Garage Band Tutorial

I'm intending to start a podcast about this, soon. I need to figure out how to generate video for Youtube though. I also need to mess around with the interface a bit more. I got to the place where you create an audio track, but I need to get it consistent.

Basically though, if you make a new song, there's a "create audio" button. Hit that and you get an audio track, then you just record like you think you would, by hitting the record button. I'm also not sure if you can add audio tracks, so far I can't see how, but I'm working on figuring it out one way or the other.

The online GarageBand user guide has a very good section on using it with VoiceOver. I've used it to record some basic multitrack stuff, but I'm far from great at it.

That's one thing I wish we had more of, good resources for how to create content.

It makes it look like GB is set up for instruments. While that might largely be true, you can absolutely record at least one audio track with GB. But you won't find that in the Voiceover section, it's in the main manual. On the one hand, sure, read the whole manual, if you really want to get familiar with it. On the other hand, I'm not even sure if it's mentioned in the VO section, I didn't go through the whole thing looking for it, just the sections. The VO section seems to pretty muc hcover dealing with instruments.

The guide is great in a lot of ways, e.g. there's actually a whole set of keyboard shortcuts if you're using a Bluetooth keyboard, and hint, you probably want to if it's at all possible. The Voiceover section also covers the stuff it covers fairly well. It's pretty straightforward to work through, so far.

But I think some kind of tutorial needs to be made just for stuff like audio, aside from having examples to walk through for the rest of the stuff. Because I'm not sure just reading the guide gets you where you need to be.

I've played around with GarageBand on iOS, less so with Mac. On iOS, you can actually play around with the instruments, like having a piano on screen where you can mess around with chords and the like. I didn't find any such option in the Mac version. Is it there, or do I have to use something LogicPro for something similar?

So after a bit of digging I found the answer to my question in the post above. Note that I haven't tested this myself, as I have to clear some space on my Mac to make way for instrument libraries. But if someone can give it a try before I get around to it, post your findings please.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/09/how-to-play-music-using-your-macs-keyboard-with-garagebands-musical-typing

Weirdly it's not in the iOS version, which is a bummer. But yeah, you hit cmd-k, you have to be in certain areas for it to work, the toggle I mean. If you're using a Bluetooth keyboard there will be some delay and you'll need to quantize. It's not great, but yeah, it will give you something to play with in a pinch, or let you experiment to see if it's worth picking up a midi controller or keyboard that can do midi over USB.

As I've always said, at least we have something like a guide on ios/ipados, nothing on the mac for VO :(

Some of how GB works on iOS will be different because VO uses touch gestures, and so does GB. But for the Mac, is there a ton you need beyond basic VO skills and keyboard shortcuts?

I'm not saying they shouldn't have one, mind you. I went right to logic.band when I was getting started messing with it on Mac. I'm just trying to think if there could be any reasoning behind having one and not the other.

BTW the keyboard shortcuts seem fairly parallel between Mac and iOS. Mac has more I think, but the ones that iOS has match, or if they don't entirely, they do for the most part. So for example, to move, I think by bars/measures by default, on both it's dot/period to go forward, and comma to go back.

So looking at something like logic.band's getting started stuff for Mac might actually be a lot more helpful on iOS than you might think at first. I'll definitely be looking at it.

Ideally what I'd like to do is put up a blog or something so I can have links, and probably text write-ups of at least some of the stuff I cover. Then also do a podcast to walk people through actual examples. But I'm thinking of text because while podcasts are great to get live examples and to get started, it's hard to go back and find things in them if you just need a refresher on one or two things.

So I'm currently trying to figure out a blogging platform and podcast hosting and getting stuff set upp.

