10.7. Lose Some Software Instrument Voices

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Some instruments, like flutes and kazoos, can play only one note at a time ”in software parlance, one voice at a time. A piano, meanwhile, can theoretically play 88 notes at once, although you'd need a few friends to help you press the keys if you wanted to hear more than 10 notes simultaneously .

But the more Software Instrument voices GarageBand must play, the more your Mac sweats. As shown in Figure 10-4 at bottom, a certain pop-up menu in the GarageBand Preferences dialog box lets you limit the number of voices that get played . In a pinch , you can set a limit on these voices, thus saving GarageBand further effort and sometimes making an unplayable song playable again on your Mac.

The wording of this dialog box is a tad cryptic, in that it refers to "sampled" and "other" voices. To comprehend this lingo, it helps to understand the two different ways that GarageBand can create Software Instrument sounds:

  • With samples . A sampled instrument sound began life as a recording of a real-world instrument playing one note in a real-world studio. Pressing a key on a MIDI keyboard triggers a playback of that short recording. In the case of woodwind instruments, the sampled sound seamlessly repeats for as long as you press the key.

    In GarageBand, all the woodwind, brass, piano, guitar, bass, strings, and drum sounds are sampled sounds.

  • With synthesis . The rest of the Software Instrument sounds are created using software algorithms; in essence your Mac becomes a musical synthesizer. GarageBand's clavinet, organ, electric piano, and synthesizer Software Instrument sounds are all created this way.

    Synthesized sounds put a greater strain on your Mac than sampled sounds, since GarageBand must compute these sounds on the fly.

When you inspect the dialog box in Figure 10-4, the options in the lower pop-up menu should make more sense. Suppose, for example, that you choose "10 sampled, 5 other." You've just specified that no Software Instrument will be allowed to play more than five notes simultaneously if it's an electronic keyboard sound (organ, electric piano, and so on), or more than 10 notes at once for any other Software Instrument.

Now, you might be aghast at this suggestion. Surely eliminating notes from your chords would eviscerate your harmonies, leaving them sounding hollow and empty.

In truth, though, you might never miss the notes that GarageBand leaves out of a busy orchestration. Meanwhile, thinning out the voices could make all the difference in a GarageBand composition that's too complex for your Mac.


Tip: Speaking of voices: When keyboard players attempt to create guitar parts by playing a MIDI keyboard, they often forget that a guitar has only six strings. If you play freely with both hands on the keyboard, using all 10 fingers, you may inadvertently create a guitar part that would be unplayable on an actual guitar.
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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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