So You Want To Record Authentic-Sounding Guitar In Your DAW
In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to plug your guitar into GarageBand. The way that I find works best is the most convenient and sounds pretty good as well while minimizing latency and other problems.
GarageBand is a great way to quickly create music on your iPhone or iPad. We show how to get started with one of Apple's best software offerings. May 12, 2017 GarageBand songs defaults to the key of C. On iPhone and iPod Touch, tap Settings in the control bar, and then tap Song. On iPad, iPhone 6 Plus, and iPhone 7 Plus, tap Song Settings in the control bar. Tap the key for your song. Tap the scale for your song (major or minor).
How to Plug Your Guitar Into GarageBand
There are a few different ways of doing this, and some are significantly better than others. I’m just going to show you the way that I do it.
I have a couple of pieces of necessary gear:
- Obviously, your guitar.
- A Firewire to USB Cable
- an Audio Interface (I use the Focusrite Saffire 6USB. The Scarlett 2i2 is good too.)
- A USB-C to USB cable (The only reason this adapter is necessary is I’m using the latest edition of the MacBook Pro. The older generation MacBook Pro doesn’t need this adapter).
- Regular Guitar Cable.
If you’re new to music production, understand that a lot of this equipment will come in handy for years to come.
If you’re serious about recording and producing, much of this equipment and more are a necessity, so just grab some of it off Amazon and be done with it.
Without further ado,
The actual steps:
1) Connect your Firewire cable to your MacBook Pro. In most cases, this cable will come with your purchase of an audio interface, or a MIDI keyboard. However, if you don’t have one for whatever reason, I’m sure you can pick one up from Amazon for cheap.
2) Usually, the port for the firewire cable is on the back of the Audio Interface. Plug the other part of the firewire cable into the back of the Audio Interface.
In my case, the Firewire to USB has to go into the USB-C adapter that I mentioned earlier.
3) Now, assuming you have the Focusrite Saffire 6USB, it should be powered by your computer. You don’t have to plug it in or anything like that, so all of its lights will turn on which you can see on the front of the unit.
https://videoskiey759.weebly.com/diy-turntable-kit-djay.html. 4) Open GarageBand.
5) Click “Open Project,” or one of your old existing files. It doesn’t matter.
6) Once it brings up the “Choose A Track Type Page,” Click on where it says: “Built-in Input.”
7) This should be all that’s needed for this part of the process. However, assuming this is the first time that you’ve ever done this, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to click on where it says, “Built-in Output.”
8) That should bring up your “Output” and “Input” Devices under the Audio-MIDI region preferences.
9) Make sure you’ve selected “Built-in Output,” if you’re using your computer as your speaker, or the speakers that are hooked up to your laptop.
10) Select your Audio Interface for the “Input Device.”
11) Now, once you’re back at the “Choose A Track Type Page,” then click on one of the two subheadings below, either the “Guitar option,” or the “Microphone option.” This should bring up your MIDI Region and all of your controls.
12) In the “Smart Controls Area,” make sure that you’ve selected your audio-interface where it says, “Input.”
13) Now, plug your guitar into the front of your Audio Interface.
14) Click on the “Monitoring Button,” which looks like an upside down Wi-Fi symbol. This part is important, otherwise, you won’t be able to hear what you’re even playing.
15) You can now select whatever kind of amp you want, whether it’s a “clean guitar,” “crunch guitar,” “acoustic guitar,” “distorted guitar,” “experimental guitar,” “clean bass,” “crunch bass,” and “experimental bass.”
16) You want to hit the “Monitoring” button beside your track-header as well. I’ve highlighted the upside down Wi-Fi-looking symbol with a black circle. It’ll turn orange once it’s been selected.
Under each heading, there are quite a few options that all sound pretty good, especially after you tweak them to your preferences.
And it’s pretty much as simple as that.
There are some problems that you can run into when doing all of this for the very first time. For that reason, I’ll explain some of the problems that I’ve had when I first started out.