I’m not a music prodigy or GarageBand genius. Far from it. When I was younger, I played around with GarageBand on my iPhone mostly to create ringtones or mess around for fun. But to this day, I still don’t know what’s happening in there. I’ve never figured it out. I don’t know how to record an instrument. I don’t know how to layer the loops. And I swear, whatever intelligence I may have in the real world—it completely evaporates the second I open GarageBand. It’s like stepping into a different dimension where nothing makes sense. I’ve read the user guide, yes. I’ve tried. But they talk about fancy MIDI keyboards and all this hardware I don’t own. I’m guessing a MIDI keyboard is some sort of tiny Bluetooth piano for music? What I need is a guide that’s specific to working directly on the iPhone screen. Touchscreen only. No peripherals.

How do I record a single instrument and get it to match the beat of a song? How do I upload a sample—say, something I made in another app like Suno—and have GarageBand follow that beat and tempo? Shouldn’t it be able to do that automatically? I don’t get it. I want to add some guitar riffs, maybe a bit of drums, something simple—but instead, I’m stuck in chaos. Every time I try to record, VoiceOver jumps in the way. I end up recording myself talking, or random system sounds. Everything but the music. GarageBand is one of those Apple apps I truly don’t think I’ll ever understand. I don’t know if the problem is me, or if I need AI to help get the creative juices flowing—but the whole thing is unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes, I want to make a simple track that sounds halfway decent. But nope. Confusion. Chaos. Blender-style. Let me just say—maybe someone needs to bring Sarah back in here to explain how to use GarageBand with VoiceOver, because this is getting ridiculous. I’ve reported these issues to Apple before. Multiple times. Back when I used to care, I was constantly emailing them, with detailed screen recordings, saying GarageBand wasn’t accessible. Same thing with iMovie.

Let’s talk about iMovie for a second. One thing I really want to do in iMovie is this: stretch a single photo across an audio file and export it. That’s it. A still picture, laid over an audio track for the full length of the sound. It seems like it should be simple. The sliders are there—but they’re not accessible. I’ve told Apple this, over and over and over again. And it’s now 2025 and nothing’s changed. Why do we have iMovie and Clips anyway? Why not merge them into one app that actually works? That’s what I’ve started doing—working around the limitations. I don’t know the screen ratios, or if the picture should be square or 16:9. I don’t know what any of that means. But here’s what I used to do: I would grab a non-copyright-free photo, throw it into Clips, import the audio, and stretch the photo across the track. If there’s any original audio attached to the video clip, I mute it. Then I add music from iMovie or Clips and try to line it up. It’s a hassle, but it’s the best workaround I’ve got. I still do this, but I create the pictures with AI now.

But back to GarageBand: how do I take a song and drop it into the timeline at the start of the session—without the whole thing turning into a disaster? I don’t own a Mac or an iPad. My iPhone is my one and only device. So if GarageBand is available on iPhone, there should be a fully accessible, up-to-date guide that walks us through every step of the process on that platform. Apple needs to spend time teaching us how to use these apps with VoiceOver. I even suggested they implement basic voice controls—just like they do for other parts of the phone. Why not give us voice commands to tell the app what to do? Especially with how clunky and cluttered the interface is.
For blind creators who want to make tutorials, why not screen record what you’re doing on your iPhone? Turn off your screen curtain, slow the VoiceOver speed down a bit, turn on your mic, and narrate the process. You wouldn’t even have to show your face in the video. Add a title card at the start and end, maybe a little music intro/outro, and finish it in iMovie. That part—miraculously—is somewhat doable.

Wow, I was about to start learning iMovie for exactly what you described but it's apparently not accessible with VO?
Reaper can do that at least, trimming of audio and the video along with it.
Heard from somebody who told double tap that clipchamp on windows is accessible for blind for this exact purpose.
I will still try, maybe I could find out something. For the community! :)
@Khomus. You know what? You might be right, but this argument is even more true for the entirety of the iWork suite and each app has at least a small section dedicated to VO, on all platform I think but mac definitely does, so...
Question for everyone, can garageband do normalization of a track or should I go with reaper and from what somebody told me, shift+n with osara properly keymapped?

