A.1. Measures

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To understand GarageBand's beat ruler, time display, grid system, and other elements, it helps to go back to the dawn of music notation. Giuseppe, or Gustav, or whoever came up with the precursor of modern-day sheet music, began with a set of horizontal parallel lines. It's called a staff , but it's the same idea as GarageBand's interface: it's a timeline. You read sheet music from left to right along this timeline.

Now, any sort of measuring stick, whether it's sheet music, GarageBand, or a yardstick, isn't very useful unless it's marked up into subdivisions. So Giuseppe divided his timeline into logical units called measures . If you saw the sheet music for "Fr re Jacques," each of these phrases would occupy its own measure:

Are you sleeping ?
Are you sleeping ?
Brother John ?
Brother John ?

See how those just feel like logical break points?

So now you know about measures . The numbers along the beat ruler (top of the GarageBand window) count how many measures into the song you are. The time display (the digital blue readout) also measures measures. And the largest you can make the light-gray lines of the GarageBand grid is "1/1 note," which, in most cases, means "one measure."

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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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