Building Drum Tracks in GarageBand Efficiently

If you can’t find a specific set of appropriate loops for your drum track, you’ll probably be tempted to create your own by recording each drum or percussion instrument on its own track. This works well and usually sounds more realistic, but where you run into a problem is when you suddenly run out of tracks for your other instruments because the drums ate up all your space in the Arrange window. Here’s an easy fix: Create your own drum/percussion file, which may end up using 10 or more individual tracks. Once you’re happy with the drums, go to the Share menu and then select “Export Song to Disk.” This will take all your tracks and combine them into one file. You should get a prompt asking you if you want to Export your Song to disk in CD quality. Beneath that, there’s a box marked Compress. Unless you want the drums compressed, make sure that box is unchecked, then hit Export and save the track to a convenient location. If you saved it to the desktop, you can now open a New Song file and simply drag and drop the percussion track from the desktop into your new project window. Now you have lots of room to create new tracks.