From what I remember of iMovie on the iPhone, there are some features on there that honestly take a mix of skill and sheer luck to pull off. You’re able to combine videos, sure, and most of the transitions are automatically placed in the middle. Luckily, those are usually easy to delete if you don’t want them in your project. They’ve got some built-in sound effects, too, but even that’s a bit of a letdown when you think about it. I mean, yeah, we can create our own sound effects or pull them from anywhere, but the ones in iMovie are basic. And the music—they’ve got the same background music in both iMovie and Clips now. Back in the day, Clips was the only app that had those tracks, and iMovie didn’t. Now that they both have them, it’s like… why not just combine the two apps into one?

And with iMovie, let’s say you want to add a dog barking sound effect. You’d have to play the entire video, listen for the exact spot where you want the sound to go, then pause it at the right second and pray it doesn’t shift to the beginning or jump somewhere random. That kind of precision takes work. It shouldn’t be that hard. There are also some overlay features. You’ve got split screen, where you can show two different images—like a daytime sky on the right and a nighttime sky on the left for contrast. Then there’s picture-in-picture, where one image sits on top of another. And then there’s the cutaway feature—like if I’m narrating a video and I say, “I walked down to the beach,” the viewer hears my voice but sees a photo of the beach instead of me talking. You can detach the audio from a video too. So, if there’s a clip where you only want the sound, you can split the audio and delete the video. Or do the opposite—mute or delete the audio and use the visual. iMovie has some decent tools built in, but the problem is that a lot of it isn’t accessible. The app barely gets updates, and when it does, it’s nothing that fixes the real issues. It feels like you’re using something that’s stuck in the dinosaur age.

Clips is a different story. That app is more playful, more like Apple’s version of Snapchat. You can record directly in the app, add filters, stickers, title card posters, and effects. I remember they had this live captioning feature that was kind of cool. There were also these scene effects that let you put yourself into different virtual environments—like a jungle or a beach. I think that had some kind of augmented reality element to it. The one time I used that feature, someone told me it made me look weird—it changed the background and I guess maybe the lighting or facial proportions too. I don’t know what it looked like exactly, since I couldn’t see it for myself. I haven’t used that part in forever, so I probably should go back and explore it again. I still have these apps on my phone, but I don’t think they've been updated in forever. And based on everything I’ve already said in my previous comment, you know how frustrated I am. I used to email Apple over and over with screen recordings and detailed explanations—and nothing ever changed.

Sorry, I'll be using peripherals. They make life way way easier. Every serious musician I've seen making music on iOS, well usually it's an iPad, uses a midi keyboard, for example. Blind or sighted, doesn't matter. I'll do something entirely on the phone at some point, just to do it. But the simple fact is that the touch screen isn't a really good interface for making music.

That's especially true if, like me, you're totally blind. But unless you're using certain kinds of instruments designed for it, e.g. Thumb Jam, it's really not great. Even those, if you're trying to play a melody for example, you've got no real orientation. Sliding things are OK, i.e. tones you want to be continuous. Maybe drum pads, or pads that play chords. But individual notes are pretty hit and miss.

Maybe that's just me, and there's a blind wonderchild out there jamming on nothing but a phone screen that would cause us all to weep at their amazing abilities. But unless they step up and show us all the way, I'll be using hardware.

As I've already pointed out, GB has keyboard shortcuts, so if you have a Bluetooth keyboard, your life will be a lot easier. GB puts the phone in landscape mode and the controls are in a fairly thin line across the top of the screen. They're pretty fiddly, at least for me. So instead of trying to swipe through and find the record button, I can just hit 'r', or maybe it's upper case I forget, on the keyboard.

I just picked up a folding Bluetooth keyboard that can fit in my pocket for like thirty bucks. I realize that for some people this means saving up money, I've been there too. But because I know some people are interested in minimal peripherals, both in terms of number and size, I'm trying to find things that can work for that.

I recently came across a pocket-sized two-octave Bluetooth midi keyboard, I think it's more buttons than keys but still, for about 70 euros, so I'll probably pick that up next. I'll try to recommend hardware that's cheap but decent and hopefully fairly portable. I'll also try to cover other options that are less portable, e.g. hooking up any musical keyboard that can do midi over USB, there are quite a lot of them and they're at a range of prices.

