28.3. Effect ModulesSee the flippy triangle next to Details? As noted earlier, clicking it makes the Track Info dialog box expand. You've just revealed a set of building-block effects like Gate, Compressor, Reverb, and so on (Figure 28-3). These are the components of the instrument-named presets in the lists above. Now, if you've spent the prime years of your life hanging around recording studios , terms like Gate, Compressor , and Equalizer may already be familiar to you. If you're anyone else, well, resign yourself to the fact that reading about effects is not a very good way to learn about them. The fact is, their names are little more than puny human attempts to describe sounds that are, in many cases, other-worldly and indescribable.
Still, the prose that follows may be helpful if you read it while performing any of these three self-guided exercises:
In any case, here's a summary of what you'll find in the Details panel. (For a deeper analysis of what these common studio effects do, visit www.harmony-central.com/Effects/effects-explained.html.) To apply a certain effect to the track you're editing, turn on the checkbox next to its name , and then explore the pop-up menu to its right. Note: Before you go nuts adding effects to an individual track , remember that you can also apply any of these effects to the entire song , using the Master Track feature described in the next chapter. Part of the art of mixing is knowing when to process just one instrument, and when to tweak the entire overall mix. 28.3.1. Generator (Software Instruments Only)This pop-up menu appears only in the Track Info dialog box for Software Instrument tracks. Most people, most of the time, are content to let GarageBand's piano be a piano, its guitar be a guitar, and so on. You can, however, delve into the sophisticated modeling software that GarageBand uses to produce these sounds, either to subtly tweak the built-in sounds or to radically remake them. In fact, using the Save Instrument button described earlier, you can even create an entirely new Software Instrument, named whatever you please . (You also use this pop-up menu to load new sounds that you've found online.) The first step is to choose a basic instrument sound from the pop-up menu. Most of them are just what they sound like: Piano, Strings, Horns, Woodwind, Guitar, Bass, Drum Kits. The remaining ten modules are software versions of synthesizers, capable of generating a wild variety of soundsand not just musical notes (see Figure 28-4). 28.3.1.1. Familiar instrument namesWhen you select a traditional instrument name from the Generator pop-up menu, the pop-up menu to its right comes to life. It lists sub-species of the instrument's type: Alto Sax, Tenor Sax, and so on. If you now click the pencil button, you see a dialog box like the one shown in Figure 28-4. Here's where you can adjust several parameters of the underlying sound. For most instrument sounds, you get three sliders:
Note: The Manual dialog box for electric pianos is slightly different. It also offers two options for the underlying Tone: Tines (a bell-like sound, like the classic Fender-Rhodes electric piano of the '80s), and Reeds (a more nasal, oboe-like sound).
28.3.1.2. Synthesizer generatorsWhen you choose one of the synthesizer modules from the first pop-up menu, however, your options multiply considerably. Now when you click the pencil button, the manual-settings dialog box contains a full arsenal of synth controlsand learning what they all do could take you years. In the real world, synth programming is a full-time hobby, if not a full-time job. In addition to the Volume, Cutoff, and Release parameters described above, the synth generators offer many other sliders. They vary by module, but here's a taste:
28.3.2. Gate (Real Instruments Only)The gating function (often called a noise gate by recording geeks ) simply eliminates all sound that's quieter than a certain level, which you specify by dragging this slider. The result: total silence in the quieter sections of a track. In the recording industry, gating can be useful to eliminate hiss from the silent parts of, for example, an old recording. Very few of the GarageBand presets use gating, but you can apply it to your own recordingsfor example, when you're trying to get rid of the hum from a microphone or other component. 28.3.3. CompressorImagine a graph of your song's volume level over time. A studio compressor limits this volume graph so that it doesn't vary so wildly. There's less difference between the loudest and softest parts. Because compressors can bring out the "highlights" of a track without making the background so low as to be inaudible, they're among the most frequently used effects in today's pop music. A compressor adds punch to a solo orif you apply it to the Master Trackthe overall song. It also helps the music sound better on cheap speakerslike boombox speakers, portable iPod speakers, or your Mac's speakers . To try out this effect, turn on its checkbox and then drag the slider. 0 means no compression; 100 means maximum compression. 