Making Music In GarageBand

A few weeks ago when I didn’t go to school due to inclement weather, I got kind of bored since there wasn’t really any school work that I had to do. I decided that since I’ve learned a lot more about music theory over the past months, I tried making some sort of music in the GarageBand program.

When I first started I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t feel like setting up and recording actual instruments. Eventually, I decided to just draw in MIDI notes and started making chords. I wasn’t planning on making an actual song, so I drew in a few chords that I don’t even know the names of. All I knew was that they sounded okay and were in the same key. I looped what I had once to make it a bit longer. It was just an experiment with things, so overall it was only around 25 seconds long.

GarageBand does have many different instruments to choose from. But I actually don’t have all of the sound files downloaded, so most of the instruments are just different kinds of synthesizers. I chose a synthesizer that was electronic and kind of what I wanted but the sound of it wasn’t exactly right. However, you do have some default settings you can change to work on sound design which I used to make it sound a little bit better. I know that you can use external plug-ins like Serum that lets you do things like sound design a lot better than the default one though. Even if it didn’t sound good I had no real expectations or planned on anyone else to listen to it so I just left the sound the way it was.

I added a second track for bass, but it was just another different synthesizer playing the root notes of the chords in a lower octave. When you listen to the loop you can’t really even hear it though. At this point, I also thought the chords sounded a bit flat, so I did a rise and drop of volume whenever the chord changed for a wobble effect. I had used the volume controller before to fade things in and out, so that was pretty simple. It sounds interesting, but you wouldn’t want to hear in an actual song.

After I finished with all the pitched stuff I downloaded a few drum sound sample packs and put in a track for a hi-hat and crash. I only filled a few seconds of the track with the percussion since I just wanted to see what it was like. Working with the audio files of the sound samples was actually easier than I thought. I had expected to have issues with them being too long in length and end up clipping into each other but that wasn’t the case. It ended up making this really short weird triplet beat with a crash at the end.

Overall, I didn’t really plan to go anywhere else with the track, but I did learn a lot of new things about the program and used some of the theory I learned in making the chords. It was a lot of fun and I’d consider trying it again if I feel like it.

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