Macs All-in-One for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter V.4. Making Music with GarageBand

In This Chapter

• Recording your music

• Playing instruments with Magic GarageBand

• Learning to play an instrument

• Using Loops

• Saving your music

• Saving ringtones

• Recording your podcasts

GarageBand lets you record, play, alter, and arrange all kinds of sounds to create your own music. GarageBand provides accompanying instruments (such as drums, keyboards, and guitars) that you can use to accompany and complement recordings of your own music. Additionally, you can use these virtual instruments on their own to create new music, turning your Mac into a full-fledged band where you control the sound of each instrument, arrange the separate audio tracks, and smash them together to create your own hit songs. If you don't know how to play an instrument, GarageBand offers guitar and piano lessons to get you started.

Although designed for recording, modifying, and playing music, GarageBand can record, modify, and save audio files in a number of audio file formats. If you're not interested in making music, you can use GarageBand to clean up a recorded speech and save it as a podcast that you can distribute to the rest of the world.

Whether you want to record and arrange music or record speech, the main tasks for using GarageBand are

• Recording audio

• Arranging and modifying audio

• Saving the finished audio file

Whatever your needs, GarageBand can satisfy your artistic side or your serious side, or just give you another way to amuse yourself with your Mac.

Recording Audio ...