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Garageband tutorial: musical typing

Garageband Tutorial: Musical Typing

From classical pianos to EDM synths, percussion to hard rock guitar sounds; Garageband 10 comes pre packaged with a ton of great sounding virtual instruments that can really bring your project to life.

Digging into the instrument sounds available to you is as easy as opening a new Software Instrument track and choosing a Patch from the Library pane, but what about actually playing your chosen instrument? Ideally you could attach a USB keyboard or controller to your Mac, but maybe you’re just getting started with Garageband and don’t have access to one? Or maybe you’re on the move and didn’t have room to pack your keyboard/controller?

Luckily Garageband has an ingenious built in solution – Musical Typing.

 

What Is Musical Typing?

What Musical Typing essentially allows you to do is use the keys on your Mac’s keyboard to play notes, chords and melodies.

Here’s how it works:

 

Musical Typing 1

To open Musical Typing, first click on “Window” in the toolbar at the top of your screen.

 

 

Musical Typing 2

Next, click on “Show Musical Typing” (Alternatively, use the keyboard shortcut ⌘+K)

 

 

Musical Typing 3

The Musical Typing window will appear in all it’s glory!

 

 

Here’s a rundown of the features:

 

Pitch Bend: You can use the 1+2 keys to adjust the pitch of whatever note/s you are playing in real time.

 

Modulation: Keys 3 through 8 will add a set amount of modulation to the note/s played. The effect will differ depending on the instrument you have selected.

 

Sustain: You can toggle sustain on and off with the Tab key.

 

Black and White Keys: These are the keys you’ll use to create your melody. Garageband presents them in a way that corresponds to a single octave (C3 to C4 by default) on a Piano keyboard.

 

Octave: Use the Z and X keys to shift octaves for lower or higher pitched notes.

 

Velocity: The C and V keys allow you to change to velocity (how hard the note is struck) of your chosen instrument sound.

 

All that’s left for you to do is hit record and start playing! It can take a bit of getting used to, especially if you have larger fingers (my big fat fingers seem incapable of playing anything but the simplest melodies in Musical Typing), but you’ll soon get the hang of it.

 

 

Quantizing

If you have a large number of tracks in your Garageband project, using a lot of plug ins or are running an older machine, you may find the notes you’re recording using Musical Typing don’t always register as they should – leaving some notes sounding out of time with the rest of your project.

This issue (known as latency) is caused by your Mac trying to do too many things at once and while there are steps you can take before recording your performance to minimize it, you can also have Garageband automatically fix smaller timing issues for you.

It’s called quantization and here’s how it works in Garageband:

 

Musical Typing 4

With the track you’d like to quantize selected, click on the Editor icon in the top right corner of the Garageband window (or use the keyboard short cut E).

 

 

http://thegaragebandguide.com

In the Editor window, click on the ‘Time Quantize’ drop down menu and select the note value you want to use (if you’re not sure which note value to use, try a few different ones out – there will almost certainly be a value that will ‘fit’).

 

 

Quantise 2

The notes that you’ve recorded will snap into the timing of the note value you chose and fixing any timing or latency errors!

 

 

Now that you know how to use Musical Typing in Garageband all that’s left to do is get stuck in and start experimenting…

Do you find Garageband’s Musical Typing function useful? Ran into any problems while using it? Leave a comment and let me know!

Show Comments (28)
  1. Thanks so much for your selfless dedication to all us GB users. This is a rare contribution in this age of narcissism.

  2. Patrick, your brilliant tutorials open up a lot of new ideas for this old guitar picker!
    Since I am not a keyboard player, I’ve been recording jazzy piano chords one note/one track at a time using musical typing. Question- Is it possible to use musical typing and the time quantize window to enter fat jazz chords one note at a time, but all on one track? (Hope that makes sense)

    1. Hey Lou. Glad to help! You can absolutely create chords one note at a time. Record one of your chord’s notes, then in the editor window, copy it and paste in the next note of your chord. Repeat until you have the chord you need.

  3. GB started off as an almost a “game”, but you demonstrate that it’s a powerful tool to learn, create, compose and make, real pro music. Thanks a lot Patrick from musicians and beginners. I’m very grateful to you for all your help.

  4. Hi Patrick,
    When ever I press the ‘A’ key for musical typing, it will perform the shortcut, Automation instead.

    The other keys that don’t have a shortcut make the screen flash white.

    Any ideas?

  5. What I want to play on musical typing spans two octaves. Is there a way to expand the range of the keys aloud to play? Example, I want to play an F# and then I want to play the F# above it, but I can’t because the next octave won’t play unless I move up an entire octave. I could use your help if you know of a solution.

  6. Whenever I record I can hear the other instruments in the background even when i stop the sound from them and just listen to my recording. Why do I hear it in the background of my recordings and how do I fix it.

  7. Does anybody out there use Musical Typing on a regular basis? I appreciate the feature but the programmers have not developed the device thoroughly. Example: I have attempted to play block chords and struggle to sound the notes fully. I am only able to play certain notes using the roll (tetrads) and it is very clumsy. Why are there only 18 notes included? By my count, up to 16 keys go unused and I believe the feature needs at least 24 (2-octave) notes to work effectively. Is there anybody out there who knows coding and can help me make a better keyboard? I really don’t want to go to the further expense of a MIDI keyboard or connecting cables/adapters for a solution. I would love to hear suggestions for remedies.

  8. Hi! Thanks for the rundown on musical typing! Really appreciate it. I have a question however, say I want to play two F#’s at the same time on the keyboard. Musical typing only allows for the C to F natural range of keys to play. Is there a way to change how the keys are programmed so that my F# wish can become a reality? Thanks again.

  9. Has anyone got an answer for Chaws? I’d like to know how to expand the range of the keys.

    Also how to change the pre-set range.

    Stan

  10. Both the new 10,2 and an old 6.5 won’t perform musical typing — the window comes up, but it’s grayed out. I’ve uninstalled and redownloaded and checks the connections. I’ve turned it off and on again. It doesn’t work but it has worked before.

  11. Thank you for posting this. I have just started learning to make music on Garageband. I don’t know why are my GarageBand songs so quiet. Do you have any ideas?

  12. Hi, this is my first week using garage band. I am using the software instrument piano as I don’t own a physical one, and here’s my question: how do you play a chord like Dmaj (A-D-F#) where A and D appear in the visible octave but F# is an octave higher? I know I can press X to move up octaves but… how to press two keys that are on different octaves at the same time? (I’m hoping what I wrote is understandable!) Thank you very much!

  13. You have written so beautifully and in such simple words. Thats the sign of a genius! Thanks for helping the likes of me.

  14. Can you use this function on on IPad? If so, can you point me in the right direction as where to find it? I haven’t found it yet.

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