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johnbro23

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 12, 2004
770
0
Pittsburgh, PA
I just got my first mac this week. I'm a musician, so I was looking forward to working with GB. My only question is how can change the loops' keys? I dont want to have to play everything in C, in which, it seems, almost all the loops are.

I'd like some violin to back up my recorded Ants Marching guitar riff :D
 
DOn´ t think you can

I don`t think you can change the keys of the loops. Thats why you select a key when you open a new song, cause all the loops will be in that key.
If youre a real musician, and realy into using the computer to make music, you`ve made the right hardware choise. Macs are superior at this. But GarageBand is inferior software compared to alot out there. It`s fine if you can´t afford anything else, but if you take your music seriously, cash out for protools/logic/cubase. Where you can also get great loops, but with more choises.

good luck
 
First, Snarf is correct that the loops will automatically be transposed into the key of the song you are working on. I could have sworn there was a pitch filter, but now that I look again, I can't find one. Soundtrack is a decent program, and I also use Reason. GarageBand is a toy, and I've made some really nice tunes on it, but you may want to spend some cash to buy a more powerful program.
 
All loops can be transposed in the timeline, double click an active loop on the arrange (or click the scissors icon with a clip hilited) and the waveform appears at the bottom, you can transpose the selected loop by an octave either way.

This isn't really a key change, if the loops are in a major key to begin with, thats where they'll stay, but it does add some flexibility to the arrangement, as you can apply different transpositions to different versions of the same loop in the same track.

GB is a toy to a certain extent, but the software running underneath is pure Emagic, you have multiple ESX24 engines each with its own dynamic time and pitch machine, this is mighty powerful stuff, especially for a rev 1 app. I've seen kids do some very impressive tracks with GB after only a few hours tuition, and in the hands of someone who can really play, it becomes very sophisticated.

As a feeder app for Logic or ProTools it's amazing, I've used it for rhythm sections on several projects, bounced to ProTools and completed with real musicians, the quality of the loops is high ehough to work in pro context mixes.

Anyway, for £25 whose arguing, is Psychosoft had made GB it'd cost £200 and everyone would be raving about it.
 
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