
Now, play around until you find a sound you like.
#Black garageband icon plus#
I’ll do this with one of GarageBand’s synths, and record direct into the loop cell.įirst, create a new track by tapping the Plus button in the source column. Now we have some funky bass and drums, thanks to the GarageBand-supplied Apple Loops, we’ll add a cool keyboard line. Record a touch instrument into Live Loops If you set a loop to play, then you can preview the Apple Loops against it. I picked three similar loops, and put them in the same row. To do so, just drag them to the grid and drop them. You can pick from Apple Loops, your own audio files (if you have added some to GarageBand), or music from your library. To add an existing loop, tap the loop icon (like a loop of rope), and you’ll see the list. Add an Apple Loop to Live Loops Apple provides a ton of great loops to use in your creations. This can be another music app on your iPad, or an instrument connected to the iPad, like a guitar. The third is to record from an outside source.
#Black garageband icon software#
Another is to record the loop using one of GarageBand’s software instruments - the keyboard, or the new drum machine, for example. One is to drag in an existing loop, or audio track. There are three ways to get loops into the grid. If there are instruments in here already, tap them and hit Delete in the black bubble popover until the screen is empty. Tap that, and then tap the bank New button. On the iPad, it’s the icon to the left of the microphone icon. To go back to the main Live Loops picker screen, tap the icon that consists of a large square flanked by two smaller squares. You can also switch into the Live Loops view from one of your own songs at any rime by tapping the little Live Loops icon at the top left of the screen. Lets start over with a blank Live Loops grid. What about building your own songs? After all, the supplied templates are fun, but they’re the same ones everybody has. In edit mode, tap a cell, tap Edit in the black bubble popover, and the track will open up, ready to edit. Photo: Cult of Macīecause they are regular tracks, you can edit them as such. The guitar track is just an audio track like any other. It’s just that they are squashed into squares, and have a neat clock-like animation to show the progress of the track within. One thing to note is that a Live Loop is really just the same as an audio or MIDI track from the main timeline view, the one where you see all your tracks laid out in rows. We won’t deal with this today though, but it’s good to know where these things are. This is where you go to force a loop to follow the tempo and pitch of the rest of the song, for example, or to choose whether the loop loops over and over, or just plays once. In edit mode you can tap a cell to copy/delete, edit the cell’s contents, or change its settings.

Here you can really dial in the loop’s settings. To edit the existing loops, you need to enter Edit Mode, which you do by tapping the grid-with-a-pencil icon at the bottom left of the screen. In the normal mode, which we’ve been using so far, you can double-tap an empty square, or cell. You can edit the contents and setting of a loop in one of two ways. This has the neat side-effect of letting you trigger a whole column, and then switching the guitar part only, say. If you think of the instrument in that row as being played by a human - a guitar for example - then they can only play one part at a time. Well, one main rule - only one loop can play in a row at a time. There are some rules to which squares can play. This is a great way to switch between a verse and a chorus, say.

To switch to a whole column at once, tap the up-pointing chevron at the bottom of that column. This ensures that the loops play in sync. You’ll notice that they don’t start or stop as soon as you tap them - they wait until the beginning of the next bar to do that. Tap either of the loops in that column to start and stop them. The rows contain different instruments, and the loops from each of those instruments are arrayed across the screen in columns. I picked Electro Funk, but any one will do. The easiest way to get started with Live Loops is to open up one of the existing templates. Like everything in GarageBand, Live Loops work on both iPhone and iPad.
#Black garageband icon free#
To get started, open up the free GarageBand app, create a new project, and tap Live Loops at the top of the screen. They might look like a one-hit wonder, but they are in fact a fantastic way to create an perform songs. It would have to be a really fast, well-handling Rolls Royce, and this is already a terrible car simile, but you get my point: GarageBand is awesome, and super-powerful. GarageBand is a cut down version of Apple’s Logic, but that’s a bit like saying that a Ferrari is a cut down version of a Rolls Royce.
