GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual

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GarageBand is a great name. It calls to mind all the great bands that began as amateur acts that rehearsed in some kid's garage. The name suggests the homemade, independent nature of the music you'll be making. It even carries overtones of the us-versus-them, little-guy-against-The-Man, counterculture spirit that Apple has always embraced.

The truth is, though, GarageBand is practically incapable of producing anything but professional, polished music—a far cry, that is, from the slightly out-of-tune, drum-heavy work of true first-time garage bands. That's where the name isn't such a slam dunk.

On the other hand, it's catchier than "GarageDigitalRecordingStudio."

This chapter introduces you to GarageBand. It teaches you how to play back music with GarageBand, and goes on to explain the difference between the two kinds of music the program works with (MIDI data and audio recordings). You'll learn how to create new music in the following chapters.

Here are the official Apple minimum requirements for GarageBand:

A Mac whose processor is a 600MHz G3 or faster. True, but you can't use the Software Instruments (see Section 1.7) unless you have a G4 or later chip.
Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later. Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) is ideal.
256 megabytes of memory. Well, you might be able to record "Chopsticks" with two fingers with this much memory. But if you expect to create compositions much more elaborate than that, 512 MB is the bare minimum. A gigabyte or even more is better.
QuickTime 6.5.2 or later. If GarageBand complains that you don't have this software, download it from www.apple.com/quicktime.
A screen with at least 1024-x-768–pixel resolution

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Here are the official Apple minimum requirements for GarageBand:

A Mac whose processor is a 600MHz G3 or faster. True, but you can't use the Software Instruments (see Section 1.7) unless you have a G4 or later chip.
Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later. Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) is ideal.
256 megabytes of memory. Well, you might be able to record "Chopsticks" with two fingers with this much memory. But if you expect to create compositions much more elaborate than that, 512 MB is the bare minimum. A gigabyte or even more is better.
QuickTime 6.5.2 or later. If GarageBand complains that you don't have this software, download it from www.apple.com/quicktime.
A screen with at least 1024-x-768–pixel resolution. That would rule out, for example, blueberry and tangerine iBooks. Then again, they can't run GarageBand anyway.
2 gigabytes of hard drive space. That's what you need to install GarageBand, although there are some sneaky tricks for moving GarageBand onto a different hard drive if necessary (see Section 9.2).
Musical equipment (optional). You can use GarageBand happily for years using nothing but your Mac and its mouse. But if you have even a little musical talent—even the ability to sing in tune—you can get even more out of the program by adding musical gear like a microphone, synthesizer (electronic MIDI keyboard), or guitar (see Chapters 4 and 6).

The point is that GarageBand is a very hungry program. It craves memory and horsepower like Donald Trump craves publicity.

If you're getting error messages like "Part of the song was not played," "The hard disk is not fast enough," and "Disk is too slow," flip immediately to Chapter 10 for some explanations and solutions.

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If GarageBand didn't come preinstalled on your Mac, you can buy it as part of Apple's iLife '05 software suite. You can buy iLife at computer stores or online stores like www.apple.com.

iLife is an $80 DVD that includes GarageBand, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD. (You can't buy GarageBand separately, and you can't download it. Two gigabytes would be a long download.)

When you run the iLife installer, you'll be offered a choice of programs to install. Install all five programs, if you like (provided if you have the required 4.3 GB of hard drive space), or just GarageBand by itself.

When the installation process is over, you'll find the GarageBand icon in your Applications folder. (In the Finder, choose Go → Applications, or press Shift-

-A, to open this folder.) If the GarageBand icon—the little electric guitar—isn't already in the Dock, take a moment to drag it there, so you'll be able to open it more conveniently from now on.

For the moment, don't open GarageBand by double-clicking its icon. (If you do so, the program presents the Project dialog box, which offers you three choices: Start a new project, open an existing one, or quit GarageBand. This box goes away if you switch to the Finder and open a GarageBand song manually.)

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For this guided tour, you need a GarageBand file that's already been completed. You can get yourself one by downloading the GarageBand Examples CD, a "virtual disc" available for free at www.missingmanuals.com. (In fact, the rest of this book assumes that you've already done so. For details, see the box on Section 1.5.)

