Lesson 1:
Building a Basic Arrangement
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Tutorial
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There are many ways you can work as you create a song in GarageBand. You can freely move back and forth between adding loops, recording Real and Software Instruments, arranging regions in the timeline, and mixing the song, as ideas and inspiration strike you.
Most popular music today is based on repeating rhythmic patterns (sometimes called grooves
or riffs ), especially in the drum and bass parts. To create a song in a groove-based style, an effective way of working is to add loops for the drum parts, then add loops for bass and other rhythm parts. This lets you define the rhythmic feel of the song, and also lets you build the basic arrangement of the song by blocking out sections with different grooves. Once the basic rhythm parts are in place, you can record Real and Software Instrument regions to add lead, solo, and harmony parts.
You start building an arrangement by creating a new song, and setting the tempo, time signature, and key for the song. Then you add loops for the drum and other rhythm parts, and arrange the loop regions in the timeline.
Before You Begin
To make it easier to follow the lesson as you work, print the lesson before you start.
In many of the tasks shown in this lesson you need to choose menu commands. In the lessons,
and in GarageBand Help, menu commands appear like this:
Choose Edit > Join Selected.
The first term after Choose is the name of the menu in the GarageBand menu bar. The term (or terms) following the angle bracket are the items you choose from that menu.
Creating a New Song
To start working in GarageBand, you create a new song. Songs are the documents that hold your music and all the changes you make.
To create a new song:
1 Choose File > New.
2 In the New Song dialog, browse to the location where you want to store the song, then type a name for the song in the name field.
3 Set the song s tempo, time signature, and key as described in the following section.
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Setting the Tempo, Time Signature, and Key
Each song has a tempo, a time signature, and a key, which last for the entire length of the song.
Tempo
Each song has a speed, or tempo. The tempo defines the rate at which beats, the basic rhythmic pulse, occur in the song. The tempo is measured in beats per minute, or bpm. You can set the tempo to any speed between 60 and 240 bpm. The default tempo is 120 bpm, which is a common tempo used in popular music.
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