To loop a certain section of your piece, start by clicking the Cycle button (identified in Figure 1-3). Sometimes, it’s useful to loop a section just for the sake of listening and analyzing-when a clashing note, for example, is driving you, well, loopy. By cycling the section you’re editing, you can hear the effects of your edits even while you’re making them, in the context of all the other playing instruments. In Chapter 5, you’ll see that you can edit the notes in Software Instruments sections-adding or deleting notes, rewriting musical lines, and so on. GarageBand adds all your passes together.Įditing. So if your keyboard skills aren’t especially dazzling, you can play one hand’s part, or even one finger’s part, on each “pass” through the loop. When you’re laying down new music from a MIDI keyboard, GarageBand merges everything you play during all repetitions of the loop. If you’re getting error messages like “Part of the song was not played,” “The hard disk is not fast enough,” and “Disk is too slow,” flip immediately to Chapter 10 for some explanations and solutions. It craves memory and horsepower like Donald Trump craves publicity. The point is that GarageBand is a very hungry program. But if you have even a little musical talent-even the ability to sing in tune-you can get even more out of the program by adding musical gear like a microphone, synthesizer (electronic MIDI keyboard), or guitar (see Chapters 4 and 6). You can use GarageBand happily for years using nothing but your Mac and its mouse. That’s what you need to install GarageBand, although there are some sneaky tricks for moving GarageBand onto a different hard drive if necessary (see Section 9.2). Then again, they can’t run GarageBand anyway.Ģ gigabytes of hard drive space. That would rule out, for example, blueberry and tangerine iBooks. Ī screen with at least 1024-x-768–pixel resolution.If GarageBand complains that you don’t have this software, download it from But if you expect to create compositions much more elaborate than that, 512 MB is the bare minimum. Well, you might be able to record “Chopsticks” with two fingers with this much memory.
Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) is ideal.Ģ56 megabytes of memory. True, but you can’t use the Software Instruments (see Section 1.7) unless you have a G4 or later chip. A Mac whose processor is a 600MHz G3 or faster.