Apple Training Series: GarageBand 2 [Electronic resources]

Mary Plummer

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Adding Effects to a Track

Effects enhance the sound of the overall song. Each Real Instrument and Software Instrument comes with a set of professional-quality effects.

Each different effect has a slider or pop-up menu you can use to adjust the parameters of the effect. In Lesson 4, you learned how to add effects to a Real Instrument track. You use the same method to add effects to a Software Instrument track in the Timeline.

Let's add some Echo, Reverb, and EQ to the Hollywood Strings track. You'll start by soloing the track and creating a cycle region so you can hear how the track sounds before and after we adjust the effects.

Select the Hollywood Strings track and press S to solo the track.

Press C to open the cycle region.

Create a cycle region over the first part of the Hollywood Strings track (approximately the 9th to the 18th measures).

Press the spacebar to start playing the cycle region of the Hollywood Strings track.

Listen to how the track sounds before we adjust the effects.

Double-click the Hollywood Strings track header to open the Track Info window.

Click the Details triangle to reveal the details portion of the Track Info window.

Notice the blue checked boxes for Equalizer, Echo, and Reverb. Those boxes show which effects are being applied to the track. Let's adjust all three of those effects.

Click-drag the Echo slider to around 25 on the slider.

The slider starts with 0 and ends at 100. So 25 will be about one-quarter of the distance from the left edge of the slider.

Click-drag the Reverb slider to around 33, one-third of the distance from the left edge of the slider.

Both the Reverb and Echo effects use sliders. Now let's try the Equalizer, which has a pop-up menu of preset sounds.

Tip

Make sure that you like the way an effect sounds on a soloed track before you add it to the mix. Also, keep in mind that a little echo and reverb go a long way, so use them sparingly.

Click the pop-up menu to the right of the Equalizer and choose Add Brightness to listen to this setting.

Add Brightness is one of the preset EQ settings.

Note

You may see a dialog box asking if you want to save the instrument settings. Don't save the settings for this exercise. When you are working on your own, and want to save your effects settings, by all means save all the effects settings you want.

10.

Repeat step 9 but select a different EQ setting.

11.

Try all of the different settings to hear how they sound.

Notice that some settings make a difference you can hear, and some do not. These presets are made for a variety of different instruments, so not all the settings will be noticeable with the strings sound.

12.

Choose Brighten Strings from the Equalizer pop-up menu.

13.

Close the Track Info window and stop playback.

14.

Press C to close the cycle region.

15.

Press S to unsolo the selected track.

16.

Press Cmd-S to save your work.

Manually Adjusting the EQ for a Track

Now that you've added effects to the Hollywood Strings track, let's add effects to the Acoustic Guitar 2 track. Our goal is to make it sound slightly different from the Acoustic Guitar 1 track.

To accomplish this, you'll add Reverb and manually adjust the EQ. Just to keep things interesting, let's use keyboard shortcuts to select the track and open the Track Info window.

Press the down arrow six times until the Acoustic Guitar 2 track is selected.

Press Cmd-I to open the Track Info window for the selected track.

Click the Details triangle to reveal the effects settings, if they are not already showing.

Click-drag the Reverb effect to around 25 on the Reverb slider.

Check the Equalizer box to enable the Equalizer effect.

Click the Edit button.

The Edit button is the button that looks like a pencil, to the right of the Equalizer pop-up menu. The pop-up is automatically set to Manual to allow you to manually adjust your Equalizer settings.

The manual Equalizer settings window opens with all parameters set to Neutral.

Press S to solo the Acoustic Guitar 2 track.

Press C to turn on the cycle region.

Listen to the soloed track.

10.

Experiment with the different EQ sliders to manually adjust the EQ.

11.

Click the EQ pop-up menu at the top of the Equalizer window to choose a different EQ preset.

A dialog box opens to ask if you want to save the file (effect setting) before changing effects.

12.

Click Discard.

As you can see, you can save any of your effects settings as presets. For now, let's stick with a built-in preset.

13.

Choose Bass Boost from the pop-up menu.

This EQ setting boosts the bass end of the selected track.

14.

Press Cmd-I to close the Track Info window.

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The Equalizer window stays open in case you want to adjust the EQ with the Track Info window closed.

15.

Close the Equalizer window.

16.

Press the spacebar to play the cycle region.

17.

Press the up arrow to select the track above (the Acoustic Guitar 1 track).

18.

Press S to solo the selected track.

Now you hear both guitar tracks together.

19.

Press the spacebar to stop playback.

20.

Press C to turn off the cycle region.

21.

Unsolo both the guitar tracks.

22.

Press Cmd-S to save your progress.

Mission accomplished. You've added effects to the Acoustic Guitar 2 track to make it sound slightly different than the Acoustic Guitar 1 track.

That's the end of the fourth step in creating a final mixadding and adjusting effects. Now it's on to the last step, creating dynamic volume changes over time using Volume curves.