Garageband Mac Recording Guitar

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How to Use Real Musical Instruments with GarageBand on Your iPad. GarageBand isn’t just good for recording, you can also use it as a space-saving practice amp for listening to your guitar. How To Record Guitar on a PC computer, Laptop, iPad or Mac. If you want to record electric or acoustic guitar or bass then read this step-by-step guide to the kit you need. GarageBand for guitar players. To wonderfulness you must find a way to jack your guitar into your Mac. At the most basic level it can be done for about $7 with a 1/4-inch-to-1/8-inch mono.

Incredible music.
In the key of easy.

GarageBand is a fully equipped music creation studio right inside your Mac — with a complete sound library that includes instruments, presets for guitar and voice, and an incredible selection of session drummers and percussionists. With Touch Bar features for MacBook Pro and an intuitive, modern design, it’s easy to learn, play, record, create, and share your hits worldwide. Now you’re ready to make music like a pro.

Start making professional‑sounding music right away. Plug in your guitar or mic and choose from a jaw‑dropping array of realistic amps and effects. You can even create astonishingly human‑sounding drum tracks and become inspired by thousands of loops from popular genres like EDM, Hip Hop, Indie, and more.

More sounds, more inspiration.
Plug in your USB keyboard and dive into the completely inspiring and expanded Sound Library, featuring electronic‑based music styles like EDM and Hip Hop. The built‑in set of instruments and loops gives you plenty of creative freedom.

The Touch Bar takes center stage.
The Touch Bar on MacBook Pro puts a range of instruments at your fingertips. Use Performance view to turn the Touch Bar into drum pads or a one-octave keyboard for playing and recording.

Plug it in. Tear it up.
Plug in your guitar and choose from a van-load of amps, cabinets, and stompboxes.

Design your dream bass rig.
Customize your bass tone just the way you want it. Mix and match vintage or modern amps and speaker cabinets. You can even choose and position different microphones to create your signature sound.

Drumroll please.
GarageBand features Drummer, a virtual session drummer that takes your direction and plays along with your song. Choose from 28 drummers and three percussionists in six genres.

Shape your sound. Quickly and easily.
Whenever you’re using a software instrument, amp, or effect, Smart Controls appear with the perfect set of knobs, buttons, and sliders. So you can shape your sound quickly with onscreen controls or by using the Touch Bar on MacBook Pro.

Look, Mom — no wires.
You can wirelessly control GarageBand right from your iPad with the Logic Remote app. Play any software instrument, shape your sound with Smart Controls, and even hit Stop, Start, and Record from across the room.

Jam with drummers of every style.

Drummer, the virtual session player created using the industry’s top session drummers and recording engineers, features 28 beat‑making drummers and three percussionists. From EDM, Dubstep, and Hip Hop to Latin, Metal, and Blues, whatever beat your song needs, there’s an incredible selection of musicians to play it.

Each drummer has a signature kit that lets you produce a variety of groove and fill combinations. Use the intuitive controls to enable and disable individual sounds while you create a beat with kick, snare, cymbals, and all the cowbell you want. If you need a little inspiration, Drummer Loops gives you a diverse collection of prerecorded acoustic and electronic loops that can be easily customized and added to your song.

Audition a drummer for a taste of his or her distinct style.

Powerful synths with shape‑shifting controls.

Get creative with 100 EDM- and Hip Hop–inspired synth sounds. Every synth features the Transform Pad Smart Control, so you can morph and tweak sounds to your liking.

Sweeping Arp

Droplets

Bright Punchy Synth

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Epic Hook Synth

Learn to play

Welcome to the school of rock. And blues. And classical.

Get started with a great collection of built‑in lessons for piano and guitar. Or learn some Multi‑Platinum hits from the actual artists who recorded them. You can even get instant feedback on your playing to help hone your skills.

Take your skills to the next level. From any level.
Choose from 40 different genre‑based lessons, including classical, blues, rock, and pop. Video demos and animated instruments keep things fun and easy to follow.

Teachers with advanced degrees in hit‑making.
Learn your favorite songs on guitar or piano with a little help from the original recording artists themselves. Who better to show you how it’s done?

Instant feedback.
Play along with any lesson, and GarageBand will listen in real time and tell you how you’re doing, note for note. Track your progress, beat your best scores, and improve your skills.

How to download omnisphere 2. Tons of helpful recording and editing features make GarageBand as powerful as it is easy to use. Edit your performances right down to the note and decibel. Fix rhythm issues with a click. Finesse your sound with audio effect plug‑ins. And finish your track like a pro, with effects such as compression and visual EQ.