28.3.4. "Additional Effects" Pop-Up MenusThese two unlabeled pop-up menus, near the middle of the Details panel, are complex and deep enough to merit a book of their own. These are fantastically sophisticated software controls that emulate racks full of studio equipment. You can spend hours in here, fiddling with the sliders and checkboxes, in an effort to find the perfect tweak for your vocal or instrumental line. Note: The two pop-up menus are identical. Apple has given you two of them so that you can apply two effects simultaneously. Actually, there are a total of four pop-up menus. Each time you choose an effect category from a left-side pop-up menu, the pop-up menu to its right comes to life, pre-stocked with useful presets. (As you're beginning to notice, GarageBand offers presets for the component effects that make up the instrument-named presets listed at the top of the dialog box. Presets within presets.) You may find only three presets in this second pop-up menu (Soft, Medium, Hard) or as many as 20 (Birdish, Club at Next Door, Slow and Deep, and so on). You can dial up your own presets, too (Figure 28-5), and then save them so that they appear in this second pop-up menu (Figure 28-6). Note: Once you've used the pencil button once , GarageBand leaves you stuck in "I Want to Adjust This Effect Manually" mode until you quit and reopen it. That is, every time you choose from the first effect pop-up menu, its underlying manual-adjustment dialog box pops up automatically, without your having to click the pencil button.On the other hand, you don't have to close this manual-settings dialog box before choosing a different effect from the first pop-up menu. You can feel free to experiment, choosing different effect names and admiring the way the manual-settings dialog box changes before your eyes each time. Now that you understand the basic ritualchoose an effect generator from the first pop-up menu, choose a preset from the second, and adjust manually if you likehere's a list of the primary effect generators as they appear in the first pop-up menu. Note: After each description, you'll find a brief account of what the manual-settings dialog box offers (the one that appears when you click the pencil button).
28.3.4.1. Amp SimulationIf you're an electric guitarist, and you've slogged along this far, here's what you've been waiting for, the gem of GarageBand for guitarists: the amp simulators. These are the effects Steve Jobs and pop artist John Mayer demonstrated onstage when GarageBand was first unveiled at a Macworld Expo; this is the feature that gets true garage- band musicians drooling. As it turns out, the sound an electric guitar makes is profoundly affected by the amplifier it's plugged into. Various bands of the last 40 years have put both themselves and certain amps on the map by creating trademark guitar sounds. Unfortunately, amplifiers are expensive, heavy, and impractical to transport in big numbers . To have a single software program on, say, a laptop, that can deliver perfect impersonations of 17 classic amplifierswith names like Grunge, Scorching Solo, British Invasion, and Seventies Rhythmis, for guitarists, quite a treat. (For anyone else, it may be no more than a big yawn. That's an OK reaction, too.) As you can guess, these amp simulations work best if you have an electric guitar connected to your Mac. (Run its line output into one of the audio interface boxes described on Section 27.2.1, for example.) Listen on headphones as you experiment and noodle. Manual options : See Figure 28-6.
28.3.4.2. Auto Wah"Wah" here refers to the wah-wah pedal , a staple of electric guitar players. The name, as you can probably guess, is an onomatopoeiathe name describes the sound of the effect. Onstage, guitar players traditionally control the timing and intensity of the "wah" by riding a pedal with one foot . In GarageBand, you can't actually control either the timing or intensity, except in your selection of preset. Even so, you have an entire music store's worth of wah-wah pedal simulators here, with names like Wow, Duck, and CryBaby. Some of them distort the music beyond recognition; others make you sound like you're playing live from outer space. All of them take the range of sounds you can make with your guitar alone (or whatever your instrument) far beyond what you can play without GarageBand's assistance. Manual options : Sound (DarkBright), Reaction (LightStrong), Mode (Thick, Thin, Peak, Classic 1/2/3). 28.3.4.3. Automatic FilterThis pop-up menu unleashes a wide spectrum of truly wild and severe effects. Most introduce some form of pulsing , tremolo, or wobbling. A few highlights among the others:
Manual options : Frequency (LowHigh), Resonance (LowHigh), Intensity (DownUp & Down), Speed (SlowFast). 28.3.4.4. Bass AmpHere's another of GarageBand's now-famous amplifier simulationsbut this one's geared for electric basses. The second pop-up menu offers presets like Deep Bass Amp, Funk Bass Amp, Fuzz Bass Amp, Reggae Bass Amp, Sixties Bass Amp, Slap Bass Amp, and many others. Manual options : Pre Gain (010), Low/Mid/High (010), Mid Frequency (LowHigh), Output Level (LowHigh). 28.3.4.5. Bass Reduction, Treble ReductionAs you might expect, these effects crank down the high or low frequencies of this track's music, respectively. Use Treble Reduction if the source material is too hissy; use Bass Reduction if it's too boomy. (The equalizing options perform much the same function, but with more precision.) Manual options : Frequency (LowHigh). 