Ideally I'll get into audio interfaces and all of that too, although that will likely wait until I get a new phone, in particular if I end up upgrading to something with a USB C port I don't want to get a bunch of lightning-based hardware. But this stuff is covered fairly well already, e.g. on Youtube, so I'll probably just pick an interface and go through working with it a bit,rather than covering a bunch of different hardware just to cover it. I don't have that kind of money anyway, lOL!

BTW, I'm pretty sure GB comes up with an instrument loaded by default. So you might have to use the rotor to activate direct touch, but to record one, you pretty much find the record button across the top of the screen and double tap it, and then once the one measure count-in is done, four metronome clicks, you start moving around the screen on the playing area.

I’m not disappointed, honestly. I left GarageBand back in the past. If something comes up where I’m able to use it, then fine. It’s not the money or the keyboard that’s the issue—I wouldn’t mind saving up to buy a keyboard if that were the case. That’s not it, at least for me. The thing is, I don’t live in the US, or Canada, or the UK, or anywhere where getting an item online is as easy as clicking a button and having it show up in a few hours or even a couple days. And if I remember correctly, I don’t think Amazon offers free shipping internationally—or at least not to where I am. I think they have “free shipping days” or something like that, but even then, I’d still have to pay to clear the items once they arrive here. So that’s another layer to consider. That’s what I meant in my previous comment—just keep in mind that not everyone lives in America or has access to that kind of seamless online shopping experience. So yeah, for me, ordering something like that is pretty much out of the question.

Could I buy a keyboard locally? Maybe. I’ll probably check out the music stores, but they’re most likely going to be pretty expensive. And honestly, if I were taking GarageBand seriously—like, really investing in it long term—then maybe I’d go for it. I’m not disappointed. I can live without GarageBand and what it has to offer. For me, it’s more or less a thing of the past. I don’t know if anyone’s really using it on a touchscreen directly, but I do agree—it seems like it was always designed to be used with a keyboard of some kind. If you're able to produce a tutorial, i'm certainly interested to check it out for the sake of curiosity. And, of course, much respect to you, as always.

Which is why I'm planning on covering multiple options for things. Also, anything I do with a keyboard is doable on the touch screen. That is, if I do Hot Cross Buns or something with chords and melody, you could do that on the touch screen. I just think it would be really hard to get it right

Apple does include some things to make touch screen playing more workable, I think somebody mentioned chord strips earlier, and that's all stuff I intend to cover. So really all of the stuff should be possible with only a phone. I'm just not sure how useful only a phone would be for any kind of longer term work with GB. I guess the good news is, we'll find out!

For audio, you can absolutely record things with just the phone's microphone. In fact I saw a guy's video the other day where he showed three ways of shooting video with a phone. One was the phone on a tripod, using its own camera and microphone. Then he basically added a microphone and a light, and then a cage you could attach a bunch more stuff to.

The sound improved once he added the external microphone. I assume the video improved with the extra stuff as well. But it waas totally workable with just a phone. Audio should be too, and if you can't do multi-tracking with GB, I'm still investigating that, there are other programs that will do it, and I'm pretty sure at least the basic versions of some of them are free, I'm specifically thinking of Ferrite and Hokusai.

As I get this project started, I'd love feedback, Esp. from people in other countries. I'm trying my best to think of stuff like that but I won't get everything that people might be interested in doing. I mention things like Ferrite because I'm also going to try and cover them.

I'm starting with GB because it's free on both iOS and Mac. But part of the reason I'm doing this is because people seem to think trying to make music on iOS is more or less pointless. I don't think it is, but the only way to find out is to start hammering away at it. I figure maybe my fumbling around trying to figure things out might help somebody, so I'll put it up somewhere.

