Guide to Garageband

Our resources are designed to be used with selected film titles, which are available free for clubs at www.filmclub.org

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Into Film is a trading name of Film Nation UK. Registered Charity number 1154030. Our resources are designed to be used with selected film titles, which are available free for clubs at www.intofilm.org

Activity pack Guide to Garageband

Garageband is a pretty easy way of recording your own on an iPad. You can build up your soundtrack by layering separately recorded pieces of music.

This guide has been designed to provide a basic overview of the process of creating a soundtrack in Garageband. For more detailed support with using Garageband, check out the Garageband Help page on the Apple website at apple.com/uk/support/mac-apps/garageband

Here’s the Garageband app icon on your home screen.

A list of any songs you’ve made before will appear. Click on the plus sign in the top left to start a new project.

This will be the first screen that pops up, swipe across to choose your instrument.

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Activity pack Guide to Garageband

You also have the option of keyboard, , and some 'smart' , which can create a 'groove' at the touch of a button. The current version offers 'smart' strings, guitar, drums and keyboard. These are all good for coming up with something quick and full-sounding.

It can be tricky to replicate a drum beat with your fingers on the kit. Tap this button to switch to classic drum machine.

The Undo button is very useful if you make a mistake.

Tap the Red button to and the Stop button to stop (this will only flash when you’re recording).

Metronome is very handy to if you need a count-in, click to keep your recording in time.

When you tap the Mixing icon you’ll bring up a number of options that are quite self-explanatory. The main one you’ll use is track volume as you can use this to balance the volume of individual tracks to balance your piece.

There are other effects like echo and reverb here. Echo will create an echo on that track to the level you choose and reverb adds a ‘sustain’ to the individual sounds. Both of these can add to the atmosphere of the piece.

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Activity pack Guide to Garageband

The mixing desk icon lights up blue when you’re in this screen with all your tracks laid out (our drum machine track is highlighted).

As this is a quick guide we’re not going to explore all the instruments on offer but it’s worth a look at Guitar Amp (swipe to the right of drums).

Amplifier setting (jack icon) is good for getting crunchy, echoey edges to your sound effects, as they use the styles of old-school rock guitar , a great cheat for giving more colour and depth to your soundtrack.

Tap this to record any diegetic sounds you’d like to include (it uses the onboard internal iPad ). Maybe you’ve got a really creaky door at home and you’d like to build it as a sound effect into the mix- record this here and add effects to make your piece richer.

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Activity pack Guide to Garageband

When you’re ready to drop your piece into your film in iMovie, tap and hold down on your chosen song in MY SONGS.

A blue box will appear and your tune will start jiggling.

Tap this box to open up your song in another app.

Click share and your film will then export to iMovie.

Then open in iMovie by tapping here on the iMovie icon.

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Activity pack Guide to Garageband

Open your film in iMovie by tapping on the title in your Choose your piece from Imported, you can press film projects list. play to make sure it’s the correct clip. Then tap the downward arrow to drop the clip onto your film.

Tap the pencil /clapperboard icon to open your chosen film project.

The audio track will then show up underneath the individual shots on your iMovie timeline and you can edit this in the same way you edit pre-programmed themes and audio sound effects in iMovie.

The film timeline will appear.

On the top right tap Audio.

In this example the audio clip was too short for the film so we’ve slowed it down by a half to fit.

Do this this by tapping on the audio track to highlight (it will go be highlighted yellow). Then tapping the dial icon drag the marker away towards the rabbit icon to speed the music up and towards the tortoise icon to slow it down, until the music track is matched to the length of the shot timeline.

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Activity pack Guide to Garageband

TOP TIPS!

• Garageband automatically saves your work, so you don’t need to save as you go.

• It’s best to get the sounds you want before you drop your piece to iMovie, as you have more Remember you can undo any operation in the same way editing options in Garageband. as in Garageband by using the undo icon (top right). • Don’t worry too much about writing a whole Another handy tool is fade to fade in with the music at piece from start to finish in one go. Concentrate the beginning or maybe to fade out at the end of the on keeping your individual tracks and sounds to film to create a smooth transition. To do this tab on the smaller chunks, it will be a lot easier if you have got soundtrack (it goes yellow) then tap the speaker icon, the film running while you’re laying tracks together. you’ll see Fade at bottom right. • The Garageband guitar sounds that come with Tap this and a yellow triangle will appear at the end of the app are really good for chords (ie multiple the soundtrack bar. Moving this to the left creates a fade strings played together- lots of combined to shadow so you can adjust the height and depth of the sound like one satisfying sound) as these are more fade, listening as you go. difficult for inexperienced musicians to play.

You can also hit Trim as you go, and when you adjust the length of the piece the fade will adjust accordingly.

Into Film has a simple Guide to using iMovie available at www.intofilm.org/filmmaking, click on the Resources section.

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