Recording Software Instrument Tracks

When you’ve come up with the perfect musical riff, you can record it and make it a permanent part of your song. Best of all, you can hear how everything sounds together as you’re playing and recording.

When you’re done, you can listen to everything together and decide if you want to save it, or try another take. Don’t worry about small timing errors; you can fix them in the track editor without recording again, or set up GarageBand to correct your timing errors automatically.

Tips

Record your part in slow motion

With software instruments you can easily slow the tempo of your entire song to make it easier for you to play along, and record. Just use the tempo slider to set your song to a slower tempo, and record your part. When you’re finished recording, move the tempo slider back to its original tempo to hear your song at the correct speed.

Cycle part of the song to change one section

If you’re happy with most of a take, but want to change a small part, use the cycle function to loop the region you’d like to change. With software instruments, you can record each time the cycle region repeats, and your new recordings are merged with the existing region.

Stream audio from other applications with ReWire

Software synthesizer applications make it possible to create your own unique electronic sounds. ReWire from Propellerhead Software is a system for streaming audio from software synthesizer applications into other audio applications like GarageBand. If you want to use sounds from a software synthesizer application in your song, you can set up GarageBand as a ReWire "mixer application." This means you can stream audio or MIDI data from the other application, and you can also control its playback and other basic parameters directly from GarageBand.

Steps

Record a software instrument track

Click the track header of the software instrument track you want to record.
Click the Record button (the round one with a red circle). Your song will play and anything you play on the keyboard will be recorded. Notice that a new region appears as you play.
When you’re finished with the part you want to record, click the Play button to stop recording.