Working with Tracks and Regions

Tracks can be a lot easier to work with than musicians. Tracks never show up late for a gig, they always play in tune, their sense of timing is impeccable, and they never trash the hotel room.

Nonetheless, there are some important points to know about working with tracks and the regions that they hold. (A region is a set of notes or a snippet of sound. When you drag a loop into the timeline, the timeline or record a performance, you create a region.) For starters, when creating multitrack arrangements, you should rename tracks so you can tell at a glance which parts they hold: the melody, a solo, an alternate take of a solo.

As you compose, you may want to silence, or mute, certain tracks. Maybe you've recorded several versions of a solo, each on its own track, and you want to audition each one to hear which sounds best.

On the other hand, there may be times when you want to solo a trackto mute all the other tracks and hear only one track. Soloing a track can be useful when you're fine-tuning a track's effects settings or editing a region in the track.

A big part of creating an arrangement involves copying regions within a track or from one track to another. And as you move regions around, you often have to work with the beat ruler at the top of GarageBand's timeline. By fine-tuning the ruler's snapping feature, you can have your regions snap into place on exactly the right beat.

Here's how to get along with the members of the band.

Renaming a Track

Normally, GarageBand names a track after the instrument you've assigned to it. When you have multiple tracks that use the same instrument, it's hard to tell the tracks apart. Give your tracks descriptive names, such as Vocal (Second Take) or Third Verse Strings. To rename a track, click its name in the track header, then type a new name.

Soloing, Muting, and More

Track Tips

You can move tracks up and down by dragging their headers. Consider grouping related tracks together put all your rhythm section tracks together, then all your solo tracks, and so on.

When a track header is selected, you can use your keyboard's up- or down-arrow keys to select the track above or below the current track. This shortcut teams up nicely with those described above.

Play It Again: Cycling

When you're rehearsing, mixing, or recording, it's often useful to have part of a song play over and over. To do this, click the Cycle button ( ) and then drag in the area just below the beat ruler to indicate the region that you want to repeat.

The yellow region repeats until time comes to an end or your parents pull the plug, whichever comes first. To resize the region, drag its left or right edge. To move the region, drag it left or right.

When cycling is on, playback always begins at the start of the cycle region.

Duplicating a Track

You can make a duplicate of a track: a new, blank track with the same instrument and effect settings as the original. Select the track's header, then choose Duplicate from the Track menu ( -D).

Use the Duplicate command when you want to record multiple takes of a part, each in its own track. After you've laid down 12 takes, copy and paste the best parts into a single track.

Copying Regions

Copying a region is a common task, and GarageBand provides a couple of ways to accomplish it. You can copy and paste: select a region, choose Copy, move the playhead to the destination, and paste. You can also press the Option key while dragging the region you want to copy.

Note

If you want to copy a region to a different track, the tracks must be of the same type. You can't copy a software instrument region to a real instrument track, or vice-versa.

Zooming tip

When you're moving regions over a large distance, use GarageBand's zoom slider to zoom out for a big-picture view. And use the keyboard shortcuts: Control-left arrow zooms out, while Control-right arrow zooms in.

Copying Versus Looping

You can repeat a region by either looping it or copying it. So which technique should you use? Looping is the fastest way to repeat a region over and over again: just drag the loop pointer as described on page 325.

The advantage of copying a region is that each copy becomes an independent region that you can edit without affecting other copies. With a repeating loop, if you edit one note in the loop, that edit is present in each repetition.

Snap to the Beat

When moving a region, you almost always want to move it to the exact beginning of a particular measure or beat. GarageBand's timeline grid supplies this precision: when the grid's snapping feature is active, GarageBand automatically snaps to beats and measures as you drag regions, move the playhead, drag loops to the timeline, and perform other tasks.

Normally, GarageBand adjusts the sensitivity of its grid to match the way you're viewing your song. If you're zoomed all the way out, GarageBand assumes you're performing fairly coarse adjustments, such as dragging a region from one part of a song to another. In this case, GarageBand's grid will snap to the start of each measure.

If you're zoomed all the way in, GarageBand figures you must be making precise adjustments, so it adjusts its grid to snap in sixty-fourth-note increments.

You can override GarageBand's automatic grid sensitivity: just choose the desired value from the grid menu.

Click the timeline grid button ( ) to display the grid menu.

The "swing" options delay every other grid point. This lets you maintain a swing feel when dragging regions. The amount of delay is greater with the "Heavy" options.