Section 26.2. Your FREE Onscreen Digital Piano

26.2. Your FREE! Onscreen Digital Piano

When you fire up a new GarageBand document (on a Mac with no physical MIDI keyboard connected), the GarageBand keyboard appears automatically in a floating window. This onscreen piano is a gift from Apple to people who would like to record notes of their own (instead of just using loops ), but don't own a physical MIDI keyboard (Figure 26-1).

Clicking the keys of this little keyboard with your mouse plays the instrument sound of whatever Software Instrument (green) track is currently selected. (The corresponding instrument name appears at the top of the keyboard.)

The onscreen keyboard is a pretty bare-bones beast . For example, it lets you play only one note at a time.

Figure 26-1. You can make this keyboard appear at any time by pressing -K (or, if you're charging by the hour , choosing Window Keyboard). Hide it by clicking its tiny upper-left Close button.
Tip: The keyboard now comes in three sizes. You cycle among them by clicking the green Zoom button identified here, or by dragging the lower-right handle diagonally down and to the right.

MUSIC CLASS
A Different Kind of Velocity

As you get to know GarageBand, and as you get to know the language of electronic music, you'll encounter one term with increasing frequency: velocity or key velocity .

That's a measurement of how hard you struck the keys of your MIDI controller or synthesizer. GarageBand is required to notice and record that information. If it didn't, how could it play back what you recorded with perfect accuracy?

Now, if you're like most people, your first question is: "Why don't they just say volume ? I mean, the harder you hit the key, the louder it plays, right?"

And that's where things get tricky. It's true that on a piano, hitting the keys harder makes the music louder. In fact, most of the instrument sounds in GarageBand work like that.

But in the wacky world of computerized music, your key velocity might not affect the loudness of the note. It might change the quality of the sound instead, or even what notes are played .

For example, in most of GarageBand's acoustic-guitar sounds (Auditorium Acoustic, for one), pressing a key harder adds a little slide into the notea grace note, a glissando up the fretboard from the next lower note. In the Fuzz Clav sound, banging harder gives the notes more of an Austin Powersera "wah wah" sound.

In short, "velocity" means the velocity of your finger coming down on the key. It says nothing about the resulting sound, which is just the way MIDI linguists like it.

But the onscreen keyboard also harbors two secrets that you might not discover on your own. First, it actually has more keys than the 88 of a real pianowell over 10 octaves' worth of keys! To reveal the keyboard's full width, drag its lower-right ribbed resize handle. Or just scroll the keyboard by clicking the tiny gray triangles on either end.

Second, you can actually control how hard you're "playing" the keys. No, not by mashing down harder on the mouse button. Instead, you control the pressure on the keys by controlling the position of your mouse when it clicks. Click higher up on the key to play softer; click lower down to play harder.

Playing harder usually means playing louder, but not always. Depending on the Software Instrument you've picked, hitting a key harder may change the nature of the sound, not the volume. More on this topic in the box on the previous page.

For instructions on using the onscreen keyboard to record, skip ahead to Section 26.5.