Go from start to finish. And then some.
Create and mix up to 255 audio tracks. Easily name and reorder your song sections to find the best structure. Then polish it off with all the essentials, including reverb, visual EQ, volume levels, and stereo panning.

Take your best take.
Record as many takes as you like. You can even loop a section and play several passes in a row. GarageBand saves them all in a multi‑take region, so it’s easy to pick the winners.

Your timing is perfect. Even when it isn’t.
Played a few notes out of time? Simply use Flex Time to drag them into place. You can also select one track as your Groove Track and make the others fall in line for a super‑tight rhythm.

Polish your performance.
Capture your changes in real time by adjusting any of your software instruments’ Smart Controls while recording a performance. You can also fine‑tune your music later in the Piano Roll Editor.

Touch Bar. A whole track at your fingertips.
The Touch Bar on MacBook Pro lets you quickly move around a project by dragging your finger across a visual overview of the track.

Wherever you are, iCloud makes it easy to work on a GarageBand song. You can add tracks to your GarageBand for Mac song using your iPhone or iPad when you’re on the road. Or when inspiration strikes, you can start sketching a new song idea on your iOS device, then import it to your Mac to take it even further.

GarageBand for iOS

Play, record, arrange, and mix — wherever you go.

GarageBand for Mac

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Your personal music creation studio.

Logic Remote

A companion app for Logic Pro X.

What is Audiobus? — Audiobus isan award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you useyour other music apps together. Chain effects on your favouritesynth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app likeGarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface outputfor each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive asynth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDIkeyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear.And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.

Download on the App Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Hi everybody,

First of all, it is a pleasure being part of this forum and catching up with all the fresh bells and whistles of this growing platform. I have been reading daily and posting occasionally for almost four months and as many before me, was caught up in discovering/listening/daydreaming/buying apps that open up so much creativity without making the next step: leaving Garageband

GB is really a perfect app, being free, reliable and avaliable to anyone that owns Apple stuff but since everyone has their own “Jam”, after a while you start having a really clear view of what your personal pros/cons regarding GB are and what you want your workflow to look like.
After 4 months and almost 40 Garageband projects, this Is where Im at and with what I know I still dont know which app to move on to, so I am asking for your advice!

What is my Jam?

I play guitar, today I turned 33, am getting married on May 1st if covid lets me, and have a rock band on indefinite hiatus.

What I like to do whenever I open up a fresh project in GB is comming up with riffs and stacking takes left and right as many times as possible.
It is what I did while recording albums with my band - record 6 sometimes 8 guitars (4L/4R) all playing the same riff/lead/solo on 4 different amps/pedals/guitars/settings and have so much fun mixing it all together as one huge instrument.

Combining the wonderfull Nembrini or Gainstage guitar apps with reverbs and delays, IRs, eqs and compressors of all devs makes me very happy.
Mixing all those guitar takes on the fiddly GB UI sometimes makes me not so happy

I need a daw/mixer that can carry all that weight and enable me to at least group my LR combinations separately or if possible have a nice big fader to get those levels where I can hear/feel what Im doing.

Mac Garageband Tutorial

Sometimes I would like to have more than 4 auv3 ports per track without having to merge tracks and get lost looking for the copy of the copy of copy 2 of my new song 3!

I would also like to be able to try and master a track if I like what I did with the mix without the need of a macbook.

The 2 things that still got me hooked on GB are:

1. drums/drummers/smart drums - Its so easy to get a beat rollin and start riffing
   With the help of one or two third party drum apps I guess I could do the same thing.

2. The switch control blueboard trick, which is how I found this forum - Having the rec stop rev controls at my feet makes pumping out takes and getting the best out of my playing really what I always wanted while shouting “Again!” at my producer or obsessively hitting that ctrl+alt+z on cubase. So bt midi transport controls are also what I need.

Garageband Mac Recording Guitars

So with all that said what app or combination of apps you think is best 4me?

Comments

Garageband 11 Download Mac

• Auria Or cubasis if you’re only on ipad. I have never used cubasis, but did mix an album on auria.

  If you have a mac, then garageband projects open in garageband or logic on the mac. In garageband on mac, even though there’s not a mixer visible, you can use the logic remote ios app to control your mixing. With logic, you have everything good about garageband ios but much deeper.

• Thanks @mrufino1 , I have a mac but prefer the ipad becouse its portable and more fun
  While mixing in Auria, were you able to group tracks and assign audio units to the group and have a volume control assigned to a fader for the whole group?
  And is it possible to midi map the rec/stop controls?