28.3.4.6. BitcrusherGarageBand generally strives to preserve the maximum sound quality of your instruments. It's capable of CD quality, meaning sound that's described by 44.1 kilobits of data per second. It wasn't always this way. Primitive computers like the very first Macintosh and the Atari, not to mention AM radios, use far less data. As a result, they sound tinny and flat next to, say, the typical GarageBand instrument. The Bitcrusher effect is designed to throw away musical data on purpose , giving your track a retro, played -over-the-phone-line sound. Its presets include AM Radio, Classic 8-Bit (that is, like the oldest Macs), Meet Atari, and others. Some, like Other World, reduce lyrics to unintelligibility; others, like SR Crush, give vocal lines a buzzing, robotic, Vocoder quality. All of the presets do a real number on the sound quality of your track, blasting it into awfulness for use only in special circumstances. (Ever heard the beginning of the Electric Light Orchestra's "Telephone Line?" The opening verse is meant to sound as though it's sung over the phoneand now you can perform the same processing in the privacy of your own home.) Manual options : Resolution (LowHigh), Sample Rate Reduction (SmallHuge). 28.3.4.7. ChorusChorusing is a famous and frequently used effect in pop music (ever heard Abba?). The fundamental idea is that the computer duplicates your track and offsets the copy by just a millisecond or two, so that you sound like there's two (or more) of you singing or playing together. It also makes the two copies slightly out of tune with each other, which helps with the illusion of multiple voices singing at once. The presets here are primarily designed to let you control how much chorusing you want. Among them, Spread Stereo is among the most interesting, because it attempts to place you and your clones in different spots along the left-to-right stereo "soundstage." Manual options : Intensity (LowHigh), Speed (SlowFast). 28.3.4.8. DistortionMost musicians go out of their way to make sure that the input volume of their microphone or instrument isn't up too high. (That's why you opened System Preferences and adjusted the level slider as described on Section 27.2.) If the input is too "hot," the level meters go off the scale, resulting in the screechy, garbled sound known as distortion or clipping . In some musical circles, howeverespecially heavy-metal onesdistortion is the whole point. It's the trademark sound of guitarists who turn their amplifiers "up to 11," as the cast of This is Spinal Tap might say. Using this option, you can drive any musical material into distortion-land, even if the levels were perfectly fine in the original recording. Manual options : Drive (LowHigh), Tone (DarkBright), Output Level (LowHigh). 28.3.4.9. FlangerHere's another classic rock processor, frequently applied to guitars and keyboards by a little foot switch-operated box on the stage floor. And now it's yours, at no extra charge. You'll recognize it when you hear it: a sweeping, side-to-side, filtery effect. It's something like chorusing described above, but the duplicates of the sound are played back much more out of tune from the original. (Hint: It's most effective in stereo. Go dig out your iPod headphones.) Manual options : Intensity (LowHigh), Speed (SlowFast), Feedback (LowHigh). 28.3.4.10. OverdriveThis effect, also common in electric guitar music, is related to distortion. It simulates the sound of an overdriven tube amplifier, adding the intensity of distortion without quite as much "trashiness." Manual options : Drive (LowHigh), Tone (DarkBright), Output Level (LowHigh). 28.3.4.11. PhaserSometimes called a phase shifter , this flanger-like whooshing effect should also strike you as familiar from the pop world. It, too, sounds like somebody is cyclically rotating the dials on some selective-frequency machine, and it, too, sounds especially good on guitars, keyboards, and vocals. Manual options : Intensity (LowHigh), Speed (SlowFast), Feedback (LowHigh). 28.3.4.12. Track EchoThe Echo and Reverb effects described on the next pages affect the entire mix. It's as though you're moving your entire band from a garage into an empty stadium. These presets, though, are independent of the master echo effect; you can set up a different echo setting for each track. Most of the presets are pretty spacey, and you should use them only for special situations; a few, though, are responsible for creating certain recognizable pop sounds. Manual options : Echo Time (ShortLong), Echo Repeat (LessMore), Repeat Color (DarkBright), Intensity (LowHigh). 28.3.4.13. TremoloTremolo is a close relative of vibrato . On paper, you might describe it as a subtle up-and-down wobble, either in pitch or in volumebut in the real world of solo voice or solo instruments, you'd describe it as a beautiful, professional sound. It's also a characteristic sound of guitar amps from the '50s and '60s (think The Ventures). The GarageBand Tremolo effect won't turn a tone-deaf screecher into Pavarotti, though. You can't apply it selectively just to the ends of longer notes, as musicians tend to do in live performance. Many of the presets sound just a hair machine-generated, especially because many of them create the vibrato effect not by subtle waves of pitch but by whipping back and forth from left to right in stereo. (Here's another effect that sounds best with headphones on.)
