Tips

Adjust the volume of your drum track if you want to hear the bass more clearly

One of the advantages of using GarageBand’s tracks is that you can control the volume of each individual track. If you want to hear more bass and less drums, you can simply lower the volume of the drums with the volume slider on the drum track.

Adjust the volume of the loop you’re auditioning with the volume slider in the loop browser

You can change the volume of the loop you’re auditioning independently from the rest of your song. Just use the volume slider in the loop browser to change the volume so you can hear every part clearly.

Quickly turn cycling on or off with the C key

You can turn cycling on or off right from the keyboard by pressing the C key. With cycling off, you’ll hear your whole song from start to finish.

Change loop length to match up your parts

The loops included with GarageBand have different lengths. You can use different length loops together in your song by stretching the loops in the timeline.

Mute or Solo a track to hear just the parts you want

You can mute a track by clicking the speaker icon in the track heading. This is a great way to turn off just one track so you can hear the rest of your song more clearly. You can solo a track by clicking the headphone icon. This will mute the volume on all other tracks so you hear just that one track.

Hide the Mixer to see more of your track

If you want to see more of your track’s note information, and less header, you can click the left-facing triangle in the Tracks column to hide the Mixer. To view Mixer information again, just click the right-facing triangle to make it visible again.

Managing CPU performance

The loops in GarageBand are excellent audio quality. The Real Instrument (blue) loops have been optimized so they are CPU efficient. If you use a lot of Software Instrument (green) loops and add lots of effects and other parameters, this can impact your CPU performance. You can hold down the option key while you drag a green loop from the loop browser to a track in the timeline editor to convert it to a blue loop that plays the exact same thing, but more efficiently because it is rendered. Green loops give you more flexibility but are computationally intensive. Blue loops reside in RAM, so they are more efficient but less flexible.

Steps

Audition other loops for your mix

1. In GarageBand, click the Cycle button to turn on cycling. A yellow bar appears above the track editor showing the portion of the song that will be cycled.
2. Click Play. Your drum pattern will play repeatedly until you stop it.
3. In the loop browser, click Reset. Notice that the categories you selected previously are deselected.
4. Click the Bass category.
5. Audition a bass loop for your song by clicking a bass loop that interests you. The loop plays in time with your drum loop, even if you select a bass loop with a different tempo than your song.
6. When you find the loop you want, drag it to the track editor under your drum track. A new track is created with your bass loop, and your drum and bass loops play together.