Common Problems and Annoyances As A Beginner
Download link to izotope necter zip. 1) Make sure that the gain on your Audio-Interface isn’t turned up too much, otherwise, you’re going to be feeding GarageBand too hot of a signal, which will make it sound distorted and bad.
2) Make sure the “Pad,” and “Inst,” buttons are turned off on your audio interface, assuming you own a Focusrite Saffire 6USB. I imagine there are similar controls on other audio interface models.
I find that these buttons make the signal too powerful as well, and thus, create distortion.
3) Latency. I’ve never actually had latency problems when using an Audio Interface, but some people do have this problem. I have an entire article on Latency which you can read more about here.
Essentially, if you’re having latency issues, there could be a number of different causes, however, most of them will be a result of your set-up and incorrect settings for your gear.
For instance, you want to make sure that – if you’re running more than one track – you have the monitoring button turned on for only one of them, rather than every single track.
Other Ways Of Recording Your Guitar In GarageBand
1) You can also use your MacBook’s microphone. This is for very rough demos, obviously, because this way of doing it is going to make a very low-quality recording. However, if you’re desperate, and want to record something, this method will work.
- To do this, you just open a new “Audio” track in your workspace.
- And then click on the “Record” button.
- Start playing the guitar with your amplifier close to it, and that should be enough for a very rough demo.
2) You can also purchase a Guitar to USB cable and hook your guitar directly up to GarageBand. This is an inferior way of recording guitar tracks as well, but it works if you’re running on a string budget.
(This is what a guitar-jack to USB looks like. I don’t own one so I couldn’t take a picture. I had to piece these two images together, but this is what it looks like).
GarageBand will immediately recognize this as an input, so you don’t have to worry about there being compatibility issues.
However, like the method above, you’ll likely run into latency.
3) Use a small portable audio interface if you plan on only running one instrument through your DAW. This is pretty much the same as the main method which I described in detail above.
The only difference is that you’ll be using a much smaller, and likely, limited audio interface. The good thing about this is that it’s relatively inexpensive. Small interfaces are becoming exceedingly popular, like the iRig for example.
I haven’t picked one of these up yet, but once I start traveling around Europe, I imagine I’ll eventually purchase one. I’ll make sure to write a review on it once I do.
Update: You have to use the iRig HD if you want it to work with a PC computer or Mac. The iRig 2 is only good for mobile.
4) Another popular way would be to mic your guitar amplifier up to your audio interface and then through GarageBand.
This is a decent option, but I prefer just to run my guitar directly through GarageBand, rather than doing this. Amplifiers are too big and cumbersome, and I would much rather limit the amount of gear I own.
Before playing your guitar in GarageBand, know that there’s an actually fairly useful tuning mechanism set up in the DAW. It’s not as good as a good old fashioned Korg tuner, but it still works pretty well. I usually use it if I’m too lazy to go over and grab my tuner.
How To Tune Your Guitar Using GarageBand
1) Your guitar is plugged into your audio interface in the computer, so it’s as simple as clicking on the tuning fork beside the center of the DAW where it shows the time signature, tempo, and key signature.
2) When you click on the tuning fork icon, it’ll bring up the meter where you can tune your guitar.
Other Features
One of the great things about using a DAW for your guitar is all of the great VST plug-ins that you can use for your guitar.
For example, you can download amplifier simulators and cabs for your set up, and while it may not sound good as the original which the plug-ins are modeled after, they still sound good enough to use, and they’re good enough for the vast majority of people who aren’t tone-purists.
I’ll show you how to download plug-ins into your DAW in a later article.
That’s all for now. If this helped you out, do me a favor and share it on social media.
YouTube Video Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxqoQXvQvvAVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: How To Plug Your Guitar Into Garageband (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxqoQXvQvvA)
Before we begin, I just have to be completely honest and say I’m not an expert in the use of pitch correction or auto-tune, because I rarely use them, however, I recently had to, so I figured I’d share what I learned.