Once you've downloaded the GarageBand Examples disk, open the Chapter 1 folder and double-click the icon called "01—Garage Door." After a moment, GarageBand opens and presents you with the simulated studio shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: GarageBand isn't just the only iLife program that doesn't start with i; it's also the only program made of "wood." (You can move the window around by dragging any of the wood or "brushed aluminum" surfaces.) At first, the program tends to cower in a smallish window. Click the Zoom button to make it fill your screen—much better!

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You'll probably spend most of your time in GarageBand playing back music. That, after all, is the only way to fine-tune and perfect your work.

There's a Play button at your disposal—the big triangle indicated in Figure 1-1—but that's for suckers. Instead, press the Space bar. That's a much bigger target, and a very convenient start/stop control. (You may recognize it as the start/stop control for iTunes and iMovie, too.)

Once you've got the 01—Garage Door file open, press the Space bar to listen to this fonky, fonky piece. It's about a minute long.

If you hear nothing, it's probably because your Mac's speakers are turned down. You can adjust your Mac's overall volume by pressing the volume keys on the top row of your keyboard.

If you have a very old keyboard (or a very non-Apple one), and you therefore lack these keys, you can also adjust the volume by clicking the speaker menulet (the

icon in your menu bar).

(If the speaker control doesn't appear on your menu bar, open System Preferences, click the Sound icon, and then turn on "Show volume in menu bar.")

Whenever music is playing back, you can have all kinds of fun with it. For example:

Stop the music. Press the Space bar again.
Slow it down (or speed it up). Use the Tempo control, as shown in Figure 1-2.
Adjust the volume. You can drag the master volume slider shown in Figure 1-1, or you can press -up arrow (louder) or -down arrow (softer). (Hey! Those are the same keystrokes as in iMovie and iTunes!)

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Looping means playing a certain section of the music over and over again continuously. (That's what musicians call it. Apple calls it cycling, because in GarageBand, the word loop has a very different meaning. You can read about loops in the next chapter.)

Cycling can be very handy in a number of different situations:

Recording. When you're laying down new music from a MIDI keyboard, GarageBand merges everything you play during all repetitions of the loop. So if your keyboard skills aren't especially dazzling, you can play one hand's part, or even one finger's part, on each "pass" through the loop. GarageBand adds all your passes together.
Editing. In Chapter 5, you'll see that you can edit the notes in Software Instruments sections—adding or deleting notes, rewriting musical lines, and so on. By cycling the section you're editing, you can hear the effects of your edits even while you're making them, in the context of all the other playing instruments.
Playing. Sometimes, it's useful to loop a section just for the sake of listening and analyzing—when a clashing note, for example, is driving you, well, loopy.

To loop a certain section of your piece, start by clicking the Cycle button (identified in Figure 1-3). Or just press the letter C key on your Mac's keyboard.

Either way, the Cycle button lights up, and a yellow stripe appears on the beat ruler (the numbered "ruler" strip at the top of the screen). That stripe—the cycle region—tells you which part of the song GarageBand intends to repeat.

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Your current position in the song—that is, the spot from which you'll start recording or playing—is always indicated by the Playhead (Figure 1-1) and the moving vertical line beneath it.

You can drag the Playhead around manually, of course; you can also click anywhere in the beat ruler to make the Playhead snap to that spot. You can even jump to a spot in your piece by typing in its time or measures-and-beats position into the digital time display (Section 3.14.3).

But you'll feel much more efficient if you take the time to learn GarageBand's navigational keyboard shortcuts:

Jump back to the beginning. Pressing either the letter Z key or the Home key rewinds the piece to the beginning without missing a beat.

On Mac laptops, the Z key is easier to press than the Home key, because triggering the Home function requires first pressing the Fn key in the lower-left corner. Too much trouble.
Jump to the end. Press Option-Z or the End key. That's a great technique for people who like to build up their songs section by section. After you've finished the first part, you can jump to the end of it, ready to begin recording the second.

As far as GarageBand's playback is concerned, the end of your piece isn't necessarily where the music stops. It's the point indicated by the small left-pointing triangle on the ruler.

Sometimes you'll trim a piece to make it shorter—and wind up stranding the End marker way off to the right, so that GarageBand "plays" a minute of silence after the actual music ends. In that case, you can fix the problem by dragging the End marker inward until it lines up with the end of the colored musical regions. (You can never drag it inward past the end of the music, though. And 999 measures is GarageBand's max.)

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If you've been reading along with half your brain on the book and half on the TV, turn off the TV for a minute. The following discussion may be one of the most important you'll encounter in your entire GarageBand experience.