Still, several of these presets can lend interest and magic to a track, especially to a solo line with sustained notes. (If you're a singer and don't have a natural vibrato, try the preset called Soft and Fast, for example. Especially if you've also dialed up a little reverb, as described below.) Manual options : Intensity (LowHigh), Speed (SlowFast). 28.3.4.14. Vocal TransformerThe Effects dialog boxes may look to you like menus within menus and presets within presets. But don't get so lost that you miss the amazing new Vocal Transformer feature. The pop-up menu to the right lists 13 modules that perform jaw-dropping transformations to any vocal track. Some, like Cartoon Falsetto, Chipmunk, and Monsters, are hilarious-sounding and truly wild. (Got elementary-schoolers in the back seat on a long drive? Hand the iBook to 'em, teach 'em about Vocal Transformer, and try to keep your eyes on the road as they laugh themselves to tears.)
Other presets keep your voice sounding normal, but transpose it by a certain interval, so that you're singing a strange , monk-like harmony with yourself. (Try this: Over a neutral-key background like drums, duplicate your vocal track twice. Keep one untouched. Use the "Up Major Third" transformation to one, and the "Down Fourth" to the other. Play it back for a wild, crisp, super-hip instant-harmony chorus.) And some, like "Female to Male" and "Male to Female," are truly useful. They transform your voice into a trans-gendered version of yourself. In effect, you can become your own backup trio (of the opposite gender). Or sing along with yourself an octave or two away by duplicating the main vocal track and then applying these effects to the copy. Vocal processing: It's not just for record companies any more. 28.3.5. EqualizerIf you've ever fiddled with the graphic equalizer on a stereo, or even the software one that's built into iTunes, you already know about these controls. An equalizer lets you boost or repress certain frequencieslike the bass or the trebleto suit different kinds of music. A "graph" for classical music, for example, might slightly boost the low and high frequencies for more sparkle, letting the middle ones "sag"; a pop-rock setting might boost instead the middle frequencies, to bring out the vocal parts. When you turn on GarageBand's Equalizer checkbox, the pop-up menu to its right offers 21 canned equalizer setups bearing self-explanatory names like Bass Boost, Brighten Strings, and Reduce "S." In the unlikely event that none of these presets is quite what you want, you can click the pencil button to its right to adjust the various frequencies yourself (Figure 28-7). The truth is, many of the Equalizer presets might make more sense when applied to a finished composition than just one instrument track. But now and again, they can be useful in giving a recording just the right nuance. For example, in the guitar preset called Summer Sounds, the "EQ" of the midrange has been boosted to give your guitar more of a Beach Boys sound. Tip: If you'd prefer finer control over the various frequencies, don't bother with this user -friendly, quick-and-dirty option. The AUGraphicEq function described in the box on Section 28.3.4.10 offers 31 individual sliders for extremely precise adjustment of various sound frequencies. 28.3.6. Echo, ReverbYou might suppose that echo and reverb are the same thing: the nice echoey sound of, for example, your shower. Actually, in studio terms, they're different. Echo , sometimes called delay , is literally an echo, giving you fainter and fainter distinct repetitions of each sound, each separated by a fraction of a second (think Grand Canyon). Reverb is a sweet, subtle, professional-sounding reverberation that smoothes the rough edges of a musical performance (think shower stall, empty alley, or concert hall). You'll probably use Echo only rarely, for special effects. Reverb, on the other hand, is useful for practically any kind of solo. There's not a pop star alive , for example, whose recordings aren't "sweetened" with a little reverb. The audience may not be able to pinpoint why your singing or playing sounds so great, but they'll definitely hear the difference. Each of these effects has its own on/off checkbox and slider, which goes from 0 to 100 percent. Note: If the Echo and Reverb checkboxes are dimmed, it's because these effects are turned off in the Master Track (see Chapter 29).The fix: In the Track Info dialog box, click the Master Track tab, and then turn on the Echo and/or Reverb checkboxes. When you return to the Software Instrument or Real Instrument tab, you'll see these checkboxes come back to life.The explanation: As it turns out, the individual tracks' Echo and Reverb sliders simply govern how much of these effects are sent to the Echo and Reverb in the Master Track. Studio musician call these send effects . (The Track Echo effect in the two unnamed pop-up menus are different; it gives you a truly track-independent echo.) So if Echo and Reverb are turned off for the entire song, they're also turned off for every individual track. |