MacMost Now 843: Using GarageBand For iPad Part 4: Real Guitar and Voice

Have a look at using a real guitar with GarageBand for iPad. You can filter your guitar to make it sound like you are using a wide variety of amplifiers, pedals and settings. Also look at how you can record vocals. You can also use a microphone to record samples to play on the keyboard.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at using Real Guitar and the microphone with GarageBand for iPad.
So in addition to playing lots of virtual instruments that we've seen on the first three parts of the series you can also plug in instruments and use the microphone on your iPad.
For instance, I picked up this iRig device here and I'm able to plug it into the headphone jack of my iPad and that allows me to plug in a guitar to the iPad and record that using GarageBand for iPad. Theoretically you can also use it for other instruments as well.
Of course under instruments you want to go to the Guitar Amp instrument to use a guitar and then it comes in here and shows you a little picture of a guitar amp. You can flip through the different amps to try different ones. Then you also have some controls at the top. For instance you hit that there and then I can set input level. I can put on the Automatic, whether or not it should output as well so I can hear it. Things like that. I also have a Tuner that I can use to tune the guitar and then once I have it all set up like I want I can play the guitar.
Actually I have many variations here. You can flip through all of these. You can also change at the top here say to British Pop and then you have a different set in here. You have Sparkling Clean. So there is tons of variety in here. Then beyond this you have pedals as well. So let's stick with this one and we can hear what the note sounds like normally.
Then we'll go and get some foot pedals going on here and you can add them. You can see the little blank spot there. So I can add Fuzz pedal right there. You can hear the fuzz and I can turn it off. To get rid of one of these you just simply drag it out like that. So you can kind of swap which ones are available.
So there are so many variations in everything that you can control and tweak the settings and then of course just like with other instruments you can record. Then it will save it as a track in your song.
So let's try now to use the Audio Recorder. Basically this just allows you to record from the microphone in the iPad or a microphone you have hooked up to the iPad. You could even just use the earbuds. That's the one you get with the iPad that have the microphone on them as a microphone.
You have the usual input options here and then you just hit the record button and record something. "Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now." Hit the stop button there and now I've got a segment here that is recorded. 
Now once I have the recorded part there, I can actually then change the type of sound. There is a little filter there and I could do some adjustments at the bottom. When I play it back I can hear it.
So now let's take a look at the Sampler. The Sampler is basically a combination of using the mike and the keyboard. You are going to record a sound and then play that back on the keyboard.
I'm just going to snap my fingers here and I've got that as a recording. I can now trim it down and then play it and it will play the note as I want. I can do lots of things. I can loop it, I can reverse it, I can also tune and shape that sound if I want. So there are a lot of different things I can do. 
I can then look at my library of sounds. I've got the sounds I've just recorded here and this is called My Sample 1. I can rename that and I can add it to a permanent library there on the right. I can also just keep those for sounds in this song.
Below I've got the full keyboard where I can do all sorts of things. Let me go and take for instance one of the default sounds in there. I can play that and then quickly shift to another one. I can do all the different things I can do with a regular keyboard like changing how the keyboard looks and things like that.
Then I can go ahead and use the record button at the top to record that as a track into GarageBand.
So now we've looked at all the different instruments. We looked at creating drums, we've looked at guitars and bass, we've looked at using keyboards. There is even a set of strings in there that you can play around with as well. In this episode we looked at real instruments, adding guitar, adding an audio track just from the microphone, and even used the fun Sampler. All of these create tracks in GarageBand.
In the future we will be looking at how to modify and edit those tracks in your song documents.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 843: Using GarageBand For iPad Part 4: Real Guitar and Voice”

JOSPEH

12 years ago

Gary - - this is a great video for inspiring musicians. Checkout this link about how iPad is assisting a Special Needs HS Band member: http://quest.mda.org/article/marching-ipad-drummer

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MacMost Now 843: Using GarageBand For iPad Part 4: Real Guitar and Voice

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 843: Using GarageBand For iPad Part 4: Real Guitar and Voice”

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