Understanding how GarageBand produces music—or, rather, the two ways it can create music—is critically important. It will save you hours of frustration and confusion, and make you sound really smart at user-group meetings.

GarageBand is a sort of hybrid piece of music software. It can record and play back music in two different ways, which, once upon a time, required two different music-recording programs. They are:

GarageBand can record, edit, and play back digital audio—sound from a microphone, for example, or sound files you've dragged in from your hard drive (such as AIFF files, MP3 files, unprotected AAC files, or WAV files).

If you've spent much time on computers before, you've already worked with digital recordings. They're the error beeps on every Mac, the soundtrack in iMovie, and whatever sounds you record using programs like SimpleSound, Amadeus, and ProTools. The files on a standard music CD are also digital audio files, and so are the ones you can buy at iTunes.com.

Digital recordings take up a lot of room on your hard drive: 10 MB per minute, to be exact (stereo, CD quality).

Digital recordings are also more or less permanent. GarageBand offers a few rudimentary editing features: You can copy and paste digital audio, chop pieces out, or slide a recording around in time. In GarageBand 2, you can even transpose these recordings (make them play back at a different pitch) and change their tempo (make them play back faster or slower), within limits. But you can't delete a muffed note, clean up the rhythms, reassign the performance to a different instrument, and so on.

Now then: To avoid terrifying novices with terminology like "digital recordings, "Apple calls this kind of musical material

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When you work in GarageBand, the timeline is your primary canvas. It's something like the timeline view in iMovie: a scrolling map of the overall project, marked at the top by a beat ruler that helps you figure out where you are in the song.

Tracks are the horizontal, parallel stripes that represent instruments playing simultaneously. Which is lucky, because if this software could play only one instrument at a time, it would have to be renamed GarageSolo.

You'll learn how to fill these gray stripes in the following chapters. For the moment, though, it's useful to learn your way around the tracks themselves. After all, like the musicians in a real garage band, they're paid very little, but respond well if you treat them with a little respect.

As you read the following instructions, you might want to follow along by working with the Garage Door song you opened in the previous section (Section 1.3).

You can add a track in any of three ways.

Click the + button below the track names. You can see this button in Figure 1-1.
Choose Track → New Track. Or press Option- -N.

Both of these methods open the New Track dialog box shown in Figure 1-6. Click the appropriate tab—Real Instrument or Software Instrument—and then, on the right side of the dialog box, click the name of the kind of instrument you plan to add.

(If you intend to record sound—that is, if what you need is a Real Instrument track—you can bypass the dialog box by simply choosing Track → New Basic Track. Details in Chapter 6.)

You can read more about this process in the tutorial at the end of Chapter 2.

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Most of the time, GarageBand plays all of your tracks simultaneously—and most of the time, that's what you want.

Sometimes, though, it's useful to ask one track to drop out for a minute. You might want to mute a track when:

You've recorded two different versions of a part, and you want to see which one sounds better.
You're trying to isolate a wrong note, and you want to use the process of elimination to figure out which track it's in.
The Playhead is bright red, indicating that the Mac is gasping under its load of tracks. So you'd like to lighten its burden by shutting off a couple of tracks without deleting them forever.

Silencing a track is easy: Just click the little speaker icon below the track's name (see Figure 1-9). Or, if the track header is selected, just tap the letter M key on your keyboard.

The speaker, officially called the Mute button, "lights up" in blue, which means: "I'm shutting up until you change your mind." The regions of notes in that track grow pale to drive home the point. (You can turn the Mute button on or off while the music is playing—a great way to compare your mix with and without a certain instrument.)

There's nothing to stop you from muting more than one track, either. If you need the entire percussion section to sit out for a minute, so be it.

Of course, if you find yourself muting more than half of your tracks, you should be using the Solo button instead. That's the tiny pair of headphones right next to the Mute button.

Here again, the point is to control which tracks play, but the logic is now reversed. When you click the headphones (or, if the track header is selected, press the letter S key on your Mac's keyboard), that's the only track you hear. The note regions in all other tracks grow pale.

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Apple claims that GarageBand can be a blast even if your mastery of music never even progressed to the "Chopsticks" stage. And it's true: GarageBand lets you create authentic-sounding, studio-quality music even if you can't carry a tune, let alone a tuba. This chapter, dear nonmusicians, is sure to be one of your favorites.

