GarageBand Live Loops

Live Loops is a new feature of GarageBand for iOS that makes it easy and fun to create music. You can use one of the provided set of loops, or full in cells in a grid with recordings or loops to create your own. Then you can play Live Loops in real time and record. When you are done, you can go into the normal GarageBand interface to add more or fine tune.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's look at using the new Live Loops feature in GarageBand in iOS. 
So I'm going to show Live Loops here on my iPad. I'm going to go into GarageBand and I'm going to create a new song. Then at the top you can see it now has Tracks and Live Loops. I'll switch over to Live Loops and I flip through some of the samples that they've got here. 
I can choose New which will give me an empty set of Live Loops. But to make things easy for demonstration I'll just choose one of the options here and it will load that one up.
What I have here is a grid of cells. Each cell contains a little looping sound. Now the rows represent a single instrument going all the way across and the columns up and down represent a kind of piece of the music. So you can combine several instruments together to create one little moment in time. 
If the tap the bottom, I'm going to tap where it says one at the bottom, it will play both the loops that you see there in the first column together to create some sound. It will keep looping like that until I switch. I'm going to tap number two and it will start playing at the appropriate time. It won't start right away. It will let the first loop finish and then it will start number two.
So you can see it let the first loop get to the bottom of its time there which was the entrance point for it to change. I can do the same thing again here. Now I'll hit Stop. So no matter where or when I hit the next column to play it will perfectly time it. So it may come in almost immediately or it may come in a second or two later depending upon when the right time is to interrupt the first sound and go into the second sound.
Now in addition to actually playing an entire column full of stuff I can play an individual instrument. So I continue here and say if I wanted to play something individually I would just tap on it. You can see that sound there in the middle is now playing in addition to the sounds from the entire column number three. Tap to Stop and you can see this little stop here in the middle there is not going to stop dead it's going to stop at a very good time for that particular sound.
Hit the Rewind button here to stop everything. I can play with what's in here. If I tap on an empty cell I can actually tap on it a second time and I can record something into the cell from the microphone. So I can record my voice or an instrument that I'm playing. I can select from Loops and add something into the cell. So there is all sorts of things I can do.
If I was starting with an empty project I would have to do that with each cell. So right now it seems like a fun toy to play with. I can just start playing and then jump around. I can actually record. So I'm going to do that. I hit the Record button at the top and now it's actually recording into a song. 
I can hit Stop. Now I can tap on the button at the very top next to the microphone, between FX and the microphone there, to go to the standard GarageBand interface. That's what I've created there. You can see all the different pieces laid out in the standard GarageBand format. So now I play around with these pieces. I can also, of course, export this or take it over to my Mac and play around with it in GarageBand there.
So you can use the loops as a starting point here for creating something very quickly maybe faster than you can with a drag and drop interface. Also you can play around with what you've got. Then take it into the regular GarageBand interface for fine tuning.
Another piece to this is the special effects. See that FX button at the top. If I click that you can see that I've got a whole new interface here at the bottom.
So let me start that playing and now I can actually tap and drag my finger inside the Filter on the left to change the sound there. I can use all these controls to do all sorts of things.
Now there is only so much that I can show you here because this really is a creative tool. You've just got to play around with it. Don't expect to create anything too interesting at the very beginning even if you are experienced with GarageBand. Just play around with it and have some fun. It is very fun to play with. It is very fun to go in and try the different presets here or create your own set with some loops. Try recording your voice and other instruments into it. Have some fun with it. Then after a while you'll be able to actually use it to quickly create some GarageBand music.

Comments: 5 Responses to “GarageBand Live Loops”

Paul

8 years ago

Thanks for the info, I don't know if you did a video on how to bring the file from iPad into the iMac Garageband, could you send me a link if you did?
Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

Paul: No need for a whole tutorial on that. Just select the song in My Songs and use the Share button. Share through iTunes. You'll see from there.

Ellis

I have an iPad 3 and an iPad mini1 with IOS 9.2 and when I downloaded the Garageband update I did not get Live Loops with it. Is it limited to newer hardware?

Ellis: It might be, but I haven't heard that. Both of those are unpowered iPads for this sort of thing.

Thanks Gary, I appreciate all the info you share.

Comments Closed.

GarageBand Live Loops

Comments: 5 Responses to “GarageBand Live Loops”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information