Are your musical ideas bigger than Brat, more commercial than Coldplay or scarier than Slipknot? Then it’s time to recruit the ultimate musical companion: GarageBand!

Written by Carrie Marshall

Image credit: Apple Inc

Making and sharing music is one of the most fun things you can do on a Mac. And you don’t need to be a musical maestro to get involved. Indeed, with GarageBand, you don’t even need to know how to play an instrument to make banging beats or memorable melodies.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or a grizzled muso, everything you need to make amazing music is right there on your Mac – and it won’t cost you a penny, because GarageBand is free.

In this tutorial, we’ll discover how you can make your own music using Apple Loops, software instruments and real instruments, and we’ll also look at the add-ons and accessories that can turn even the most modest Mac into a superb music studio. We’ll show you how to share your songs, and we’ll investigate the iPhone and iPad apps you can use to make music on the move, or to capture ideas you want to work on later.

Whether you’re a rocker, a rapper, a disco diva or a classical composer we think you’ll be delighted by the things GarageBand can do for your music – and by the little tricks and tools it offers that can transform a ‘pretty good’ idea into something even greater.

Are you ready? Then as those legendary punk rockers the Ramones so beautifully put it: hey ho, let’s go!

Image credit: Apple Inc

Get started with GarageBand

Let’s start making your first musical masterpiece

There are four ways to get music into GarageBand. The first is to play musical instruments and record them, either as audio tracks for things like guitars or voices, or as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files for electronic instruments such as keyboards and digital drums. With MIDI, you can then swap instruments for completely different ones, edit the notes and move them around although, as we’ll discover, GarageBand can do some cool things with audio recordings too.

The second way to make music is to program virtual instruments or external ones, again using MIDI – so, instead of playing the notes on an instrument, you draw them on a grid, telling GarageBand what to play when.

The third way is to use loops, which are pre-recorded or pre-set snippets of sound that you can use rather like LEGO blocks for ‘building’ music.

The fourth way is to mess around with as many or as few of these techniques as you like. That’s our preferred option: we record bits, program other bits and use loops too. And GarageBand is quite happy mixing up those methods.