GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Effects, Guitar Amps, and Instrument Modules

GarageBand is more than a MIDI sequencer, more than a loop-based music construction set, even more than a multitrack tape recorder. It’s also the equivalent of a six-foot-tall, $100,000 rack of studio processing equipment and a room full of guitar amplifiers.

The point is to give you exactly the same professional edge that recording artists have. If your singing sounds a little dry, you can “sweeten” the track with a little reverb. If you’re looking for a distinctive keyboard sound for the indie post-grunge trash music you’re trying to record, you can bleach out all of the low frequencies and add some stereo tremolo. And if you’re a guitarist, GarageBand is pleased to offer you a music store’s worth of amplifiers from every decade since 1960.

You can apply these effects to both Real and Software Instruments. You can also apply them on a track-by-track basis (when you’re trying to fine-tune one instrument’s sound) or to the entire mix at once (when you want to tweak the acoustics of your “garage” space).

Either way, you’ll soon discover that the simple, idiotproof face of GarageBand gradually disappears as you begin drilling down into the intricacies of its effects and instrument modules. They offer some of the world’s most advanced recreations of real-world, rack-mounted recording machines ever written—and they offer the technical complexity to match.

Instrument-Named Presets

Whenever you double-click a track’s header, its Track ...