• edited March 17

  @NemanzgbKaj .. the slippery hole that iOS DAWs can send you down..

  I started with GarageBand as well then went to Auria Pro. Did a pile of work in there and then have tried a few different ones since.

  Auria Pro has group tracking (via assigning channels to groups), busses and submix channels. It has 4 plug in slots per channel that you cannot change the order of. You cannot MIDI map the rec/stop controls. You can use Audiobus to remote control Auria Pro. Auria Pro does allow the use of controllers that use the HUI protocol to control start/stop, record, R/W control data for a channel etc.it also reads and sends MTC and MMC.

  Cubasis 3 has group tracks and 8 inserts per channels which can be re-arranged. Cubasis 3 is still a bit buggy though. Buyer beware.

  I have used and still use Auria Pro, Cubasis, BeatMaker 3 and AUM primarily.

  If you were really into experimenting with samplers and your guitar BM3 could be fun, but might not fit your current required workflow. I like the places you can get to with BM3 and it’s sampler engine. It’s not all about beatmaking..

  Auria Pro has the most complete bussing capability at this time out of these three.

  I use AUM a lot as well for jamming ideas, this approach leads to buying more apps though..

  There is also Audio Evolution Mobile Studio https://apps.apple.com/au/app/audio-evolution-mobile-studio/id1094758623 which might be worth a look as well. I haven’t used it much, but it has had some very positive feedback on the forums.

  Hope this helps.

  I was just thinking after re reading what you were asking..maybe AUM with a couple of decent AUv3 apps would allow you to build a very flexible fluid jamming rig.as MIDI mapping in there is much easier. You could use something like the 4pockets multitrack or the inbuilt file recorder/player in AUM..one or two decent drum machine apps..kind of exciting.

• edited March 17

  Being a fellow guitarist. have you explored group the loop especially if you want to experiment with multiple takes?
  FYI it can load auv3 fx

  Auria is good to mix down and master , not a great playground wherein you can quickly experiment with various fx . you will end up with a bug or crash

  That having said I find aum the most stable while recording guitar

• Wow @arktek & @hisdudeness thanks for the input!
  Having read your posts Im thinking AUM + multitrack with everything I have for the guitar and some additional drum apps (maybe the 4pockets drum app avaliable bundeled with multitrack?) might do the trick
  How is it with Aum when you make something and want to save it for later, export it when you are satisfied, does it work like traditional daws or does it require tweeking and setting things up each time you open a project/file/song?

• edited March 17

  @NemanzgbKaj said:
  Wow @arktek & @hisdudeness thanks for the input!
  Having read your posts Im thinking AUM + multitrack with everything I have for the guitar and some additional drum apps (maybe the 4pockets drum app avaliable bundeled with multitrack?) might do the trick
  How is it with Aum when you make something and want to save it for later, export it when you are satisfied, does it work like traditional daws or does it require tweeking and setting things up each time you open a project/file/song?

  that’s where Auria comes in if you need the master or tweak specific parts . Else it stays in AudioShare . which is a great platform to move audio in and out

  I mostly use aum/AudioShare

  For drums lumbeat apps . I go no further. all locked solidly with ableton link especially helpful if you into dotted eight syncing

  My choice strictly
  I don’t like 4 pockets apps especially their GUI knob interactions

  The only one which I was using . I.e. shimmerfx is replaced by alteza

• I love GarageBand, but I’ve finally ended up in Ableton on my old, old iMac. It’s just less of a pain. I still use my iPad for Blocs and Beatmaker, and a lot more besides. But for recording and arranging, it’s the Mac for me.

  But I also have some guitar advice! Beatmaker is really good for stacking takes. You can just play them into the sampler, or any of a number of ways. Plus, you end up with loops that you can chop up easily.

  Also, it’s super easy to use AU plugins and record the results. Stacking AUs is easy, way, way better than GarageBand.

• @hisdudeness said:
  that’s where Auria comes in if you need the master or tweak specific parts . Else it stays in AudioShare . which is a great platform to move audio in and out

  I mostly use aum/AudioShare

  For drums lumbeat apps . I go no further. all locked solidly with ableton link especially helpful if you into dotted eight syncing

  My choice strictly
  I don’t like 4 pockets apps especially their GUI knob interactions

  The only one which I was using . I.e. shimmerfx is replaced by alteza

  Im still trying to undrestand this AUM Audioshare relationship

  So aum doesnt have a timeline, but if you use it with Audioshare you can see the timeline in audioshare?
  Am I getting this or is it nonesense?
  What happens when you recorded a bunch of guitar tracks and some drums, you set the levels you like using the aum mixer, all this is two and a half minutes long and you want to send it as one audio track to a friend via email or wifi. How do you export the track?

