(piano keys chiming) The interesting thing here is that depending on where you click, you'll get a slightly different sound. The keyboard will play whatever sounds of whatever instrument is currently selected in your track. Now, really either of these onscreen keyboards are a poor substitute for a real MIDI keyboard, but they may work in a pinch if you need to add a single note or two here and there. Let's start with the regular keyboard here. You can switch between the two types of keyboards with these buttons here in the upper left.
#Garageband mac keyboard piano software#
The Musical Typing window opens by default when you don't have a MIDI keyboard connected to your Mac and you create a new project with a software instrument track. Now, in case you don't have a MIDI keyboard, GarageBand does come with on-screen music keyboards that you can find under the Window up here. You saw how this works in the previous chapter when I showed you how you can take a software instrument loop and have the notes played by a piano or a guitar or a bass. That just changes the instrument that plays the data you recorded. All you have to do is select your track, go to Piano and select the instrument you want to use. You don't have to go back and try to recapture your performance by playing it again with a different instrument.
So, for example, let's say you recorded yourself playing the Classic Electric Piano that opens by default when we create a software instrument track in GarageBand, and you're really happy with your performance, but a week later you decide that you really prefer the sound of the Steinway Grand Piano for the part you recorded. The cool thing about this is that since you haven't actually recorded any audio, you can pick other instruments to play your performance after you've recorded it. When you play back your recording, GarageBand just reads that info you saved and plays the appropriate samples. The MIDI message of each note tells the MIDI device, in this case GarageBand, what note to play, but also sends information like how long the note was held, how hard you press the key, whether you were pressing a sustain pedal, and lots of other information.
#Garageband mac keyboard piano series#
What you're really recording is a series of MIDI messages. But the point is that when you record yourself playing a MIDI instrument in GarageBand, no audio is actually recorded. Other software instruments, like many of the horns and wind instruments, were made completely electronically. For example, the Grand Piano sound in GarageBand was made by recording the individual notes of an old grand piano, note by note. In some cases, a software instrument bank is comprised of samples that have been recorded from a real instrument. Software instruments are really just a large collection, sometimes called a bank, of individual audio files that mimic the sound of a real instrument.
As you've already seen, GarageBand contains tons of software instruments, all of which can be played using a MIDI keyboard. Nothing in the controller itself creates any sounds. There are no hammers or strings involved. When you play a MIDI keyboard, however, pressing the C triggers a sample or recording of middle C that's been saved on your computer.
Now, when you sit down and play a note on a real piano, let's say you play middle C, you're actually causing a felt hammer to strike a string in the piano, which resonates to produce a sound. MIDI instruments are often referred to as MIDI controllers because they're used to control MIDI software such as GarageBand. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, MIDI, which stands for musical instrument digital interface, is a method for electronic instruments to communicate with each other and with computers and various other devices that speak the MIDI language. So, to talk about working with software instruments in GarageBand, we have to talk about MIDI. I'm going to create a new empty project, and I'll choose a software instrument track for this. Now let's talk about software instruments.
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