EP. 16: GarageBand – Muzica / Music (RO/EN)

Every good game and animation has to have good music, which is why it's essential to be able to make music easily and quickly, even if you may lack musical expertise, by using a music program for Loops / Samples. I use, GarageBand, a free program. With it, you can also compose your own music from scratch, which makes it a very versatile program, but you can only get it on Apple devices, like an iPhone or MacBook. You can find similar applications for Android or Windows, but they should be similar in usage to GarageBand.

So, let's open GarageBand together! On the first screen that we will see, we can create a new project, and at the bottom of the window there are some settings we can adjust. In the second episode of the course, we talked about rhythm, which we will now be putting to use in making music. We can change the Tempo to modify the speed of the song and the Key Signature to affect the pitch of the sounds in our song. We will be able to change these values again later, when we already have parts of our song built, so that we can see their effects in action.

After we have created our project, we need to add a new Track. We will click on MIDI, and then continue, even though we will not be using it for what we want to do, but we cannot go further without adding an initial track. We can delete it after we bring in some Loops by right clicking the label of the track and choosing Delete. We cannot delete it now, however, because if we do, we will have to repeat the step with adding a MIDI track, since we haven't yet added any Loop tracks.

We will be closing the panels with settings for the MIDI track from the buttons in the top left, so we can open the Loops panel from the top right. In this panel we can listen to the Loops found in the long list by clicking on their icons, we can sort them from the buttons at the top of the panel and, if we find any that we like, we can drag them using left click into the empty space under the existing Track to add them to the song. We will need to do this with as many Loops as we can, searching for ones we feel like they sound good together, making sure they fit harmoniously, combining melodies with drum patterns and complementary effects.

To rearrange the Loops we have gathered, we can hold left click at the center of a loop and drag it around, moving it along the track left to right or going up and down to change which track it is on.

If we hover the mouse over the right side of a Loop, two buttons are revealed. By pulling on the top one, we can extend the Loop as we drag it towards the right. The extended area of the loop will appear darker to signify that it is a repeated segment of the Loop it is part of.

By dragging the lower of the two buttons to the left, we can cut the duration of the loop to shorten it so it can match the length of other chosen Loops.

If we right click on a Loop, a menu will open that allows us to Copy the selected Loop. Once we have something copied, right clicking on the empty space of a track will allow us to Paste the Loop. When pasting, the Loop will be aligned to the position of the time cursor, as long as there is enough space for it to fit at that position. If other Loops obstruct it, it will be pushed towards the closest available empty space on that track.

When arranging the Loops in our track, we also need to consider the length of the song. We can change the end of the song by dragging the End Marker in the top right of the screen.

The labels on the left of the tracks have volume sliders, allowing us to modify the volume of their respective tracks. The volume of the Loops on a track depend on the track's volume, which is why it is useful to arrange Loops on different tracks, keeping some instruments louder or quieter during only specific parts of the song.

We have two more buttons that will help us in editing the song more efficiently: the Mute button can turn off the volume of a certain track in case we may want to test what the song sounds like without a specific instrument or to find out where certain sounds come from in the mix.

Solo is used to isolate tracks, making it useful in listening to a specific loop alone or turning more tracks to the solo setting to hear how they sound together without the rest of the song. Its effects are directly opposite to the Mute button and both of them can achieve the same thing, but it is useful for when there are too many tracks to go and mute every single one other than the one we are trying to hear.

Just like we said at the beginning of this episode, we can change the speed of the song by adjusting the Tempo, which is found at the top of the screen. To change it we just need to left click the number and drag up or down. We can also change the Key Signature of the song by clicking it and choosing one from the list, hearing its effect when we play our song so we can choose which one sounds best.

Once we are satisfied with what we have created, we need to go to File - Save As... and choose where we want to store our file.

After which we can export the song by going to Share - Export Song to Disk...

In the window that opens, we need to select the format as MP3 and pick the folder we want our song to be output into, after which we press continue and we are done! The song's finished, Grandpa!

In the following episode, you will learn how to record and edit sounds for games and animations using a program called Audacity. Until then, practice your talent and enjoy doing it, making songs like you've learned now. I know I will!