6.3. Editing Real Instrument Regions

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6.3. Editing Real Instrument Regions

When it comes to editing, Real Instrument regions don't offer nearly as much flexibility as Software Instruments. Real Instrument regions are digital recordings of live performances ; you can't very well correct a wrong note, boost the emphasis of a sung word, draw in new notes, or have any of the kind of fun described in Chapter 5.

Still, as Chapter 3 makes clear, you can massage any kind of regionReal or notin a number of useful ways. You can chop them up, rejoin them, drag them around in time, copy and paste them, and so on.

If you double-click a blue or purple region, in fact, you behold the sight in Figure 6-6: actual audio waveforms that make it very easy to isolate certain notes or syllables. You've just opened the Track Editor for a Real Instrument region. (If you've clicked a blue track to select it, you can open the corresponding Track Editor in any of three other ways: Choose Control Show Editor, press -E, or click the button below the track headers.)

Figure 6-6. By zooming in, you gain incredible precision in selecting portions that you intend to cut or copy.
Note, however, that you can't use this zoomed-in view for the purpose of positioning the Playhead to split a region unless you've turned on Playhead synchronization. To do that, make sure that the button circled here shows two aligned Playheads; if not, click there!


The " mountains " on display in the Track Editor for a Real Instrument region show the bursts of volume in the trackindividual notes of an instrument, for example, or words in a vocal track. (A flat straight line means silence.)

There are a few tricks worth noting here:

  • The top edge of a region in the Track Editormaybe about the top eighth of it (Figure 6-6)is a special zone. Inside it, the cursor changes to this shape. You can now move the region by dragging it from side to side.


    Tip: When your cursor has that shape, you can also select an entire region with a single click. (Yes, that's easy to do in the timeline , but it wouldn't otherwise seem possible in the Track Editor.)

    If you click any lower, your cursor becomes a simple cross , and you actually wind up dragging across waveforms and highlighting them. Learning how high to position your cursor for these two different purposes is just part of the game.

  • If you drag the upper-right corner of a Real Instrument region in the Track Editor , your cursor takes on the curly Loop shape, and you wind up looping the regionthat is, making it repeat. In other words, it behaves exactly as though you're dragging the upper-right corner of the un magnified region up in the timeline, as described in Chapter 3.

  • If you drag leftward on the lower -right corner of a region in the Track Editor, the cursor changes to this shape, and you wind up trimming the region essentially hiding the outer notes. It's just like dragging the trailing edge of a region in the timeline (except that you must use only the lower-right corner as a handlenot the entire right edge, as in the timeline).

  • If you paste Real region B on top of Real region A, the pasted region wipes out whatever was underneath, just as you'd expect. But suppose you change your mind.

    If you then move or cut away the pasted region, you can tug outward on the end of original region A. The wiped-out sound waves grow right back , revealing that GarageBand was only hiding them, not forgetting them.

    Which gives you a great trivia question for your next bar bet: How is a GarageBand region like the leg of a starfish?

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GarageBand2. The Missing Manual
GarageBand2. The Missing Manual
ISBN: 596100353
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 153

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