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Playing a Software Instrument with Your Song

After you’ve experimented with loops and created a song, you can attach a USB or MIDI keyboard and play along. It’s a great way to work on your timing, and playing with an accompaniment adds a personal touch that makes music come alive.

Best of all, you can make your keyboard sound like any one of the software instruments included with GarageBand. It’s almost like having a grand piano, Hammond organ, or even a horn section—all inside your computer.



Tips

Use a MIDI interface to connect a MIDI keyboard

Some keyboards connect directly to your computer with USB, but many keyboards use a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) connector. To connect these keyboards to your computer, you’ll need to connect a MIDI interface to your computer first. Go to the GarageBand Menu and choose Preferences. Click the Audio/MIDI tab and then you’ll set the Audio Input to your MIDI device. You can find some examples of MIDI interfaces that work with GarageBand at the GarageBand web site.

Resize the onscreen keyboard

You can drag the corner to expand the onscreen keyboard so it displays more octaves and much larger keys. You can play this keyboard by using your cursor. This can be really helpful if you’re a music teacher and need to demonstrate to many students.

Use Musical Typing to quickly input your track

If you’re on-the-go and don’t have a MIDI or USB keyboard with you, you can use your computer keyboard and type in your groove. Go to the Window menu and choose Musical Typing. In the window that appears you’ll see the layout of notes on the computer keyboard. The middle row of keys play "white" keys, and the top row plays "black" keys. You can change octaves, velocity and even sustain just by typing. It’s even polyphonic, so you can type more than one letter at the same time to play chords.

Use an iSight to show fingering

If you’re a music teacher you might consider setting up an iSight camera to teach proper piano fingering. You can use iChat to simply show the class your technique, or use iMovie to record your performance and fingering.

Steps

Connect a keyboard to your computer and play along with your song

  1. Connect a MIDI or USB keyboard to your computer. Install any driver software that came with the keyboard. For MIDI keyboards, you’ll need to attach a MIDI interface to your computer first.
  2. In GarageBand, choose New Track from the Track menu.
  3. In the New Track sheet, choose the Software Instrument option and then click Create.
  4. In the Track Info pane, select an instrument type and instrument.
  5. Play your keyboard to hear the software instrument you selected.
  6. Click the Play button to hear the other instruments in your song as you practice.