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It has to be said that despite the fact it comes preloaded free on every Mac, GarageBand is a bit of a music production powerhouse. Behind its unassuming exterior lies a veritable cornucopia of sounds and instruments to build your music projects. The selection includes a large number of software instruments, from drum kits and orchestral instruments to piano and strings.
Since these are all modelled in software, it goes without saying that a large portion of the library consists of synthesizer sounds, from warm, fat analogue basses to soaring leads and thick, layered presets perfect for dance music. So in this tutorial, we’re going to look at how to mine this rich seam of synth sounds and get some synthsational electronic sounds into your tracks.
1 Project preparation
Working in a new, empty GarageBand project, set the tempo to 130bpm, then click the + button at the top of the track list in order to create a new track.
2 Choose track type
Click the image of the synthesizer on the left to create a software instrument track, allowing you to select and play any of the software instruments in GarageBand’s library.
3 Create track
Now click on Create to add the new track to your project. The Library pane on the left will open up with the default Classic Electric Piano preset selected.
4 Browse library
From the Library pane, which contains a menu of all the available instruments, select the Synthesizer category. Several subcategories will appear. We’re going for the Brass section first.
5 Select sound
Click a preset’s name to select it. We’ve gone for Emotive Pulse, but not all presets are available on all systems, so you may need to download additional content via the File menu.
6 Import project files
Import the files ‘GBX Synth Track Drums.aif’ and ‘GBX Synth Track Bass.aif’ from our FileSilo page by dragging and dropping them from the Finder into your project timeline.
7 Import MIDI part
Next, import the file ‘Emotive Pulse.mid’ onto the Emotive Pulse track (or you could always record your own MIDI part if you prefer). Hit Play to hear the result – it needs a little adjustment.
8 Take control
Hit the Smart Controls button to bring up some controls for the sound. We want to make the sound shorter, so bring the Release control down close to zero to achieve this.
9 Adjust effects
Finally, turn up the Delay control to add more delay effect to the sound. Alternatively, to try out another synth sound, just pick a new one from the Library pane and hit Play once again.