I've managed to do chords and the like on a touchscreen, but precision isn't the easiest to get right, and I was using an iPad pro at the time. Wouldn't dream of trying it on a phone. @Winter Roses, I know what you mean, believe me. It always mildly annoys me when someone says something like "Just order it online" as if it[s a simple key press and your new product shows up just in time. For me. online ordering has always turned into a lengthy process, and the cost of finding transportation to pick up the order, plus the customs duties, means that ordering isn't something I would do at the drop of a hat. I know someone who has a midi keyboard; it made me wonder if there was such a thing as an electric guitar that could be wired into the Mac. But it's not something that I couldn't live without.

Yeah. If you're playing something like a form of slide guitar, I'm not saying you don't ever want to hit anything dead on, but there's some room for moving around, and that's kind of what you're supposed to do. You also have a larger area and often some kind of orientation, e.g. starting from the end of the instrument.

Let me stress, I don't think this is impossible. There are instruments played without fixed positions, e.g. the various forms of slide guitar, some forms of the Indian veena, the theremin. So I think there's certain kinds of stuff you can do,even on a phone.

If you have a pad setup, think drums, you probably have larger areas, and that would make them easier to hit accurately. If the set up for chords has larger areas, again, that would make them easier to hit. If you could restrict single note stuff to purely melodic playing, it's going to be harder because you've got I think two octaves of notes, maybe three, so the distances between everything will be smaller, which is going to make accuracy harder.

So it's not that it can't be done, I don't think anyway. It's more that it's really hard, and most people probably already play something else they can just hook up, so they don't worry about messing around with playing a piano on a touch screen.

But you know what? Challenge accepted! You're both absolutely right that I didn't think enough about people who might not be able to get something to hook up at all. My assumption was that yes, it might be hard, in terms of saving or ordering or whatever, but if you got serious about making music on a phone,like that's what you have or you just want something super portable, you'd gradually work on accumulating gear.

I still think this is the most practical solution. It has quite a number of advantages. For instance, there are ways to hook instruments, like an electric guitar, up to your phone. We have accessible multi-track audio recording on the phone. So throw a couple things in your guitar case or a small bag, i.e. your phone and the interface and maybe a battery or cable and charger for power, and if you suddenly get an idea while you're jamming somewhere, you've got the ability to record it right there.

Again, this is part of why I'm going to do this. Every time music on iOS gets brought up the consensus seems to be, oh I messed with it a bit and made a song once, you can probably do it but you don't want to, it's terrible to work with. But again,I think this depends on what you want to do.

Loopy HD has a free version, and that's literally just hitting a looper pad, e.g. 1, 2, whatever, and recording some audio, which it plays back in a loop when you're done. Then you can pick another pad, and record more audio. Idon't think the pro version si crazy expensive either, although I haven't looked.

But I mean, there's a looping pedal in your pocket. And you can do it right from the phone. Again, if you got a decent microphone that connects to the phone, or an audio interface that let's you connect pro microphones, you'd get better sound, sure. But just right there, if you have an instrument, play it, clap some rhythms, drum on stuff around your house, sing some parts, you know just "be bop dibbity dabbity do", then sing some more, whatever.

So I mean, while I think there are good reasons to get extra equipment if you can, and in the case of playing instruments in Garage Band or external things like Pianoteq maybe practical ones, because some sort of keyboard is just going to allow you to play what you really want to play, no, I don't think it's necessary, which is especially true if you're dealing with audio.

Again, you might really want something, if you directly interface your guitar you can apply effects like distortion and delay on the phone, and you don't need a bunch of hardware pedals, although you might want some anyway. But if you've got an acoustic guitar or a way for your electric to make noise anyway, e.g. an amp, it has a built-in speaker?

Sure, record it with your phone's microphone, why not? Then all you need are some wired headphones, if you want to record multiple tracks and hear what you've recorded, i.e. the first track(s) play back while you're recording the new one. Bluetooth headphones add delay which means the tracks won't sync up right, and if you don't use something, the microphone will pick up the output from the phone's speaker.