GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual

Chapter 9. Adding On, Moving Up

GarageBand is good for days of fun right out of the box. You can do a lot of great work without ever adding a thing, and without pining for the ability to change the tempo mid-song. Surely 90 percent of all GarageBand fans will be perfectly content with the basic, built-in features.

But if you were content with the mere basics, you wouldn’t have picked up a book on the subject, now would you?

This chapter introduces a few of the coolest ways to enhance GarageBand’s repertoire, suggests where you might go when you decide it’s time to graduate to more powerful (and expensive) music software, and points out some Web sites where you can learn more about GarageBand.

Note

All of the programs described in this chapter are available for download from the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.

Making Your Own Apple Loops

Stuffing your hard drive with GarageBand-ready loops you’ve bought from companies on the Web is just fine and dandy, as long as you’re willing to limit yourself to other people’s canned creativity. It turns out, though, that with very little effort, you can turn your own sonic eruptions into full-fledged Apple Loops, ready for use in your compositions or even for selling online. This technique is also ideal for converting loops originally designed for other music software into official Apple Loops that appear in the GarageBand Loop browser.

In the bad old days of GarageBand 1, you needed a special utility program to do this deed. In GarageBand ...