OutGrowing Your Garage: Moving From GarageBand To Logic Pro X

A Mac user who is a musician will likely have used GarageBand at some point in their career. What's the point? The basic edition of GarageBand 10 is free, but for only $5, you can access 200 sounds, 2,000 loops, 15 drummers, and 40 guitar and piano Basic Lessons, among other features. Multi-instrument input is supported, as well as virtual instruments, loops, ramps, and pedalboard effects for both guitar and bass players, as well as mixing tools capable of producing a great demo.

4/4-Breaking

When starting a project in GarageBand, you get to pick the time signature. Several aspects of the song's vibe may be affected by the time signature you pick, including how music notation appears in the Score editor for software instrument tracks, the metronome click, and the drumming rhythm.

Except if your project has numerous time signatures, for as 16 measures in 4/4, 2 measures in 3/4, and then back to 4/4, this is OK. The metre may be changed at any point in a GarageBand project, but when you do, the metre changes for the whole project, not just a specific section. A single project can contain any number of time signatures, and Logic Pro X offers a variety of ways to accomplish it.

Mix Things Up

In most recording studios, you'll see the engineer sitting in front of a big mixing console, equipped with faders and buttons. This mixer is nothing like GarageBand's. If you enable automation controls, you'll see a pop-up window that lets you automate the volume and pan of each track and make some tweaks to GarageBand's smart controls to the left of each track.

Window >'' Open Mixer (Command-2) brings up a virtual mixing board with a pan knob, volume slider, and mute and solo buttons, among other things, in Logic Pro X. The virtual mixing board also features inserts for both audio and MIDI effects.

Whenever Anywhere

Apple added Smart Settings in GarageBand 10—effects and controls tailored to the instrument and track you've picked specifically. For example, the Tremolo, chorus, and reverb are common on electric piano sounds. Previously, you had to open an Info pane, select an Edit tab and then click an empty effects slot to access all of GarageBand's effects in prior software versions. When you double-click on an effect to assign it, you can use a preset or manually adjust it.

Composing with Logic Pro

At the bottom of your GarageBand window, when you double-click on one of the software instrument tracks, you will get a piano-roll representation of the data it contains. The track's data will be shown as musical notation if you click the editor's Score button. Editing notes and adding new ones is possible while holding down the Command key in that view. You may even print off a single section when displayed in Score view. This can be done using Logic Pro X, but it may also be a replacement for a separate notation programme in some circumstances.

Song-Pitching

You may often fix pitches that deviate from their intended pitch in GarageBand. It's a good function, but you can't fine-tune the pitch using it. Flex Pitch, a new tool in Logic Pro X, gives all of these capabilities and more. Flex Pitch allows you to treat a recording like a MIDI track in that you can modify the pitch of individual notes by moving the Flex Pitch box up or down. Find the note in the waveform display and move the Flex Pitch unit down one step if you accidentally played a D instead of a C on your guitar.

The Drummer

Logic's Drummer track, which features actual drummers performing a range of kits and styles, has been ported over to GarageBand. By sliding a dot over an X-Y controller, you can change the patterns they play, making them more or less complicated and louder or softer.

Using the track's smart controls, you may also alter the drum mix by adjusting the kick drum's volume and the snare drum's loudness. You may change the drums in any kit to suit your needs. Replace your kick drum with one that has a louder ring on it. The tuning, dampening, and gain may also be adjusted for each drum.

Tuning Other Instruments

GarageBand 10 has a small selection of Logic Pro X-derived instrument sounds, and they sound fantastic. A Fender Rhodes-like piano, guitar, or analogue synthesiser sound are all examples of completely realised sounds. But you can't mess with their core characteristics using Smart Controls in the app. In addition to the sounds, Logic Pro X gives you access to the tools used to produce them. An extensive collection of virtual synths, drum machines, and historical instruments is available by selecting the Instrument control on a channel strip.