The Macintosh iLife 06
| More Ways to Work with Regions I've already discussed the most common tasks you're likely to perform with regions: looping them, moving and copying them, splitting them, transposing them, and editing them. There's more. Here are a few additional ways you might work with regions. Resizing a region. To extend a regionmake it longerpoint to its lower-right corner and drag to the right. Why extend a region? Say you recorded a riff that you want to loop. If your recorded region doesn't end at the proper measure boundary, the region won't loop properly. By extending the region, you can have it loop. Another reason to extend a region is to be able to draw in additional notes or controller data using the track editor. Yet another is to add some silence before a region's content repeats. To make the region shorter, drag its lower-right corner to the left. You might shorten a region in order to "crop out" some unwanted notespossibly as a prelude to rerecording them. When you shorten a region, you don't delete the notes in the hidden portion of the region. To restore the notes, lengthen the region. You can also resize a region from its beginning by dragging its lower left corner. This enables you to add silence to the beginning of a region (drag to the left) or to crop out audio from the beginning of a real instrument recording (drag to the right). Joining regions. You've transposed a set of loops using the Split technique from page 329, and now you want to transpose the entire verse to a different key. Select all the loops and choose Join from the Edit menu ( Note When you join real instrument regions that you've recorded, GarageBand combines those regions into a single audio file. GarageBand asks if you want to create a new audio file. Click Create, and GarageBand merges the real instrument regions into a new audio file.
Adding Variety When you're working with loops, it's easy to create overly repetitious arrangements. Fortunately, it's also easy to add variety and make your loop-based songs sound less repetitious. Vary loops. Many of the bass and drum loops that come with GarageBand and Apple's GarageBand Jam Packs have variations that sound similar but not identical. Rather than relying on just one loop for a bass or drum track, switch between some different but similar-sounding ones. Edit some loops. Make your own loop variations. Make a copy of a software instrument loop and edit itdelete a few notes or transpose others. For real instrument loops, select part of the loop, copy it, and then paste it elsewhere. Another way to edit loops is to change the instrument played by a software instrument loop. Try assigning an electric piano or clavinet to a bass loop. Record your own bass track. Use bass loops to sketch out an arrangement and choose instruments, then replace the loops with your own bass line. Take breaks. Add a drum break now and thensilence your drums for the last beat or two of a measure or for an entire measure. You can split the region and then delete part of it. Or you can edit the region if it's a software instrument drum track. Or leave the region alone and create a volume curve that plunges the track's volume down all the way, then brings it back up. Add fills. Don't want to edit a drum loop? Create a new track that uses a software instrument drum kit. Use this track to hold drum fills, such as an occasional cymbal crash or tom-tom fill. Want a kick drum to mark the beat during a drum break? Put it in this track. Vary the percussion. Add one or more percussion tracks to some versesshakers, tambourines, claves, congas, bongos. Click the loop browser's Percussion button to explore. Add a pad. A pad is a note, a series of notes, or a chord that forms a sonic background for a song. It's often a lush string section or an atmospheric synthesizer that plays the root note or a fifth (for example, G in a song written in C). One way to add variety to an arrangement is to have a pad play throughout one verse. Stop the pad at the start of the next verse, or add another track with a pad that uses a different instrument. Changing Effects Want to apply an effect, such as echo, to only part of a track? You can use the hijacking technique, but here's an easier method. Duplicate the track, then move the region to which you want to apply the new effect to the duplicate track. Now apply the effect to the duplicate track. To create a smooth transition between the two tracks, create volume curves for each track. Saving an iLife Preview A new feature in GarageBand 3 lets you save an audio "preview" along with a project. A preview is simply a stereo mix of the song, stashed inside the project file. Saving a project with a preview makes possible a couple of tricks. For one thing, you can access the project using the media browsers in the other iLife programsuse a song in an iPhoto slide show or in an iMovie HD project, for example. Another benefit to saving a preview along with the project is that you can import one song into another, as described below. To have GarageBand create a preview when you save a project, choose Preferences from the GarageBand menu, click General, and check the box labeled Render a Preview When Saving. The next time you save the project, you'll encounter the biggest drawback of this feature: it greatly increases the time required to save a project, since GarageBand must create a stereo mix of your song. For this reason, you might want to leave this feature turned off as you're working on a songa time when you are (or should be) using the Save command all the time. Then, when you've finished the tune, turn on the preview feature and save the project again. Importing Songs into Songs If you save your GarageBand projects with an iLife preview as described above, you can import one song into another. This makes possible some versatile composition options: create each verse of a song (or each movement of a symphony) separately, then combine them into a finished project. Importing one song into another can also be useful for working around a performance problem caused by a slower Mac, or a very complex song: complete as many tracks as your Mac can handle, then import that song into a new project and continue adding tracks. To add one song to another, open the media browser by clicking the When you import one project into another, GarageBand maintains a link to the original project, enabling you to go back and make changes, then have those changes reflected in the second project. To open the original version of a project that you've imported, double-click on the orange region. In the Advanced area of the track editor, click the Open Original button. GarageBand opens the original project, where you can make changes. When you save those changes and close the project file, GarageBand reopens the second project and asks if you'd like to update it to reflect your changes. |