GarageBand / Set your voice to music GarageBand allows you to input and combine sounds from a multitude of sources, such as microphones, MIDI instruments and pre-installed loops and sound effects. This exercise uses the PCL’s new Blue iCE Snowball microphones to mix your vocals with pre-installed, royalty-free loops.

1. From the New Project menu, select Voice.

2. Narration Vocal will be the track selected by default. GarageBand digitally emulates multiple components of an analog recording studio, such as the multitrack recorder, effects racks and sampler. We will be recording to separate tracks.

3. With Narration Vocal highlighted, click the Record button

and begin speaking into the microphone. Don’t know what to say? How about “I am sitting in the PCL Media Lab… My name is ___ and this is my first time using GarageBand”? Or read the first paragraph from a New York Times article. Tell a joke, sing, or begin narrating your epic autobiography…

As you record, you should see a waveform appear in the Narration Vocal track, like this:

Hit Space to stop recording. You can listen to the recording by returning to the beginning with this button:

and then pressing Space to play from the beginning. 4. If your vocal is too loud or too quiet, use the Volume

Slider bring it to a satisfactory level.

5. Now it’s time to add some music. GarageBand comes loaded with dozens of prerecorded loops – synth lines, beats, horn blasts and guitar riffs. You’ll find them in the Apple Loops panel in the upper-right corner of the GarageBand interface.

Loops that must be purchased from Apple will be greyed out and unuseable, but there are still plenty of free ones to choose from.

6. Using the Search tool, type Basic Vintage Break

Drag the loop file that appears below the category list to the track directly beneath Narration Vocal. Your composition should now look something like this:

You can help to synchronize the two audio tracks better by using Loop points. First, place the mouse pointer at the edge of the Vintage Break waveform then drag the rectangular box from right to left. Notice how that changes the length of the audio segment? Drag the audio clip so that it’s aligned with Narration Vocal, as in the picture above. Now click the Loop button near the top of the screen:

This will cause a selected portion of audio to play repeatedly and ignore the rest. Using the numbered marker at the just above the first track, drag the loop region to match the length of the audio, like this:

Hit Space to play and you’ll hear your looped audio segments, played together as if on a multitrack recorder.

7. Add some more loops by browsing the loop library or searching for sounds you want. Some loops that work well with Basic Vintage are Cowbell Funk Break and Contemplative Synth 01. Drag as many loops as you like into the existing tracks. Note that these have preset effects applied already (ex. Robot Vocal), but can these can be tweaked later. If you want the unadulterated version of the loop, go to the Track menu, select New Track…

then choose Audio from the next menu.

To have a less cluttered screen, you can delete any unused tracks by right-clicking it and selecting Delete track.

8. Now for some extra fun. You can speed up or slow down the tempo of your composition by adjusting the BPM counter.

The Library panel on the left of the screen offers numerous effects that can be applied and tweaked in any one of your tracks.

Select the audio clip to which you want to apply the effect, then select your effect from the Library menu. For example, applying Fuzz Vocal to the recording of your voice would look like this:

Play around with the effects and tempo as until you have something crazy, cool or clean, depending on your preference.

9. When you’re ready to finish, export your composition through the Share menu and Export file to disk…

Select to export as an Mp3, and help us to identify your file with a name like Your Name – Title of Your Composition – LC Open House.

If you only want to export the looped region, check “Export cycle…”. If you want to include all the audio data, leave it

unchecked.

Save your file to the Desktop. You’re done!