10 Fun and Useful Things You Can Do With GarageBand For Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at ten useful and fun things that you can do with GarageBand on your Mac. 

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So GarageBand is a great free app that comes from Apple. You can get it from the Mac App Store if you don't already have it. You may have looked at it before and thought well this looks really cool but there's nothing I could really use it for. So here are ten simple things that you could do with GarageBand. Some of them useful. Some of them just fun.

First let's look at trimming simple audio file. With GarageBand started up here I'm going to create a new project. A new empty project and it's going to ask me to choose a track type to start with. GarageBand is picky about that. It always wants to have one track even if you're not going to use it. So we can choose Software Instrument, or Audio. It doesn't really matter. Either one of those. Hit Create. We'll get a GarageBand window here with one track open. Now don't worry about that empty track there. We're just going to drag in an audio file. So I'm just going to drag that in from the Finder. I can stick it here. If I created that microphone track here I can just drag it into there. Otherwise I can create a second track. It doesn't matter which one. Drop it in and then you'll see the waveform for that audio. You can hit Play and it will play that audio. You can click and drag here and move around in that audio file.

If you want to trim some of it you can go to the end here and you see how you have some controls here at the end, you want to drag the bottom right hand corner and click and drag and you can trim from the end. You could also click and drag the bottom left corner to change the start point. Then you can drag the entire thing and you can drag it until it locks all the way to the left. So now I have trimmed a little off the left and a little off the right. Now all I need to do is go to Share, Export Song to Disk and export a new copy. You see I have a variety of formats that I can use when I export and options for them all.

You can also use GarageBand to just record your voice. So let's start over again with an empty project. This time I'm definitely going to choose the Microphone here and then I'm going to go to GarageBand, Preferences, and Audio MIDI and make sure my input device it set to my microphone. To record my voice I just need to hit the Record button. I'm going to turn off the Count In and Metronome and now I can just talk.  (This is a test. This is me recording.) You can see I just hit Stop there and now I have this recording. I can trim it. I can go to the end here and hit Record again and record more. Then when I'm done I can go to Share, Export Song to Disk again, and export it as a regular audio file. 

Now you can also use GarageBand to easily merge audio files. So I'm going to start an empty project again and choose the Microphone. I'm going to drag the same test audio in here. But then I can drag in a second test audio and stick it right there. You can see I can move them closer to each other. Trim each one. Move them around. Then I can preview by hitting Play and then Export the entire thing again. You can string together 3, 4, 5, as many as you want audio files to merge them together and export a single plain audio file from it.

Now you can also filter audio very easily. I'm going to go and create a cycle area by clicking here. This creates a little area I can adjust that loops over and over. So if I hit Play, this is a test audio file I'm going to count to ten.This is a test audio....... I can just hear it loop. So now let's apply an effect to it. If you don't see the Library here on your left click on this button to reveal the Library. Then with this track selected here you should see some filters. Let's go to voice filters and I can select one of these. Let's play this and I'll show you some different voice filters. 

(Demonstrating voice audio files). 

So once you've applied one of those filters exporting will include that filter. 

Now you can also use GarageBand to play your Mac like it's a piano. So let's start with an empty project. But this time I'm going to choose Software Instrument. I'm going to hit Create. You should see this little keyboard pop-up here. Let's dismiss it for now and note that I've got an instrument set here. In this case Classic Electric Piano. If that's not the one you want you can go here on the left and there are all sorts of other ones you can choose. So I can go and choose Steinway Piano, for instance. 

Now let's bring that keyboard backup. It's under window, Show Musical Typing. Now if I click on this, I can click here, it actually plays that note. I can even click and drag. Or I can type using the keys shown here. So A, S, and E, are C, D, E. Now you can move up or down octaves by clicking here or using the Z and X keys. So you can go down an octave or up and up higher. Now if you click here it switches to this type of keyboard and you have to click with your mouse but you get a larger keyboard. Either way it's a lot of fun to play. You can change the instrument here. For instance I can change to a Synthesizer, go with Classics, and maybe this one. I get different sounds. It is just something fun to play with but if you hit Record it actually records those notes. Now I can play that back. 

