Turn Your iPhone Into a Musical Instrument With GarageBand

The free GarageBand app from Apple allows you to play your iPhone like a piano, guitar, bass, drum kit or a variety of other instruments. You don't need to learn how to use GarageBand's complex recording and editing tools, you can just jumpo to one of these instruments and play live.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to turn your iPhone into a musical instrument using GarageBand.
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So one fun thing to do with your iPhone is to turn it into a musical instrument using the GarageBand app. Now the GarageBand app you could find in the App Store and it's absolutely free and it's from Apple. The only downside is that it takes up a lot of space on your iPhone. Besides that just get it. Then you could use GarageBand for all sorts of things like editing audio, recording your voice, recording from guitar or mini instrument. But you could also use it just to turn your iPhone's touchscreen into a musical instrument which is fun all by itself.
So if you selected Tracks instead of Live Loops here you'll have a series of screens that you could flip through giving you different ways to interact with GarageBand. Now let's start by just using the default one which is the Keyboard. The keyboard has several different modes here. Let's start here with the second one. I'm going to tap that and it's going to give me an onscreen keyboard that I could play. Now this is multi-touch so you can touch as many keys as you want at the same time. One of the problems with this is you only have a limited number of keys so there's not much you can play with just basically two octaves here. But if you tap here you can change to Scrolling mode. Now when you tap and hold you can easily scroll back and forth. With a little practice you could reach all sorts of keys very easily. You could also tap again and change the pitch of the notes.
Now to get back to the instrument selection tap here. Once you're there we can try some other things with the keyboard. For instance, I could use Smart Piano which gives me a keyboard that looks like this. I can then play cords. (Playing cords) I can also switch between this and the regular keyboard by tapping there. Going back again there's also more sounds here. So for instance if I wanted it to sound like a classic rock organ right there.
So as you can hear the quality of the instrument sound is pretty good. So you can connect your iPhone through the lightening port or audio output to a set of speakers or something else to boost the volume and they really hold up. Now let's at some of the other instruments. Here we've got drums. You have several different ways to play the drums. To play drums on the screen you want to use the acoustic drums here. Then it gives you a drum set and all you need to do is tap it to play. You could tap multiple things at the same time. (Tapping drums) You could also use a beat sequencer to setup things on a grid. (setting up grid beats). You could use more sounds to setup a different drum kit. The kit even looks different on the screen. There's even electronic sets here. This is just a series of buttons you could tap. 
So let's flip through these some more and see some of the other instruments that we could simulate. We've got guitar here. Guitar can be played a few different ways. You have a smart guitar that you could tap and strum and play a whole cord by tapping at the top. You also have Notes and here you could tap and play an individual note. You could even bend. If you tap more sounds you can pick different guitars. There's also a bass guitar and you can do the same Smart Bass or individual notes. There are a few other instruments as well that work similar to the guitar and the bass. So you go here to Strings, for instance, and play string instruments (playing). Or individual notes. We saw there was one here called World and this allows you to play a few different world instruments (playing). Some of these have interesting controls like these down here so you really need to explore and then you could tap multiple things. 
So, of course, the idea in GarageBand is that you can record yourself doing this and setup different tracks and all. But that's a whole different set of skills. You don't need to do that to enjoy just using your iPhone as an instrument. If you're musically inclined and don't happen to have an instrument with you but want to play around with some music you can use this. If you turn up the volume enough or connect it to an external speaker or something you an actually play along live with other musicians.

Comments: One Response to “Turn Your iPhone Into a Musical Instrument With GarageBand”

Chris Laarman

4 years ago

GarageBand had me buy an iPad 2. There are (at least Michael Eskin) or were several developers of ethnic instruments. Some wind-instrument emulations would allow or even require you to blow over the microphone of an iPhone. And there are still some sequencers and other interesting stuff around. Even that iPad 2 had hardly any latency.
I do hope to find the opportunity to dust the iPad 4 that I have dedicated to music apps.

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Turn Your iPhone Into a Musical Instrument With GarageBand

Comments: One Response to “Turn Your iPhone Into a Musical Instrument With GarageBand”

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