That's because GarageBand comes with over 1,100 loops—short, prerecorded snippets performed in recording studios by professionals who most certainly do know their instruments. According to Apple, some of GarageBand's Motown drum loops, in fact, were played by the original studio musicians who recorded classic Motown hits like "My Girl" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine."

Loops are only a few seconds long, but they're designed to repeat seamlessly for as long as you specify. That's a serious help when you want to create a drum part, for example.

Using some extremely advanced technological mojo, GarageBand manages to make every loop sound good with almost any other. So all you have to do is choose the drum beat, bass line, and guitar noodling you like (for example), and trust GarageBand to make them all sound like they were recorded in perfect sync. As you'll see, it's all about dragging and dropping.

If you click Create a New Project in the Project dialog box (when you open GarageBand for the first time), or when you choose File → New, you get the box in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1: The overwhelming majority of GarageBand masterpieces that people have posted online are built with these settings: 120 beats per minute, 4/4, key of C. Clearly, most people do not, in fact, ever get around to changing these parameters.
Incidentally, if you're interested in learning about time signatures, keys, tempo, and so on, see Appendix A for a crash course.

If you do know a little bit about music or the Mac, you can use the New Project dialog box to specify details like this:

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If you click Create a New Project in the Project dialog box (when you open GarageBand for the first time), or when you choose File → New, you get the box in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1: The overwhelming majority of GarageBand masterpieces that people have posted online are built with these settings: 120 beats per minute, 4/4, key of C. Clearly, most people do not, in fact, ever get around to changing these parameters.
Incidentally, if you're interested in learning about time signatures, keys, tempo, and so on, see Appendix A for a crash course.

If you do know a little bit about music or the Mac, you can use the New Project dialog box to specify details like this:

What to call your new piece. You'll almost certainly want to type a new title into the Save As box—"My Song" gets old fast.
Where to file it. The program always hopes that you'll keep all your compositions in your Home → Music → GarageBand folder, which the iLife installer created. You can, of course, choose to file it anywhere else (press -D, for example, to save it onto your desktop). But you'll have to redirect GarageBand in this way each time you create a new piece.
The song's tempo. This means how fast or slow it is, expressed in beats per minute. You can either drag the Tempo slider or type a new number into the "bpm" box just below it.

You don't really have to know what you're doing at this stage. You can adjust a song's tempo at any time, even after you've recorded it.
The song's time signature (meter)

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If you're following along with this chapter, leave the one empty Grand Piano track on the screen. Close the onscreen keyboard for the moment. (If you've been fooling around on your own, start a fresh project by choosing File → New.)

Now, if the plan is to build a piece of music out of 1,100 musical spare parts, you'd better have a very organized toolbox. Sure enough, GarageBand offers an extremely clever loop-finding system called the Loop browser. To open it, use one of these three methods:

Click the eyeball icon below the list of tracks, as shown in Figure 2-3.
Choose Control → Show Loop Browser.
Press -L.

Later, you can hide the Loop browser by repeating the same step (except that the menu command will say Hide Loop Browser).

When you first open the Loop browser, you're seeing only a sampling of the musical smorgasbord Apple has prepared for you. Only about half of the Loop browser buttons—35 of them—are visible.

To view the rest of the buttons, drag the dark gray brushed metal divider bar upward into the Track area, as shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2: You can sort the loop list by name, by originally recorded tempo or key, and so on, just by clicking the corresponding column heading. Click the heading a second time to reverse the sort order. You can also drag the heading divider lines to adjust column widths, or drag the heading names horizontally to rearrange them.

At this point, GarageBand offers three different ways to search its massive database of juicy sonic tidbits to locate the one you're seeking: Button View, Column View, and the Search box.

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Suppose that you've used one of the three loop-finding techniques, and you've homed in on just the right loop. Now it's time to install it into your song.

To do that, drag the loop's name upward and into position, as shown in Figure 2-5. The leftmost edge of the loop will align with the spot where you release the mouse.

What happens when you release the mouse depends on where you release the mouse.

If you drag into an empty track area, you create a brand new track, already set to play the instrument whose name you dragged (Figure 2-5). At the beginning of your song-building session, this is the technique you'll probably use the most. (It makes no difference whether you release the mouse in the light gray area beneath the existing music or the darker gray area beneath the existing track headers.)

If you Option-drag a green Software Instrument loop into an empty track area, GarageBand converts that green Software Instrument into a blue Real Instrument loop—and creates a Real Instrument track to hold it.