So how about drums. You can have fun with drums one of two quick ways. One is instead of choosing Software Instrument or Microphone I can choose Drummer. Hit Create and you get a drum track here and you have all of these controls. From your Library here on your left you can choose from a variety of different types of drummers. Select one. Then select a different beat for that drummer to play and then hit Play to hear it. Let's turn the Looping on here and just play this. (Drums playing). Now I can go and change what's being played by moving this dot around. From Loud to soft. Simple to Complex. Changing which parts of the drum kit is used. So watch as I play around with this. (Drums playing).(Different drum playing).

This is a real track just like those audio tracks. So if I wanted to I actually could Export this. If I wanted this to loop longer I could click here at the top right and drag it out and have this loop for a long period of time. Export a five minute track that's just drums playing.

Another way to play with drums is to use them in the same way we played with the piano and synthesizer before. I'm going to create an empty project. Select Software Instrument but I'm going to switch the instrument here to Drum Kit. Then select a drum kit. Like this one. Now when I use A, S, D or any of these other keys I get drum sounds. They map across the different kits. So the bass drum is the same key on different kits. So you can get used to kind of playing things and then switch the drum kit to something else. Just like with the piano you could record things. (Playing music).

Now another thing you can do is you can use various loops that come with GarageBand and create your own music. It's really easy to do. Just create a Software Instrument there. I'm going to close this and I'm going to click on Loops here at the top right. Then I'm going to go to Genre and select something. So let's say we select Jazz here and you can see there's some drum kits. So clicking once will just give you that sample there. Drag that in to a new track here. We can get rid of this track. I'll click on it and hit Command Delete to delete it. Now we just have this drum track. I can stretch out the loop there. I can find something else. So go down the list here and here is some bass. Let's drag that in and let's loop that all the way out. Now it will play them together. You can continue to add 3, 4, 5, 6, as many as you want of these loops and have them only appear in places. So for instance I can shrink this down, move it over, and now we'll hear drums first and then the bass will come in in the second measure.You can create quick little loops or fun bits of music here. Export them out. Use them in video projects or whatever you want.

You can also use MIDI files. So MIDI files have been around for a long time. They are basically musical notes encoded into a digital file. Let's create an empty project here. Just an empty software instrument. Now I'm just going to drag a standard MIDI file. You can download a lot of MIDI files from the internet. They've been around for decades. Here's just a piece of classical music. It's just a dot MID file. I'm going to drag and drop it here. It's going to ask me if I want to change the tempo to match. I'll say yes. Now I've got this little bit of MIDI here that I'm going to play on a piano. I can play it. I can change the tempo here. So let's boost the tempo way up. Get rid of the metronome sound. I can even change the instrument. Right now it's set to a piano, Steinway piano here. I can go to vintage electric piano there. Go to a classic electric piano. Let's hear it on that. You can combine this with other loops or even drum kits. So I can add here a drummer like we showed before. There will be a drum kit here. GarageBand will match the tempo so now you get something like this. (music playing).

See how easy that was to create!

Finally, let's look at editing video. Yes, video in GarageBand. That's kind of weird because GarageBand is just for audio. Right. Let's create an empty project here. I'm going to choose Software Instrument as the blank track. I'll get rid of it but after I add a video in. So I'll drag and drop a video file in here and I'll add it in. I get this little video window here. I can shrink that down because here I'll see audio but as I scroll through it this will show me where I am in the video track. I can actually play it. Now I can get rid of this extra track here. I've got the audio in here and I can apply filters to it just like I can do with the regular audio track. I can add other tracks to it. So I can add music or anything I want to it. 

There's so much more you can do in GarageBand, of course, that I'm not even going into. Once you're done with this audio it can be exported back into the video. So you go to File, Movie, Export Audio to Movie and it will take this audio track and it will create a new video with these settings using your now changed audio track.

So if you haven't used GarageBand much in the past I'm hoping these ten ideas will give you a chance to take a look at it. GarageBand is a useful tool. But it's probably also the most fun tool that Apple provides for Macs.