If you’re a newbie to home recording then you can’t go far wrong with Garage Band. It’s a really simple way of recording your first tracks and while there is the option of adding additional equipment like digital audio interfaces, drum machines and expensive microphones, the reality is that for basic recording all you really need is your Mac and the Garage Band software. If you get good enough, you could theoretically record an entire album on it.
The other equipment will definitely push the limits of what you can do on Garage Band, but in its’ simplest form it can record anything that you can make a noise with, digitally edit it and enhance the sounds, overdub additional sounds to complete a full song or loop your sounds together to create a demo track.
The first thing to do is to create your first project and here you’ll have a number of options about the type of project you’re creating (piano, electric guitar, voice etc.), but it doesn’t massively matter which one you choose. You’ll be able to add all different types of recording tracks once you’re inside the project, so for now you can just click the one that matches the instrument you plan to record first. On the very next page you’ll be asked to give your project a name, choose the tempo of the project, the time signature and the key you’ll be playing in (if you’re not entirely sure about this, just choose the chord or note that you play the most in the song).
Now you have the canvas of your project. If you’re using a digital audio interface with your instruments plugged into it then you will need to set this as the input and output, which can be done by simply clicking on the Garage Band button in the top left hand corner of the screen > Preferences > Audio/Midi and choosing the device from the drop down menus. However, you can just play your instruments into and the Mac microphone will record everything. The sound quality won’t be as good, but you’ll definitely be able to record everything that you need.
For your first recording, you start by creating a track by clicking on Track, and selecting New Track. On the next page you’ll have the options of choosing between a Software Instrument, A Real Instrument and Electric Guitar, so choose what you want to record and you’ll have the track ready. For audio it’s just a case of clicking the record button and playing. You can set up a metronome to keep time to and count it for the start of the recording from the Control top menu.
However, if you want to record a software instrument without a digital audio interface and a keyboard, for example, you’ll need to do this through the keyboard function. Click Track > New Track > Software Instrument to create the track and then click Window > Keyboard to open the keyboard feature. If you click on the button with the A on it, you can change the display to qwerty view, so that you can play with your computer keys. Now it’s just a case of pressing record and tapping away. You can edit the pitch, notes and velocity of your midi strikes in the editor, which you open by either clicking on the scissors button in the bottom left of the screen, or by clicking Control > Show Editor.
Finally, you can edit all of your tracks with the right hand window to add effects, change amp settings, change the sound of midi recording from say keyboards to drums and change the recording monitor setting for real instruments. While all of this might not be enough to teach you how to record an album, it should give you enough of an introduction to start recording.
Authored by Gerard Harris
Gerard Harris is the writer and editor of Tuppence Magazine entertainment news and reviews. The website has sections on music news, album reviews and live music reviews.
