Reversing tracks

[live4ever]

Is there any way to reverse a phrase recorded from a guitar? This is mainly for 3-5 second riffs that come at certain chord changes.

 

[Oroboros]

Yeah... But you're not going to like it :-/

The easy way is to play the guitar's notes the order you wanted them in in the first place

However, assuming you want the full-on reversed playback 'nyob-nyob' effect (reversed 'boing-boing'), you will need to do several steps, only one of which is in GarageBand:

1) In iTunes, set your Import preferences to AIFF;
2) Record the guitar phrase in GB;
3) Export that phrase (with any FX on it) to iTunes;
4) Open your new iTunes file in a wave-editing program (suggestions ask for!);
5) Reverse the wave form and save as a new AIFF file;
6) Open this file with SoundTrack Loop Utility ( download here --> ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Development_Kits/Apple_Loops_SDK_1.1.dmg.bin );
7) Turn this file into an Apple Loop and save it in an appropriate location (tutorial here --> http://www.icompositions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=413 );
8) Open the loop up in GB - insert as required.

Yeah... Messy.

If you have great timing and a good wave-editing package that allows you to record, you could replace steps 1-4 with "record your guitar phrase in the wave-editing program".

Hope this helps. I really would like to know what simple OS X wave editors are out there.

-Oro

 

[Oroboros]

Waveform Editor = Audacity?

I really would like to know what simple OS X wave editors are out there.

Doing a little bit of web-prowling turned up Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ which does reverse wave transformations. It's free and has basic effects. Woo.

-Oro

 

[toots]

Is there any way to reverse a phrase recorded from a guitar? This is mainly for 3-5 second riffs that come at certain chord changes.

You can record the guitar in Sound Studio (a cool cheap program, that actually came with my 10.2 eMac) and reverse it easily there. Then you can drag that file into your GB song. It won't technically be an Apple loop I guess, unless you use the Soundtrack Utility, but it might just work okay.

 

[mikeyredk]

i like audicity its a great free app

if you have devo "whip it" reverse it and listen closely

if you like the song and your a pot head guess you know who you can blame

 

[live4ever]

The way I was doing it was recording in Sound Studio reversing it, exporting as an aiff and dragging and dropping into GB.

It would nice if GB could do it directly though.

 

[Oroboros]

It would nice if GB could do it directly though.

I'm kinda glad it doesn't That sort of wave manipulation might be taken for granted these days, but considering GB's purpose, it could add quite a bit of confusion.

You couldn't reverse-wave MIDI trax, for instance. Reversing note-order won't give you the nyob-nyob effect. I think it would be tough to reverse-wave Apple loops within GB - There are certain tempo, info and stress elements that could throw a beat track or instrument track completely out of time, and a beginner could make a real dog's breakfast of it, trying to sync things back up.

So, having a feature that only works on acoustically recorded data, and is faded out for other tracks, is a move away from the 'make music now' simple approach GB is geared to do.

If wave transformations were to be added for all types of trax, GB engineers would have to find a way to 'render' MIDI trax (and its internal sound sources and effects) into a 'recorded' or acoustic track. The major drawback of this is inefficient playback. MIDI trax are cheap on data, and you should be able to load up several layers of MIDI trax on a small system without latency issues. But try and playback several full quality acoustically sampled tracks at the same time in GB, and you're asking for a world of frustration.

Intermediate to high-end composition software like Logic, ProTools, CuBase, etc etc are geared for wave-intensive tasks, and don't require the software overheads GB has in order to make various sound datatypes playable and simple to use.

-Oro