  Sorry If these are stupid questions but I dont really understand and I tried looking it up on youtube but people mostly focus on the mixer and loading as many AUs you like

• @mistercharlie I watched some videos of BM and as good as it looks for percussive stuff or beat oriented I dont see myself tracking guitars with it, maybe im wrong and would love it if I tried it but it looks even more confusing than aum audioshare I wrote about earlier, maybe im just a stupid guitarist

• Was gonna recommend Blocs Wave for generating drum loops. Added to the fact that I can record up to 8 tracks per bar (with the unlock) which allows for easy stacking. What I then do is send projects from Blocs into Garageband/Beatmaker 3/Multitrack Daw to finish the mix.

  I'll be honest..I haven't found anything as user friendly as Garageband, despite the 'Optimizing performance' that I run through a lot whenever I have a lot of audio files in it. I'm testing combination of Multitrack Daw/Blocs Wave/Audioshare/AUM(don't have it yet) for audio, and RouteMIDI/Xequence/Nanostudio for MIDI but I haven't found anything concrete.

  I'm working on a project that might help Garageband users a little bit but here's hoping I can finish it in time. But it takes a bit of testing, and learning something I haven't even done before.

• edited March 17

  Here's my workflow - Blocs Wave + Audio Bus + GarageBand (I should probably make a video to explain). I'm assuming that you have Blocs Wave unlocked to do this, and are using an audio interface or a microphone IN (yes, even the cheap iRig)

  To do this,

  1. Open Audiobus, and in the audio section use your Guitar input to connect the input section of Audio Bus. Connect Blocs Wave into the output section. You can use any effects you want to use for your guitar
     (I've been testing out MultiTrack Recorder to have a clean sample, while I'm also adding effects; or I could have made a separate channel using the same input but recording to an output connected to Audioshare for the duration of the session for a 'clean, no effects sound'.)
  2. Make sure you go to the Record section of Blocs Wave, and turn on Monitor to allow you to hear if there is any distortion, or clipping. Adjust the volume as needed.
  3. Generate a random drum loop from Blocs Wave to your tempo, and play to it. Or use a metronome.
  4. I record all my takes into the first squares, all synced to the same beat. Audiobus allows you to toggle between 1 to 8 squares, and set the number of bars you want to record (all the way to infinity).
  5. I then copy the first section into multiple sections (there's up to 5).
  6. Next step is to divide each section . Using the edit feature in Blocs Wave, I keep the same amount of bars for each section, at the same start point. If I make a mistake when recording, I can always use the 'Slip' feature to move the audio left or right.
  7. I rearrange each sections to my preference, panning the sounds, and adjusting the volume and EQ directly from Blocs Wave.
  8. Once I'm happy with my mix, I send projects from Blocs directly into Launchpad (iOS App) for EDM effects/live performances, or GarageBand to finish the mix. I could use the audio from Multitrack Recorder/Audioshare if I needed the clean version of the audio.

  Here’s a patch I made for AudioBus. Remove whichever one you don’t have, although you do need at least 2 of those apps to use this workflow.

• Audiobus/AUM/Audioshare combination is very powerful.

  BlocsWave is a good choice, you have a lot of options.

  Loopy is amazing, especially if you go with Audiobus

  Good luck!

• edited March 17

  @NemanzgbKaj said:

  @hisdudeness said:
  that’s where Auria comes in if you need the master or tweak specific parts . Else it stays in AudioShare . which is a great platform to move audio in and out

  I mostly use aum/AudioShare

  For drums lumbeat apps . I go no further. all locked solidly with ableton link especially helpful if you into dotted eight syncing

  My choice strictly
  I don’t like 4 pockets apps especially their GUI knob interactions

  The only one which I was using . I.e. shimmerfx is replaced by alteza

  Im still trying to undrestand this AUM Audioshare relationship

  So aum doesnt have a timeline, but if you use it with Audioshare you can see the timeline in audioshare?
  Am I getting this or is it nonesense?
  What happens when you recorded a bunch of guitar tracks and some drums, you set the levels you like using the aum mixer, all this is two and a half minutes long and you want to send it as one audio track to a friend via email or wifi. How do you export the track?