This is an important trick when your Mac is wheezing under the weight of too many tracks. See the box on Section 2.3.2 for the explanation.

Figure 2-5: If you drag a loop into an empty track area (top), you create a new track and fill it with one repetition of the loop (bottom). You can save time by dragging it carefully into the horizontal position you want, using the beat ruler at the top of the window as your guide.
Of course, you can always adjust the loop's position after placing it, just by dragging it from side to side.

On the other hand, once you've added a track for Cool Upright Bass, for example, there's little point in creating a second or third Cool Upright Bass track for bass licks that occur later in the song. Simply keep all of your Cool Upright Bass in a single track. That's why you can also drag into an existing track. (Read on.)

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GarageBand comes with 1,100 loops. That should be plenty—for the first half-hour or so!

As your lust for greater musical expression grows, though, you might find yourself wishing you had a more comprehensive sonic palette. You might have noticed, for example, that GarageBand comes with a healthy selection of rhythm parts (bass, drums, guitars, keyboards, mallet instruments), plus some strings and brass—but no solo instruments, like trumpet, clarinet, harp, or solo violin. As noted earlier, GarageBand is also heavily slanted toward music in 4/4 time.

Fortunately, expanding the possibilities is easy enough, since you can add more loops in any of these forms.

As noted at the end of this chapter, you can add almost any sound file to a GarageBand composition just by dragging it into the timeline area. That doesn't make it a loop, however.

A true GarageBand loop comes in Apple Loop format. That's basically a dressed-up AIFF file with built-in tags that specify its original length, key, category, and so on. See Section 10.9 for instructions on converting any plain-vanilla loop into a true-blue, smart Apple Loop.

These $100 expansion packs from Apple each offer 2,000 more loops, additional instrument sounds, more audio effects, and in some cases, more guitar-amp simulators.

The first four Jam Packs were titled Instruments, Loops, and Effects (100 processed or combined versions of the sounds you already have, plus a couple of new solo saxophones, a solo flute, new guitars and bass samples, and sound effects, like a car starting, vinyl record scratching, and phone sounds); Remix Tools (loops and instruments for electronic dance music like techno and hip-hop); Rhythm Section (primarily drum kits and drum patterns); and Symphony Orchestra (sorely needed instrument samples for strings, woodwinds, percussion, a Steinway piano, harpsichord, and organ).

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A region, in GarageBand lingo, is one of the rounded green, blue, or purple music blocks in the timeline. These are your GarageBand building blocks. A region may contain musical material or silence. Each may last only a fraction of a second, or the entire length of a song. Just by chopping, copying, pasting, and dragging regions around, you can build an infinite number of compositions that have never been heard before.

Loops, described in Chapter 2, are one kind of region (green or blue), but they're not the only kind. In subsequent chapters, you can read about how to record material of your own. Regions containing MIDI note information are always green, Apple Loops containing digital-audio recordings are blue, audio recordings you make yourself are purple, and audio files you drag in from the Finder are orange.

The following discussions tell you how to manipulate regions in general—but these techniques are especially useful for manipulating loops.

Before you cut, copy, delete, split, join, or move regions around, you must first select them. This isn't rocket science, of course—you perform the same "Select, then apply" ritual in just about every Macintosh program.

Here's the complete GarageBand region-selecting handbook:

Select one region by clicking it.
Select an additional region by Shift-clicking it. If you Shift-click one by accident, Shift-click it again to deselect it.
Select all the regions in one section of the piece by drag-selecting (Figure 3-1).
Select all the regions in one track by clicking the track header (on the left side, where the track's name and icon appear).
Select the entire

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Before you cut, copy, delete, split, join, or move regions around, you must first select them. This isn't rocket science, of course—you perform the same "Select, then apply" ritual in just about every Macintosh program.

Here's the complete GarageBand region-selecting handbook:

Select one region by clicking it.
Select an additional region by Shift-clicking it. If you Shift-click one by accident, Shift-click it again to deselect it.
Select all the regions in one section of the piece by drag-selecting (Figure 3-1).
Select all the regions in one track by clicking the track header (on the left side, where the track's name and icon appear).
Select the entire song by choosing Edit → Select All (or pressing -A).

You can tell when a region is selected because its color deepens and its text darkens.