How To Tune Audio In Garageband Ipad 2
In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how I recently used pitch correction in the manner consistent (at least in sound) with Travis Scott and other hip-hop artists of the day.
Pitch-correction is almost always used in the recording process, and every artist uses it, from metal bands, rock bands, pop singers, and so on and so forth.
Similar to ghost-writers and professional producers/writers working on your favorite artist’s latest record, it’s just a part of the business and it’s a part of how the game is played at a high level.
Without further ado…
How To Use Auto-Tune (Pitch Correction) In Garageband.
First things first.
You need to know the key signature of the music. This should be the first step you make.
If you want to know the key signature of the song, I just find the tonal center of the music, and then I play the notes of that scale.
For instance, when I jammed along to Dave East’s “Type Of Time” recently, I knew it was in the key of C Minor (relative major: Eb Major).
I figured it out, just by searching around on my guitar for the note on which the entire song is built, and then I played the natural minor scale up from the root note, carefully listening for each note to hear any dissonances.
If you don’t know anything about major or minor scales, I suggest checking out MusicTheory.net, as they have great tutorials for beginners to music theory. Also, Mark Sarnecki’s book, which I wrote about here.
You can also use the tool, TuneBat.com.
TuneBat is a pretty good resource for quickly finding the key signature of a song. They have quite a bit in there.
Personally, I like figuring it out for myself that way I don’t have to depend on the software, however, if you’re only a music producer rather than a musician, sight-reading or improvising skills really aren’t that important.
Also, understand that pitch-correction and auto-tune are used only for recordings and obviously not MIDI recordings.
1) Open a new project/already existing project.
2) Hit (Command + Option + A) to bring up an Audio track.
3) You’ll see down in the Smart Controls the way the Audio looks in wave format, in addition to a few different settings including, “Limit to Key,” and “Enable Flex.”
4) From here, what you want to do is hit the “Enable Flex” and “Limit Key” check-boxes to ensure that when you record some vocals or other music, the pitch correction tool will come in keep everything in the key.
5) At this point, I’m sure you’re already familiar with the key signature option at the top center of the DAW, but for the sake of clarification, I’ll speak of it anyway.
Just go up to the top-center where it displays the beats per minute, measure, time signature, and the tempo. You can adjust the key signature from there.
6) Now, if you want to make auto-tune work in the style of, say, for example, T-Pain, you’re going to need to know the key signature of the track in which to sing.
7) Depending on how much auto-tune you want to use, you can adjust the pitch correction on a 1-100 scale within the Smart Controls.
If you put it all the way to 100, that’s obviously the most amount of pitch-correction you can use.
8) The next step is to begin recording your vocals, and then listen to how the pitch correction tool has changed the way your vocals sound.
In the Instagram post below, you can see what it sounds like without pitch correction and with the pitch-correction all the way up to 100.
The first thing that you hear is the out-of-key version of “Stargazing” from Travis Scott.
You’ll notice when I say the word, “Stargazing,” it sounds out of key. But then after I adjust the pitch the correction to 100 it starts to sound good.
In conclusion, the steps I laid out above is how you pitch-correct a vocal track. However, if you want to use auto-tune as a creative tool in the style of Travis Scott, then there are additional details.
It’s worth mentioning that between 65 and 75 is the best range for the pitch correction tool if you’re just trying to correct those imperfections.
Also, it’s best to give the best singing performance possible, because the pitch correction tool works at its most optimal when the notes are only slightly off.
If you just sing wildly out of tune, the benefit of using the pitch correction software is lost. You can try it for yourself some time to see what I mean.
How To Use Auto-Tune Like Travis Scott
For this, it’s pretty much the same thing as the steps listed above, but we have to add a few more effects, including delay, reverb, and a bit of compression as well, actually, probably a lot.
For the sake of clarity, I’ll run through these steps once again.
1) Bring up your audio track using the (Command + Option + A) function.
2) Click on the Audio Region.
3) Click on Track.
4) Check both boxes, “Limit to Key,” as well as “Enable Flex.”