  Sorry If these are stupid questions but I dont really understand and I tried looking it up on youtube but people mostly focus on the mixer and loading as many AUs you like

  Solution

  1. You need AudioShare . it’s a must have . thank me later .in AudioShare aum folder will appear. From AudioShare you have variety of options to export

  2. You can record individual tracks and also the combined mix of all tracks

  All depends on how many tracks you record enable

  
  

  See example set ups

  
  

• From your description of your workflow Cubasis is probably the best fit that I know of - certainly if the GB timeline is important to you. Cubasis 3 is still pretty buggy, but they’re definitely working on it. AUM, as suggested by others, is a phenomenal piece of software, but I still can’t find an AUM workflow that fits my timeline focussed brain.

• edited March 17

  I did the exact opposite, I used GB, BM3, Cubasis and felt in love with Korg Gadget for a long time and now I’m back to GarageBand for the reasons you exposed.

  Easy to use, very stable, I play soul/funk keyboards since 32 years and this for me is a real good deal ‘cause I can do exactly what I need to do without hacking for hours. Composing, rercording and jamming. It’s what I like to do.

  Drummers sounds great, PBass is nice, guitar and bass amps are amazing and tweakable.

  Cubasis could be a good replacement but I mean that the few additional editing functions provided by Cubasis do not make it a good replacement as Garage band is user-friendly.

  BM3 is great for sampling.
  Auria is a gas factory.
  Cubasis is a pro software, offering 10% functions of the desktop version, great for edition but time consuming imo.
  Korg Gadget is really great if you need to create good sounding loops quickly but definitely not created for pop/rock/acoustic musicians. And it’s not AUv3 ready 😒
  AUM is a great tool but it’s just a tool not a DAW.

  You could use Lumbeat apps and export the rendering to cubase but you can do the same thing directly in GB. Of course Lumbeat sounds are different but GB is offering a wide panel of great drumkits.

  My message wont help you much 😊

• Thank you guys, all your posts are very helpful, afrer reading everything, my heart wants it all
  My wallet says listen to @hisdudeness get Audioshare now, thank him later
  Cubasis would probably be the closest to what I described and maybe I should wait until the bugs are fixed, and until then get AUM + Audioshare and play with it. Since I started with this Ipad stuff 4 months ago, every post I open is AUM this, AUM that so I guess its something essential if I want to call myself an Ipad musician
  And I do like those big faders.. but I also like timeline

• Not a single mention of NS2? Is it because there are no audio tracks yet?

• Thanks dude my first ever can you believe that

• @Telstar5 said:
  Not a single mention of NS2? Is it because there are no audio tracks yet?

  I read a few threads about NS2 here and Im pretty sure the whole audio tracks comming soon is a hoax

• @NemanzgbKaj said:

  @Telstar5 said:
  Not a single mention of NS2? Is it because there are no audio tracks yet?

  I read a few threads about NS2 here and Im pretty sure the whole audio tracks comming soon is a hoax

  Thats what they want you to believe

• @NemanzgbKaj said:
  Thank you guys, all your posts are very helpful, afrer reading everything, my heart wants it all
  My wallet says listen to @hisdudeness get Audioshare now, thank him later
  Cubasis would probably be the closest to what I described and maybe I should wait until the bugs are fixed, and until then get AUM + Audioshare and play with it. Since I started with this Ipad stuff 4 months ago, every post I open is AUM this, AUM that so I guess its something essential if I want to call myself an Ipad musician
  And I do like those big faders.. but I also like timeline

  Also as I said earlier ..if you are into stacking takes.. (without taking a break) ..check out group the loop . you can go on and on with it.. and above all a super responsive developer

  I have all Cubasis Auria pro and nano studio

  I recommend AUM bcoz sometimes as a guitarist you need to figure the sound in your head and aum is the perfect playground to play with effects in and out to your heart content . No limitations or fx order nonsense.

  If you know what you are going for and want to master a take ..then auria and cubasis will suit your needs

  I still love and use GarageBand .. but does not play well with 3 rd party fx especially while exporting

• @NemanzgbKaj Audioshare is one of those core apps that come in very handy when moving files around between apps and recording direct jams from AUM. It is not a timeline app as such, more of a file storage area (and you can edit files in there amongst other things). You have to load those files into a file player in AUM if you want to then jam with what you’ve recorded hence why the suggestion for something like Group the Loop or multitrack recorder.

  AUM gives you a lot of freedom, but in that freedom then comes a little trial and error to work out what will work for your particular workflow. You can also set up a jam in AUM and record separate tracks directly into somewhere like GB or Cubasis etc.

• What a great thread this is you guys. Really good stuff.