Understand MIDI and musical typing - GarageBand Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now let's talk about software instruments. I'm going to create a new empty project, and I'll choose a software instrument track for this. So, to talk about working with software instruments in GarageBand, we have to talk about MIDI. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, MIDI, which stands for musical instrument digital interface, is a method for electronic instruments to communicate with each other and with computers and various other devices that speak the MIDI language. MIDI instruments are often referred to as MIDI controllers because they're used to control MIDI software such as GarageBand. Now, when you sit down and play a note on a real piano, let's say you play middle C, you're actually causing a felt hammer to strike a string in the piano, which resonates to produce a sound. When you play a MIDI keyboard, however, pressing the C triggers a sample or recording of middle C that's been saved on your computer. There are no hammers or strings involved. Nothing in the controller itself creates any sounds. As you've already seen, GarageBand contains tons of software instruments, all of which can be played using a MIDI keyboard. Software instruments are really just a large collection, sometimes called a bank, of individual audio files that mimic the sound of a real instrument. In some cases, a software instrument bank is comprised of samples that have been recorded from a real instrument. For example, the Grand Piano sound in GarageBand was made by recording the individual notes of an old grand piano, note by note. Other software instruments, like many of the horns and wind instruments, were made completely electronically. But the point is that when you record yourself playing a MIDI instrument in GarageBand, no audio is actually recorded. What you're really recording is a series of MIDI messages. The MIDI message of each note tells the MIDI device, in this case GarageBand, what note to play, but also sends information like how long the note was held, how hard you press the key, whether you were pressing a sustain pedal, and lots of other information. When you play back your recording, GarageBand just reads that info you saved and plays the appropriate samples. The cool thing about this is that since you haven't actually recorded any audio, you can pick other instruments to play your performance after you've recorded it. So, for example, let's say you recorded yourself playing the Classic Electric Piano that opens by default when we create a software instrument track in GarageBand, and you're really happy with your performance, but a week later you decide that you really prefer the sound of the Steinway Grand Piano for the part you recorded. You don't have to go back and try to recapture your performance by playing it again with a different instrument. All you have to do is select your track, go to Piano and select the instrument you want to use. That just changes the instrument that plays the data you recorded. You saw how this works in the previous chapter when I showed you how you can take a software instrument loop and have the notes played by a piano or a guitar or a bass. Now, in case you don't have a MIDI keyboard, GarageBand does come with on-screen music keyboards that you can find under the Window up here. We have Keyboard and Musical Typing. The Musical Typing window opens by default when you don't have a MIDI keyboard connected to your Mac and you create a new project with a software instrument track. You can switch between the two types of keyboards with these buttons here in the upper left. Let's start with the regular keyboard here. Now, really either of these onscreen keyboards are a poor substitute for a real MIDI keyboard, but they may work in a pinch if you need to add a single note or two here and there. The keyboard will play whatever sounds of whatever instrument is currently selected in your track. (piano keys chiming) The interesting thing here is that depending on where you click, you'll get a slightly different sound. Clicking lower on the keys, (piano key chimes) plays the note harder, or with more velocity, as it's called in the MIDI world. Clicking higher plays the note with a lower velocity. (piano key chimes) Now, if necessary, you can increase the size of the keyboard to make it easier to click the keys. If I need to play a lower or higher tone, I can drag this blue indicator here that shows me the entire keyboard, (piano key chimes) or I can click the arrows on either side. (piano key chimes) Again, when I play a note on a MIDI keyboard or on the onscreen keyboard, what I'm really doing is triggering a sound file to play. The problem with playing the onscreen keyboard is that you have to play by moving your mouse and clicking exactly at the right time, and it limits you to playing one note at a time, which might be okay if you're just playing a snare part or some other single note part. To make things a little easier, we can try switching to the other virtual keyboard feature, which again is called the Musical Typing feature. This displays a window that lets you play notes on your Mac's keyboard. You can see here that the letters on the keys tell you which notes they'll play. Typing an A plays a C. (keyboard key chimes) Typing a T plays an F-sharp, (keyboard key chimes) and so on. They're laid out in such a way that they mimic an actual piano keyboard, at least as well as a computer keyboard can. Notice that the black notes are all in the line of letters above the white notes. So, if I press A for C, (keyboard key chimes) and then want to play a C-sharp, I press W, (keyboard key chimes) which is up and to the right of A, kind of like the C-sharp on a piano keyboard is up and to the right of the C. Musical typing is a nice feature to have and it's definitely easier to play a melody using it than using the onscreen keyboard. For one thing, you can play simple melodies much easier than by clicking your mouse. (gentle piano music) Like the onscreen keyboard, you can click up here to choose the octave range that you want to play in, but you can't stretch the window like you can with the onscreen keyboard, although there's really not a need to do that since you can only type an octave and a half at a time. Notice down here that you can type Z to go down an octave, and X to go up an octave. And we can see that blue display moving at the top as I do so. This can be useful if you're playing a line that spans more than an octave and a half. It'll take a little practice, but if you press the Z or X at just the right time, you can play a seamless line. Not the most graceful way to play piano, but it can work for simple lines. But you are limited by having just an octave and a half. One of the many other limitations of your Mac's keyboard as an instrument is that it can't tell how hard you're hitting the keys. As you saw with the onscreen keyboard, you can click the notes in different areas to change the velocity of the note. But with musical typing, you have to press either C or V before you type the note to have it play either softer or louder, which is probably not the best way to play a passionate melody. And we also have some other capabilities here, like, pressing the tab key will sustain the notes like pressing the sustain pedal on a real piano. So, I can press tab and play a couple notes. (gentle classical piano music) If you really practice, you might be able to wrap your brain around using your left pinky finger as your right foot. And finally, we have this top row of keys for controlling pitch bend and modulation. Pitch Bend bends the note a full step up or down, and Modulation adds vibrato, which is sort of like a fast, repetitive pitch bend that stays within the range of the note. Now Pitch Bend and Modulation are not effects you can apply to just any instrument. For instance, they have no effect on this Grand Piano instrument that I'm using because you can't bend notes or play vibrato on a piano, but they will work on instruments like guitars, and so on. So, GarageBand's Musical Typing feature will work in a pinch for certain scenarios, but if you're serious about recording your music with software instruments, you really need to go out and get a real MIDI keyboard that has actual piano keys on it. They're just so much more flexible and give you much more control than anything either the onscreen keyboard or musical typing can offer.