GarageBand 2 | Software Instruments (Patreon)

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Hi Everyone,

In the first GarageBand lesson, we talked about audio recording. In this lesson, we're talking about MIDI. This lesson covers the basics of how to record, edit, and manipulate MIDI data and make it sound like actual music.

This is the stuff that makes a recording session a lot of fun and lets you apply your music theory knowledge to a whole host of instruments. We didn't fully explore all the possible instruments available to you with GarageBand, but they are all in the library on the left side of the screen.

Share your tinkering and noodling on the community forum. Remember, you don't need to share a song or something amazing, just show that you can record some drums, chords and some vaguely melodic stuff on top. Just get the hang of using MIDI and have fun.

Attached below are some PDFs. The first is the MIDI Drum layout, showing all the pieces of the drum kit and where to find them on the keyboard. The second PDF is a layout of all the windows related to MIDI as well as a few more shortcuts to learn.

Other lessons in this series:

GarageBand 1 | Getting Started

GarageBand 2 | Software Instruments (current lesson)

GarageBand 3 | Audio Interface & Setting Gain

GarageBand 4 | Recording Process & Basic Mixing

GarageBand 5 | Adding Effects and Final Mixing

Check out the Lesson Archive for more Songwriting lessons