Adjusting Your Time Scale and Working with Real Time

All of this musical notationkeys and measures and temposare great for the musically inclined, but Jennifer has had no musical training. All she wants is a loop that will run as long as her video. She knows her time-lapse video (from Lesson 7) is 1 minute long. How does that translate into measures?

Luckily, no math is required. At the bottom of the workspace is a digital counter.

The music note to the left of the numbers indicates that the counter is displaying musical measurement. For more practical applications of your music, change the counter to display time measurement by clicking the note.

The note becomes a clock, and the display changes to show hours, minutes, seconds, and thousandths of a secondperhaps more accuracy than you need. Now, by positioning the playhead in your music, you can see how long your music is runningor where you are within a piece of music.

NOTE

When you loop a bit of your music, the counter restarts at zerothe beginning of the loopno matter how many times the loop repeats.

The ruler across the top of the workspace is always expressed in measures. And measures do not consistently relate to elapsed time in different pieces of music. But as you build your music, and the length of your song increases, you may need to see more duration of your tracks at a glance.

The Zoom control for the workspace is (somewhat cryptically) nestled at the bottom of the Tracks column.

Click and drag the knob to increase (or decrease) the time span represented on the right side of the workspace. Whenever there is more to see than what is shown in the window, the familiar Mac scroll bar is available along the bottom of the workspace.

The measurement of time is the ideal way to find events in your video and make them correspond to moments in your music.

1.	Open Lesson12 > Finished_Timelapse_Project07 alias. This is the finished version of Jennifer's illustration of the Italian brushstroke technique. With the titles and fade-out, the video is precisely 1 minute, 0 seconds, and 7 frames long. The music for this should probably be relatively subdued. The only musical cuethat is, the only instance in the picture where she might want to have a corresponding change in the musicis when the video goes from the medium shot to the closer shot.
2.	Move the timeline to the point where the video cuts close. The counter at the playhead indicates this is 37 seconds, 8 frames from the start. This will be our cue point.
3.	Go back to GarageBand. With the counter set to display time measurement, you now have three factors to keep in mind as you develop your music: The song starts at 0, something happens at 37:08, and the song ends by 1:00:07. As you continue to work on your tracks, these cue points will be central to the creation of the structure you build in your song.