To deselect everything and start over, simply click in any empty gray spot in the

Figure 3-1: By dragging enormous chunks of your song, you can rearrange sections and experiment with musical arrangements. The trick is selecting so many regions all at once. To do so, start by zooming out. Then, drag a box around the entire area you want to select. Now you can drag any of the selected regions to move them all at once, exactly as with icons in the Finder.

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Regions usually begin life named after their tracks or instruments. But giving them more descriptive names—like "Vocal Intro," "Bridge," or "Zither Solo"—goes a long way in helping you recognize where you are in your song at any given moment.

To change a region's name, double-click it. As shown in Figure 3-2, an editing window appears. You'll read more about this Track Editor in subsequent chapters, but for now, what you care about is the Track Name box (Figure 3-2).

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You can change when a region plays by shifting its horizontal position. Just drag it by its center.

Dragging is a very handy tactic. When you drag a region horizontally, you make it play earlier or later in time. When you drag it vertically, you move it to a different track, according to the rules described on Section 2.3.2.

Figure 3-2: When you double-click any region, the Track Editor appears at the bottom of the window. One key feature is the Track Name box, where you can type a new name for the region. Press Return or Enter to make the name stick.
(Try not to worry about the inconsistency of having to edit the region's name so far away, and not right on the region itself.)

Figure 3-3: This pop-up menu determines how fine or how coarse the underlying drag-and-drop grid is. It lists basic musical rhythmic units, from largest to smallest (that is, slowest to quickest). In 4/4 time, a region will snap only to the beginnings of measures if you choose "1/1 Note" (that is, a whole note); it will move much more freely if you choose "1/16 Note" (a sixteenth note).

And when you select a huge chunk of your song (Figure 3-1), you can rearrange huge chunks of your piece at once.

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You may notice that a dragged region tends to snap to positions on an underlying grid, whose vertical lines correspond to the markings on the beat ruler across the top of the window. Here are the keys to understanding this snapping motion:

In general, the snapping is a good thing. It keeps your loops aligned with one another, so that your GarageBand players have a virtual conductor keeping them together.
A region you're dragging snaps to the nearest measure, quarter note, and so on. One way to control the fineness of this invisible grid is to use the Grid pop-up menu at the upper-right corner of the GarageBand window, as shown in Figure 3-3 on the previous page.
If you choose Automatic from the Timeline Grid pop-up menu, the grid expands or contracts according to how much you've zoomed in. As you magnify your music, you get more gridlines per measure, which offers you finer positioning options. (The onscreen gray gridlines show you where GarageBand intends to snap.)
If you want complete dragging freedom—no snapping grid at all—choose Control → Snap to Grid, or just press -G. Now you can drag a region wherever you like. (Repeat the command to turn the grid on again.)

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If you install a loop, hit the Home or Z key to rewind, and then press the Space bar to play, you may wonder why you went to all the trouble. The newly installed loop plays once—and then stops.

Fortunately, they're not called loops for nothing. The first and second illustrations in Figure 3-4 show how you can make a loop repeat (or any region, for that matter).

You can make a region repeat as many times as you like. In many songs, for example, you might want the drums to play continuously for the entire song. You can even stop dragging halfway through a repetition, giving you, for example, one-and-a-half repetitions. That might be useful if, say, you want those drums to stop short halfway through a measure to create a dramatic break.

When you make a loop repeat by dragging its upper-right edge, you're cloning the original loop, and the copies remain genetically linked to their progenitor. If you edit the first occurrence, all attached repetitions also change.

If you'd prefer the ability to edit each repetition separately, duplicate the loop region by copying and pasting (or Option-dragging) instead. That way, you create fully independent regions that you can edit separately.

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You don't have to use Apple's canned loops in their entirety. By shortening a region from its right end, you can isolate only a favorite first portion of it.

Shortening a region is simple enough: Drag the end inward, as detailed at bottom in Figure 3-4. You'll know you've grabbed the right spot when the cursor changes to a vertical bar with a rightward arrow. (Contrast with the curly cursor that appears when you make a loop repeat.) If you've used iMovie, this movement should feel distinctly familiar. It's exactly the same cropping motion you can use on clips in the Movie Track.

If the region is blue or purple—a Real Instrument region—you can drag either end inward. That is, you can shorten it either from the beginning or end. (You can't shorten a green Software Instrument loop except from its right end.)

