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Compose in Garage Band from Your Mac's Keyboard
04/12/2007

Picture this: You're on a cross-country flight. Ack! Six hours on a plane. Do you want to watch the in-flight movie on those awful little screens (ugh!) or do something creative? One of the coolest features in Garage Band is the ability to compose using your Mac laptop's keyboard. In our scenario, you whip open your laptop and fire up Garage Band. From the Window menu, choose Musical Typing to open its window, which displays exactly which Mac keyboard keys correspond to specific notes. Once you get the hang of it, you can easily use your laptop keyboard to audition software instruments or even record performances, which you can later polish up with a bit of editing. You can play melody lines or even chords and by using the Z and X keys, it's easy to change octaves. The C and V keys control velocity, while numeric keys can provide pitchbend and modulation. Try it! Before you know it, you'll be placing your seat in its upright position, ready for landing!





Other Techtips from April 2007:
April 30 - Your Amplifier is Dangerous!
April 27 - Is Your Guitar Amp Transformer Ready to Retire?
April 26 - Adding Data to Existing Audio in BIAS Peak
April 25 - Entering a SysEx Message in Apple Logic Pro
April 24 - Fixing Dropouts in Ivory
April 23 - Understanding Mid-Side Miking
April 20 - A Simple Trick to Determine Correct Speaker Wire Polarity
April 19 - Q: Can I run more than one ReWire slave from the same host at one time?
April 18 - Using PZM Mics in Big Rooms
April 17 - Storing Guitars Safely
April 16 - Using Kontakt 2's Script Editor
April 13 - Quickly Adding Modulators in Kontakt 2
April 12 - Compose in Garage Band from Your Mac's Keyboard
April 11 - Using GarageBand's Built-In Tuner
April 10 - When to Change Your Guitar Strings
April 09 - MOTU Library Locations
April 06 - Safe In-Ear Monitoring
April 05 - Creating New Grooves from Old in Reason 3.0
April 04 - Importing Vision DSP MIDI Files Into ProTools LE
April 03 - Mapping Samples to Zones in Kontakt 2
April 02 - Bigger Windows in Kontakt 2


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