10 Ways To Have Fun With GarageBand For iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you ten ways you can have fun using GarageBand on your iPad. 

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So if you don't have GarageBand on your iPad you're really missing out. In addition to being a pretty serious recording and music making app it's also kind of this fun box of musical toys. You can get GarageBand completely FREE. It's an Apple App. You get it in the App Store. You download it to your iPad and most, or maybe all of these things, will work on the iPhone as well. There's a GarageBand App for Mac too, of course. But it looks very different. A lot of these things are very specific to using the touchscreen on the iPad.

Now perhaps the simplest thing you can do is just play keyboards on your iPad. So you want to go over to Keyboard and then tap here and then it brings up a keyboard. You can just tap on the screen to play the keys on the keyboard. Just play whatever you want. It's multi-touch so you can press with more than one finger at the same time. You can also swipe to play. You can also choose how the keyboard works with some settings. You can also change the instrument right here so you can go in and then choose another type of instrument, select that, and then now you're playing that type of keyboard with its own custom settings as well. I bet you didn't know that you can actually control it with your face as well! Tap on this button here and now it's going to use the camera to see when you open and close your mouth and change the mod according to that.

Now keyboards aren't the only instrument you can play. You could also go over and choose from a variety of other instruments. For instance, let's go and choose guitar here and you can play the guitar with multi-touch on your screen. You can touch individual notes. You can bend notes. You can tap different parts of the string. Run your finger up and down the string. Play chords. You can switch instruments of course. (Gary playing instruments.) You could also try a whole bunch of other instruments. Look around and see what instrument you want to play.

Now what if you're like me and not very musically inclined? Well, you can actually go in and play these Smart Instruments as well. They group notes together and allow you to play kind of in a special way where the notes kind of make sense. So, for instance, here's what a guitar looks like. It's really easy to get something that sounds good. If you go to another instrument like, let's say keyboards, you can see here there is Smart Piano and you can go in and it's the same kind of thing. You can play whole chords and the notes are grouped in such a way on this grid that you can just play around and it usually creates something that sounds pretty nice. Here, even, you could see there's a Smart Bass that allows you to easily create and play with the bass and make something that sounds good.

Maybe playing drums is more your thing. Well, you can select Drums here and you can play the drums just like you can play the keyboard. With multi-touch it means you can tap multiple things at the same time. It's a lot of fun to play with and, of course, you can change the drum kit if you want. Just tap here and then select a different kit. Sometimes it changes the whole look of the drums. Sometimes there isn't a representation for drums. It's more like these beat pads that you could play around with and you can just turn your iPad into a musical instrument.

All of this stuff is great for playing along with others. If somebody has an actual instrument or another iPad you can play together. Now if you want to create a beat but you don't want to just play it by tapping with your fingers you can go to Smart Drums here and it gives you this grid. You can choose the type of Drum Kit you want. Then you drag over the different drum into this grid from Loud to Quiet, Simple to Complex. So where you place it determines how it sounds, what it is actually playing. Drag a bunch of these things in here and it will makeup some unique combination of a rhythm. So you can do that. There's also a Random button here and you can just switch around to play with it that way. (Making music).

Yet another way to create a beat is to use the Beat Sequencer. So you go in and you get this Grid and wherever you place a mark it will play that drum at that time. So you can keep adding things here and make a complex but well thought out kind of beat. A lot of different things you can do with this in addition to adding these wherever you want you can also, of course, remove them, change them, edit them. You can do things like, for instance, if you were to swipe like this you can turn a whole bunch of them on like that. So there's a lot of cool things you can do and of course you can change the instrument being played. Even some patterns there that you can select making it a little easier to get started.

Now there is an entire other set of drums here called Drummer. What this does is allow you to choose a drummer, in other words a style. Then it creates a track for you at the top automatically. You can alter it by choosing the types of drums, the complexity fills, all sorts of different things. It varies by drummer. You can select a different drummer here or a different style and do all sorts of different things. There are pretty much endless possibilities by going through all the different things and changing all the different settings to come up with some sort of beat that you like, maybe to have on in the background or to accompany some music on another instrument that you're playing.

Now switch at the top from Tracks to Live Loops and GarageBand becomes a whole different app. You could go in and select one of these and then it brings up this grid here and each column represents, kind of, a part of a track. When you start playing it and then you can switch to another part of the track but it comes in at a perfect time, not when you tap but actually when it's time for it to come in. So you can kind of select it ahead of time and see how it cues it up there to play it. So you can take some existing things like this and actually build your own too if you really dig deep into this. It has individual pieces playing to kind of create custom things. You can switch to another column like that. There's so much that you can do. You can just play individual items by itself like this. Listen how easy it is to make something. I'm just really tapping randomly here. I didn't prepare at all for demonstrating this but it all just kind of sounds good. (Listening to music)

Now you can go back in here and there's a Sound Library and you could download new groups from Apple for Free including actual popular songs. So occasionally artist will provide songs and you can grab them and then kind of remix the song yourself. I won't actually play you any of this here. I'll just show it to you. I don't want to get in trouble with YouTube for playing clips from the song. But you can see here this is the actual song itself broken up into these live loops. Then I just select the pieces and jump to each section. 

Now, of course, you can also record your voice using Audio Recorder and when you do so you actually can do just some fun stuff with it. Switch to actual Fun at the top. That's what it is called. Record something and you won't hear me record this but when I stop I'll play it back for you and Testing 1, 2, 3. Now you can change the filter. Testing 1, 2, 3. Testing 1, 2, 3. So it's kind of fun. You can switch to Studio and you can choose from a lot more right here. Tons of different effects, filters, and things. Testing 1, 2, 3. 

Now if you can record you can also Sample. It's under Keyboard. Go to Sampler here and it puts a default one there. It's just a dog barking. You get the idea. But you can record something as well. That's me recording MacMost right here. You can trim it. You probably want to do that a little bit because there's always a little extra silence. You can play your sample. So you can record you or you can record any sound, you can record your cat. Whatever you want to do and now you can play that sound with the keyboard. You can also go here and then play the sample as a chord. (playing chords). You can go here and then you can get it to repeat the sound. Just hold the key. 

That's really just scratching the surface. I didn't even talk about the basic features of GarageBand where you can take various loops, put them together, record your own tracks. Your whole multi-track recording right there on your iPad. There's a lot of ways that all this stuff links into that. You can use these to record tracks and then put drum loops and things under it. There's so many possibilities. So if you don't have GarageBand on your iPad or iPhone yet what are you waiting for! Download it. Play around with it. Have some fun. Thanks for watching.