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Garageband 10 – Bus Channel Workaround

If you’ve ever worked on a large, multi track project in Garageband, you’ll be acutely aware of one of the program’s few limitations. There’s no option to group similar tracks together and apply compression or other effects to them all simultaneously.

It can be a time consuming process going through each track individually and tweaking everything to sound just right, especially if it’s important that they sound identical…

Luckily, there’s a simple way you can cut down the time it takes to do stuff like this drastically.

I show you how in the video below:

 

 

Have you ever found yourself limited by Garageband’s lack of Bus Channels? Are there any other features you’d like to see in future versions of the program? Let me know in the comments below – i’d love to know!

Show Comments (14)
  1. If you wanted two guitar tracks to sound the same you could also just copy ‘Rough Gtar #1’ & paste it onto a new track no? Maybe I’m missing the bigger picture. This seems very useful & time saving if I was experimenting with tones & wanted to save one’s preset(s) for future use.

  2. Patrick, I learn much from you . I hope to miss nothing you teach. I’m an old guy at 53 y.o. but always wanted to do my own recording as a hobby. With GB, a bit of computer savvy and a helping hand such as yourself and I’m having a GREAT TIME. Thanks for all you do.

  3. Hi Patrick, one question. What if I want to apply two different effects to a vocal track but both on the dry signal from the vocal track (effects not in a chain but in parallel). How can I achieve this?

  4. Wouldn’t it be easier to make a new track with duplicate settings or would that reset all multilayered effects that you personally adjusted?

  5. This is a helpful tip aside from the fact that once you selected the Rough Guitar Patch from the Library that it changed the name of your track, thus making it indistinguishable from the first track. I’d like to save a patch like this for vocals with multiple plug-ins on it. I would be applying it to up to 10 or more tracks, so having them all change to the same name would create confusion in the project. Then, I’d have to rename each of them back to what they were named before I loaded the patch. Seems like the time lost there would almost offset the time gained by loading all the presets, unless I’m missing something?

  6. I feel it’s easier to just press cmd+D for duplicate track and then hold shift to drag and drop a copy of the recorded audio on the new duplicated track.

  7. I don’t know if it’s shift command d or command d, but you can duplicate a track with the exact same settings. It’s a lot more tedious than a bus, but it works.

  8. hey Patrick,

    thanks for taking the time and effort to put these videos together………….very much appreciated!!

    Tony

  9. GarageBand on IPhone allows you to duplicate the track and keeps all your comp and reverb settings

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