5) Hit Record on your Audio Track, and then record yourself singing whatever it is that you want to sing.
If I were you, I would make sure that you have the “Feedback Protection” box clicked, just in case.
Also, if you’re going to use your computer’s built-in microphone, you’ll have to plug headphones in due to the fact the microphone and built-in speakers are too close to each other.
If you plan on actually making legitimate vocals, obviously, it’d be a much better option to use a good microphone. From what I understand, Shure is kind of like the industry standard.
Moving on…
6) Turn the pitch-correction all the way up to 100 that way it’s working as much as possible.
7) Go into your Plug-ins, and select the options, Compressor, Platinum Verb within the Reverb options, the Stereo Delay, as well as the Channel EQ
8) First, go into your EQ, and EQ the audio track so it looks like the image I’ve laid out below.
You can see that the Lows have been boosted considerably, as well as the highs, and then the mids are cut out almost completely.
9) Then, go into your Compressor and set it at the settings you can see below in the image.
10) For the Platinum Verb, I just keep it at the default setting.
How To Tune Audio In Garageband Ipad 3
11) Now that you have your final track, you can see that it kind of has that Washed out with Reverb/Robot style which is Travis Scott’s style. I don’t mean that derisively, those are just the mannerisms that come to mind.
12) For the next step, you want to copy and paste your audio track into two new duplicate tracks, however, you’ll pan the one to the left and one to the right using the pan buttons that look like this.
13) After this, make sure you turn off the Delay off the two duplicate tracks because otherwise, there will be too much of it.
Effects like Reverb and Delay kind of add up on top of each other, so make sure to not over-use these features.
How To Use Auto-Tune (Pitch Correction) In iOS
Setting up pitch correction and auto-tune in iOS isn’t much different from how you’d do it on the Mac.
Without further ado.
1) The first thing you want to do, is hit the option, “+” on the top right-hand side of the screen when you first open up Garageband iOS.
2) Select the option, “Audio Recorder.” 2
3) Now, you’ll come to a little dial in the center of the screen that kind of looks like a children’s toy. Choose the Golden Microphone option titled, “Extreme Tuning.”
4) From there, go into the drop-down menu on the top-left hand of the screen and click on the “Extreme Tuning” icon.
5) Then, click on the setting that says, “Vocals.”
6) Choose the option “Lead Vocals” from there.
7) We now have five dials from which to choose, Tone, Pitch Control, Compressor, Drive, and Vocal Hall.
6) Hit the dials (that looks like a Gear) of the top-right hand side of the screen, and then click on “Track Controls,” which whill then bring up all of the plug-ins.
7) Virtual dj pro free download filehippo. Add a little bit of Reverb and then Delay.
8) You can adjust the compressor up or down, depending on how much you want to equalize the sound.
9) From here, as I mentioned in the tutorial above, you need to figure out the key signature of your song. Considering the fact it’s the song you’ve likely written, you’ll know what the key is.
10) If you need to adjust the Key Signature, click on the icon that looks a gear, then choose “Song Settings.” From there, you can see where it gives Tempo and Key Signature options. Crack for izotope rx7.
If you’re using someone else’s song, try TuneBat.com.
***Having the proper key signature set up is an important detail because it gives the pitch correction software a standard by which to measure and adjust.
If you have the wrong Key Signature, auto-tune won’t work properly because the tool will adjust the wrong notes to the wrong pitch.
***There’s also an Application that you can download called, “Voloco,” which acts as a harmonizer and pitch correction tool. I don’t think it’s that necessary frankly, but you can try that out.
You can refer to the Instagram post above if you want to hear the final product.
As I’ve mentioned before, probably the most important things to remember when using auto-tune and pitch correction are as follows:
- Adjust the amount of correction from 0 to 100
- Use Delay and Reverb
- Sing on key to really maximize the utility of pitch correction software.
And that’s pretty much it.
Anyway, I hope this helped you out. Make sure to share it on your social media if you enjoyed it.
Until next time.