you need them. But for the most part, you'll be spending the majority of your time in the single window. If you've worked with other audio editing applications, some of the buttons here should look familiar. At the top of the Window for example, we have the transport controls for controlling playback, rewind fast forward, stop, play and record all work the way you would expect. To the right of that, we have this display area. This is where you'll find the information like which bar and beat of your project you're currently on, the temporary beats per minute of the entire project, the key and the time signature. And then if I click the play button, you'll see the bars, beats and division display change as the song plays. (drums upbeat music) Now, this display area can be toggled between a few different states. We're seeing the default beats and project display right now, but clicking here to the right, I can choose beats and time, which replaces the tempo, time signature and key display with the time code of where my play head currently is in the song. So this is the play head right here. And when I click play, you'll see the play head move. And the time in the display indicates where we are in terms of the bar and beat and the time. (drums upbeat music) Or if you want, you can display just the beats or just the time. Depending on how you're working in your project, you might want to see different info at different times. I'll switch that back to beats and project for now. All right to the right of the display, we have three buttons. The first one is the tuner. Now in order to use it, I need to first select a real instrument track, meaning a track for an instrument that can be tuned like this guitar track. So now we can click the Tuner button and that opens up in its own window. Now we don't actually have a guitar connected right now but if I did, I could play it and tune it Next to that are the accountant and metronome buttons which are tools for helping you come in at the right time and to keep to the beat while you're recording. We'll see those in action later as well. Continuing to the right, we have the Master Volume Slider which is for adjusting the overall level of your project. So if it's playing, I can drag that down and up. (rums upbeat music) And you notice that we see level meters inside the Master Volume Slider while the song is playing. So you can make sure your project's volume isn't too loud or too quiet. To the right of that are two buttons that toggle open different panels here on the right side of the main window. The first one opens up the notepad for jotting down notes, reminders about the project to yourself. And next is the Loop Browser where you'll find a huge collection of pre-installed musical snippets that you can drag into your projects. You can use loops to do everything from adding little touches of different instruments and rhythms to your project to creating complete songs assembled entirely from loops. We'll be looking at loops extensively in the next chapter. Notice that you can only have one of these panels open at a time, clicking on them, toggles between the panels. Let's jump back over here to the upper left corner and take a look at these buttons. The first one is the Library button which opens and closes this panel here. Now the Library Panel is contextual. What you see in it depends on what you have selected. Notice the changes when I select different tracks here. So when I click the modern stack track which is a bass guitar track, I see bass guitar amps that I can select a modify. Next to that is the Quick Help button. When it's enabled, we see this panel open and rolling your mouse over most objects brings up info letting you know what that object is used for. So for example, I can roll over the New Track button here to see what that is or over the track icons. And it tells me I can Control click those icons to select different images. I'll close that for now. The next part is to toggle the Smart Controls open and close here at the bottom of the window. I'll talk more about the Smart Controls throughout the course, but basically this gives you access to the settings of each instrument, amp or effect you're working with as well as a separate queue for each track. And this last button here opens and closes the Edit Pane which is used for editing selected recordings. You can have both the Smart Controls and the Edit Pane closed at the same time, which gives you more room to work in the main track area. But you can't have both the Smart Controls and the Edit Pane open at the same time. You can only toggle between them. Now this last area is the main area of the Garage Band window. And this is the Track pane. It contains these rows referred to as tracks and he's track represents an individual recording. When you play back your song, each track is played simultaneously. Generally the order in which the tracks appear is the order in which they were recorded, but you can easily change the order by dragging them up and down. Each track has its own set of controls. Some tracks have more or fewer controls depending on the type of track it is, but each have the same basic controls. First, we have a speaker icon with a slash through it. This is the mute button and clicking this button mutes the tracks so that it can't be heard. It's useful to click this button when you went to quickly hear what your song sounds like without a particular instrument in the mix. So if I have the drums playing up here, (drums upbeat music) I can mute them and unmute them. (drums upbeat music) Next to that, we have the Solo button. Clicking this button meets every other track, but this one. Notice that the mute button is flashing on all these other tracks now. This is commonly called soloing the track. You can mute and solo multiple tracks which you may often want to do while mixing your song. For example, you might just want to hear the percussion tracks. So you would solve them together. If you want to mute or solo, multiple tracks in Garage Band, you can click them individually like so. Or if the tracks you want to Mute or Solo are in order with each other, you can click the Mute or Solo button on the first track. And then keeping your mouse button done drag down and touch each of the tracks you want to mute or solo. And it works the same way in reverse to unmute or unolo. So this is a good reason to keep similar or related tracks together in your project. It makes it much easier to mute or solo them. All right, so next to those buttons and some of these tracks is the Input Monitoring button. And this is used when you want to be able to hear the instrument, you're recording through Garage Band as you're recording it. So for example, if you're recording an electric guitar you'll want to be able to hear what you're playing if you're using garage bands built an amps. If you're recording a real amp with a microphone, you'll probably be able to hear your guitar out of the air and you won't need to hear it through garage band as you're recording. So you can toggle the input monitoring on and off with this button. Next, we have the volume slider for the track. Each track has its own volume slider which lets you determine how loudly or softly the track has played back in relation to the other tracks. This is a crucial part of mixing your project. And lastly, we have a pan dial, which allows you to decide whether the track comes primarily out of the less speaker or the right speaker or equally out of both in a stereo mix. You can turn the style by clicking on it and dragging up or down. You can also double click both the Pan Dial and the Volume Slider to manually input a value. Or if you want to set them back to their default locations, just hold on the option key on your keyboard and click either control. All right, so that's a quick overview of the Garage Band interface. Again, we'll be spending a lot more time in all of these areas throughout this course but now you should have a decent understanding of the lay of the land and we can move on from here.