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Where Did Automation Go? Q&A #11

With a new modern design, added Drummers, new sounds and an abundance of interface improvements, it’s fair to say that GarageBand’s 10.2 update gives you a lot ot get your head around.

Having said that, feedback from The GarageBand Guide community has been almost unanimously positive.

It’s not perfect though, and there are a few new features and controls that could be more intutitive…

In this edition of GarageBand Q&A, I cover a couple of questions from the community  -Bob is wondering where Automation has moved to and BF can’t seem to update at all.

Got your own GarageBand question? Leave a comment below or get in touch on Facebook or Twitter!

Patrick
I've been a musician for longer than I care to remember and though I don't make a living in a recording studio, I have spent the last decade getting to know everything worth knowing about Apple's GarageBand on Mac and iOS!
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One Comment

  1. I’m going into voice acting and discovering that I suddenly need to become an instant recording/mixing engineer. Your tutorials are helping me the most – Thank you! But as I don’t have a music background (well, aside from being a high school band geek which was years before any Internet existed,) I’m having trouble getting a couple of things accomplished, especially as voice over education isn’t software specific in their instruction. They tend to educate us by assuming we’ll pick an editor or DAW that shows us, very clearly, what dB we are recording at and where our noise floor level is at. GarageBand doesn’t seem to work that way, but it is clear from your tutorials that I should be able to tell GB to not go above or below certain limits prior to doing my recording. Is that correct? And if so, what would be the best way to tell GB the following:

    I want to peak at -6 dBfs during recording.
    I want the noise floor not to exceed -60 dBfs during recording.

    As for compression … I get the idea, but all instruction we receive is about setting compression after-the-fact by visually nailing the average shoulder peaks (only a few software apps even allow this visual peek with an accurate, vertical dB scale on each track with +0.0 dB at the top) and using that average as a threshold with something close to a 2:1 ratio. Not sure how to translate this post-record compression with how GB does it. Thoughts?

    The final product after normalization should set those peak levels at a maximum of -1 dbfs.

    In fact, while I’m here, how cool would it be to have a GarageBand tutorial just for voice over talent – a growing field – whether we are doing commercial or narrative or character roles, with compression primarily needed only if we are also supplying background music or sound effects, which may or may not be required, depending.

    I’ve asked for a lot here, but hey … if you don’t ask … 🙂

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