iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Tracks

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.

Creating a Track

You can add a track in any of three ways.

• Click the + button below the track names. It’s shown in Figure 23-1.

• Choose Track → New Track. Or press Option-

  

  -N.

  Both of these methods open the New Track dialog box shown in Figure 23-6. 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 ...