Section 26.3. The Mac Keyboard as Piano | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

26.3. The Mac Keyboard as Piano

It's nice that Apple provided a little onscreen keyboard so that even the equipment-deprived can listen to GarageBand's amazing sound collection. But you'll never make it to the Grammy Awards using nothing but that single-note, mouse-driven display.

Fortunately, a new feature called Musical Typing lets you trigger notes by playing, rather than clicking. This feature turns your Mac keyboard into a piano keyboard. It even lets you play polyphonically that is, you can play more than one note at a time. (Six-note chords are the maximum.)

Note: The Mac's keyboard was never intended to be chorded, however. Indeed, it's been carefully engineered to process only one keypress at a time, for word processing purposes. Therefore, playing chords using Musical Typing results in a subtle, mandatory rolling effect, as each note sounds a few milliseconds after the preceding one.If the effect becomes noticeable, you can always clean up the chords after recording, using GarageBand's quantizing feature (Section 26.11).

The row beginning with the letter A represents the "white keys"; W, E, T, Y, U, O, and P in the top row are the "black keys"(sharps and flats). As shown in Figure 26-2, having one row serve as "black keys" means that some computer keys produce no sound at all, because a real piano doesn't have a black key next to every white key. No wonder using Musical Typing takes some getting used to.

Tip: In GarageBand 1.0, the only way to perform using your Mac keyboard was to use the shareware program MidiKeys (part of the "Missing CD" of this book's first edition). In general, the Musical Typing feature is a heck of a lot easier to set up and use, but you still need MidiKeys if you want to play with both hands at once, using two different rows of keys.

Nonetheless, it's a powerful tool for scratching out GarageBand pieces when you're on a plane, on a bus, in bed, and anywhere else where lugging along an external keyboard would get you arrested, expelled, or divorced.

Figure 26-2. Top: The light gray lettering on the Musical Keyboard "keys" give you some indication as to what notes you'll hear when you press the keys on your Mac keyboard.
Bottom: Here's a more familiar depiction of what notes you'll hear when you press the keys on the top two letter-key rows.
The Tab key simulates a piano's sustain pedalwhen it's pressed, notes continue to ring even after you release the keys. The number keys manipulate virtual pitch-bend and mod wheels.

26.3.1. Musical Typing

To use Musical Typing, create a Software Instrument (green) track in GarageBand. (One way is to choose Track New; in the New Track dialog box, click Software Instrument. Choose an instrument from the right-side column, and then click OK.)

Now open the Musical Typing window by choosing Window Musical Typing, or by pressing Shift- -K.

Once its keyboard appears (Figure 26-2), try playing a few "keys" on the A row of your Mac's keyboard. You'll see the Musical Typing piano keys change color , you'll hear the corresponding notes play in GarageBand, and you'll see a flickering "light" in the time display (Figure 26-4). It tells you that GarageBand is receiving MIDI musical data.

At this point, you can use Musical Typing like it's a MIDI controller keyboard, including making GarageBand recordings (Section 26.5).

26.3.2. Control of Key Velocity

There's only one problem with using Musical Typing as you've read about it so far: you can't control the key velocity (Section 26.2) as you play. (Apple never designed the typing keyboard to be touch-sensitive, although the idea is intriguing. What would it domake the letters bolder the harder you hit the keys?)

The solution is to tap the C and V keysrepeatedly, if necessaryto simulate "softer" and "harder" key presses. This is not exactly a simple task when you're using both hands in the middle of a Rachmaninoff concerto, but if you record one hand at a time, riding the C and V keys with the other hand, it's a manageable arrangement.

Of course, you may also want to record your track with no velocity adjustments, and then adjust the key velocities later by editing the track (Section 26.3.2).

26.3.3. Tips and Tricks

Other than handling key velocity, Musical Typing does the best conceivable job of turning your Mac into a bona fide musical instrument. Here are some of its finer points:

Shift the entire keyboard up or down an octave at a time by tapping the X and Z keys, respectively.
"Press the piano's sustain pedal" by pressing Tab. Press once to "step on the pedal," press a second time to "release it."
" Turn the mod wheel" by pressing 4 through 8; see Section 26.9 for details on the mod wheel. (Higher numbers trigger greater turns of the modulation wheel.) Press 3 to turn off modulation altogether.
"Turn the pitch-bend wheel" by holding down the 1 key, or bend it up by holding down 2. (Alas, you can't control how much you "turn the wheel." You always get a pitch bend of 20 units up or down, on a scale of 0 to 127.)

Tip: Thanks to a bizarro bug in GarageBand 2.0.1, the pitch-bend keys don't work when you're playing certain key combinations, like the notes C, D, and any other "white key" note. Apple says it's working on it.
While Musical Typing is quite useful for recording new tracks, it's also extremely handy when choosing an instrument sound for a track.

Think about it: Ordinarily, when the New Track dialog box appears (Figure 26-3), GarageBand offers no way for you to hear what each listed sound sounds like (unless you have an external MIDI keyboard). Most people wind up laboriously clicking a sound's name, closing the dialog box, clicking the keys on the Garage-Band onscreen keyboard, double-clicking the track name to reopen the Track Info dialog box, and then repeating the whole ritual over and over.

But with Musical Typing's window open, you can click an instrument's name and then play a few notes on your Mac's keyboard to hear what it sounds likeall without leaving the Track Info dialog box.

If you fool around here long enough, you'll find some surprising selections, including sound effects, exotic percussion instruments, and traditional instruments that have been processed in wild, sometimes musically inspiring ways.

Figure 26-3. This dialog box appears when you choose Track New Track. These instrument sounds all look delicious , but how are you supposed to know which one sounds exactly right for your piece? Simple: Press a few keys on your MIDI controller (or, if youre using Musical Typing, the A row of your keyboard). Use your arrow keys to walk through the instrument list, and play a few more keys to hear the next sound.