Figure 3-4: If you drag a region by its upper-right corner (top), you make it repeat seamlessly (bottom); the curly cursor tells you that you've grabbed the correct corner. The farther to the right you drag, the more repetitions you get.
Middle: The little notches—four of them shown here—illustrate where the region will repeat.
Bottom: If you grab the middle or bottom of a region's right side, you can shorten it by dragging it to the left. (See the difference in the cursor shape?) You can also grab the left side of a blue or purple region and drag inward, cropping out the beginning of the region.

And now some cool mix-and-match editing pointers:

Once you've shortened a region, you can then drag its upper-right corner to make just that shortened version repeat over and over. This trick does amazing things for drum and bass loops, for example, creating fresh, shorter, more repetitive loops that never existed in Apple's imagination.
The advantage of shortening a region by dragging its end—as opposed to splitting the region and deleting the unwanted portion, as described below—is that you can always restore the region to full length by dragging its end outward again.

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If your goal is to shorten a certain drum loop and then place a different region right next to it, try this shorthand: Drag the second region right on top of the one you want to shorten, so that they overlap. When you release the mouse, you'll see that you've vaporized the overlapped portion of the stationary region.

In some cases, you'll just leave the dragged region where it is now, so that it plays side-by-side with the shortened one. But once the chopping is done, you don't have to leave it where you dropped it. You can drag it right back where it started from, having used it as only a temporary chopper-offer.

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You can also make a region longer by dragging its right end to the right. That's not the same thing as dragging the top right corner, which makes the loop loop. Instead, dragging the loop's right edge extends the loop's width without making it repeat.

You might wonder what the point is, since the extended area of the region is filled with silence. But this trick can be handy when, for example, you recorded only seven measures, but want to loop the region so that it repeats every eight measures. By making the region an even eight measures long, you can now drag its upper-right corner to make it loop evenly.

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You don't have to use a region in its entirety. Drum loops, in particular, are fun to split down the middle; the resulting half-loops or quarter-loops often serve as useful fills (drum riffs right before a musical moment).

All you have to do is position the Playhead precisely where you want the split to occur, click the region to select it, and then choose Edit → Split (or press

-T). You'll see that the region is now in two separate pieces. You can manipulate, cut, copy, drag, shorten, repeat, or otherwise process each of these two pieces independently.

As noted earlier, what's especially intriguing is that you can split off a snippet of a region, and then make that repeat over and over, creating a whole new effect.

And now, some important region-splitting tips:

It helps to zoom in on your loop before splitting it, so you can see exactly where your knife is about to fall. Drag the zoom slider beneath the track list, or just press Control-right arrow or Control-left arrow key to zoom in or out.
You can simultaneously split stacked regions—that is, parallel regions in several tracks at once. Just make sure that you've first selected the ones you want to split by Shift-clicking each one (Figure 3-5).

Figure 3-5: Top: Zoom in, and then position the Playhead where you want to hack up the loop. (Or loops—you can chop several simultaneously, as shown here. Just make sure they're both selected. Here, the middle track is not selected, and so it won't be split.)
Bottom: After the split, the two loop pieces still sound alike when played in succession, but they're now independent entities that you can copy and paste, drag around, and so on.

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What the Split command hath rendered asunder, the Join Selected command shall restore.

Combining two or more regions on a track into a single, unified one has a number of benefits. For example, musical riffs that you've painstakingly assembled and positioned turn into a single, easy-to-manipulate block. Copying, pasting, and dragging regions around is much simpler, too, if you can select the music in question with one quick click, without having to select a bunch of itty-bitty individual regions one at a time. And, of course, you can loop a region that you've created by joining them.

There is, however, one condition: The Join Selected command is dimmed if you've selected blue regions—that is, Real Instrument Apple loops. It works only on two green regions (MIDI, aka Software Instruments), two purple ones (those you've recorded yourself), or two orange ones (sound files you've dragged in from the Finder).

According to GarageBand's online help, there are other conditions, too—but don't believe it. For example, the regions you're about to join do not have to be adjacent. In fact, you can even Shift-click two regions that are separated by other regions! They'll still merge into one long region that appears to float behind the intervening ones—the only time you'll ever see superimposed regions in GarageBand. Weird!

Figure 3-6 shows the routine.

Figure 3-6: Top: Select two green or purple regions by clicking the first, then Shift-clicking the second. They don't have to be immediately next to each other; they can even be separated by other regions. Choose Edit → Join Selected.
Middle: If you select purple regions, you get the dialog box shown here. Click Create.
Bottom: The separate regions have now merged into one, making them easier to work with as a group.

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