As we mentioned in the last tutorial, GarageBand has a wide selection of pre-recorded loops built in - short segments of sound that you can place in repeated patterns into your projects.
The most common use for loops is to create a drum track, although you’ll also find loops for guitars, strings and several other instruments.
NOTE: instrument loops come in two varieties - software instrument loops (green icon) and real instrument loops (blue icon). Essentially they are the same, but the MIDI loops are easier to edit (an advanced skill we’ll deal with in future tutorials). Both can be adjusted to fit the key of your song, although as we’re primarily dealing with drums, key isn’t really an issue.
Adding a GarageBand drum loop
Adding a drum loop to a GarageBand project is dead simple. Follow the steps:
1. Click the ‘eye’ button at the bottom left of the project window (it’s to the right of the ‘new track’ button.
2. The loops pane will appear from the bottom of the project window (you can press the eye button again when you need to hide it).
The GarageBand loop pane
3. From here, you can select the loops you wish to use. Browsing the menu can be quite tricky, so play around and figure out how it works. If any of the loop names are too long to display properly in the browser, hover the mouse over them for a second and the full name should come up.
OK. Let’s choose a loop and insert it into a GarageBand project.
4. From the full list of drum loops, select 70s Ballad Drums (or any other loop - this is just the one we’re going to use in the song project in the next two tutorials).
5. With it selected, simply use your mouse to drag and drop it into the track pane. DON’T add it to an existing track (unless it’s a MIDI loop you wish to add to a customised kit track - but that’s a technique we can ignore at this stage. Just drag it into the empty space below the existing tracks.
Dragging and dropping a GarageBand loop into the track pane
6. A new track will created, and one instance of the loop will appear in a piano roll in that track. Drag the play head to the start of the gobbet and hit the space bar to listen.
A new track is automatically created for the drum loop
7. Clearly, we will want the loop to cover our whole track. There are two ways of extending it. Either hover your mouse over the right hand edge of the loop piano roll until an extend handle appears, and drag rightwards to extent. An easier way is to select the piano roll gobbet, and copy it (Apple-C). Move the play head to the end of the gobbet (making sure it’s exactly at the end, which should be a clear bar/measure divide if you’ve got the bottom pane set to project) and paste (Apple-V). You’ll now have two, joined up gobbets, and the play head will have moved to the end of the second. Keep pressing Apple-V until you’ve pasted in enough gobbets to cover the length of your song.
Drum loop extended to cover the whole of the GarageBand project
8. To test, drag the play head to the start of the track (or press the ‘return to start’ button immediately to the right of the main record button in the lower display) and press the spacebar to play. You should hear a continuous drum track.
9. To adjust the tempo (speed) of the drum track, make sure ‘project’ is selected in the bottom pane, and then click ‘tempo’ - a slider will appear. The number you choose represents the number of beats per minute. (See GarageBand tutorial 3 for more information and screenshots).
…and that’s it. Now we’ve got all the basic skills we need to record a basic song. We’ll start doing that in the next GarageBand tutorial.
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