How to Use GarageBand and Free Music Loops to Create Your Own Tracks
What is GarageBand?
GarageBand is a line of digital audio workstations that is made available for iOS and macOS devices which allows users to make their own music or podcasts. GarageBand is created and sold by Apple for macOS and iOS, and it is a part of the iLife software suite. GarageBand music and podcast creation tools allow its users to make several tracks with already-made MIDI keyboards, pre-made loops, a list of several instrumental effects, and voice recordings.
You do not need to have a whole lot of musical instrumental talent to make music with the GarageBand software. Especially with a whole lot of free music loops available in the application and also online. It is easy to bring up a track in just a few minutes or you spend several hours losing yourself developing a new song.
Now, since there are so many free music loops available, you do not need to spend a cent on making your track. Below, is how to get started making your own music with GarageBand using some loops and samples.
Get Some Loops
Open the loop library by clicking on the Loop button that is in the top-right corner or by pressing O on your keyboard. You will then find loops for all sorts of instruments. Make use of the Instrument, Genre, and Descriptors buttons which are at the top of the library to filter the collection and also to look for the loops that you are searching for.
Start Making Music
By this time, you would have spent a while exploring the free music loops that are in GarageBand or the ones that are online. So it is now the time to create your own GarageBand project.
Open up the GarageBand and create an Empty Project. When GarageBand asks you to choose a track type, you should create a Software Instrument track. It doesn’t matter what instrument it is since you will drag each loop into its own new track anyway.
Now it is time to start making music. You can follow the steps below in any order that you like.
Add a Drummer
To add a drummer, Go to Tracks > New Track and choose Drummer from the track options that comes up.
A Drummer panel would come up on the left side of the window select one, once you have selected, a drummer, play around with the settings that are at the bottom panel.
You can also select other parts of the kit to include in the beat. Then make use of the associated sliders to change how much the drummer uses them.
Add Other Instruments
It is now the time to add more instruments to spice your music up. This is where the GarageBand massive library of free music loops really comes in handy. For your first few tracks, you may just want to experiment with guitar and bass. But with thousands of options, you can spend hours trying new things out.
Play around with the volume and pan of each track as you add new loops to your song to keep them balanced. You can do this using the volume sliders and pan knobs to the left of the main window.
Give It Some Structure
It’s important that you add variety and structure to your songs so that they don’t sound too monotonous. There are lots of ways to do this. For a start, make your loops drop in and out at different points or have them gradually build up one at a time.
Change over to related loops for the chorus or bridge sections and try to include different combinations of instruments playing at the same time.
Add an Accent Loop
Once you have gotten a good soundtrack on your hands, it is now the time to add some extra spice to it. Look for a particularly flavorful loop and add a short section of it throughout your music track.
It may be a nice idea to make use of it before going into each chorus or to have it play once every few bars throughout the song. Anything to make your music a little less predictable.
Play Around and Make Music With Loops
Making music is all about experimentation. And with thousands of loops available for free directly in GarageBand (plus any of the others you can find online), you’ve got enough material to experiment with for a very long time.
GarageBand lets you export directly to the Music app or to SoundCloud from the Share menu. You can use the same menu to export your song to your hard drive. Upload it to YouTube, play it on your website, or find another way to get it out there.
