There's more to GarageBand for iOS than meets the eye (and ear)! If you've explored all it has to offer, now's a good time to add some free sound effects, and Mike Watkinson shows how.
Sound Effects In Garageband Ipad

I can almost guarantee that at some point in your Garageband career, you’re going to want to get more sounds and add some new instruments and/or loops to the ‘vanilla’ selection that comes with the program. Maybe you’re looking for a specific instrument sound or want to fill out your project with loops from a particular genre. Quick Start 6 Recording Audio in GarageBand 7 In the Track Info pane, select Vocals from the list on the left, then select No Effects from the list on the right. With these settings, you have just chosen to record a vocal track while disabling all effects. If you can tap, you can play. GarageBand comes with beautiful and highly expressive Touch Instruments that sound and respond just like the real thing. Play keyboards, guitars, and bass, as well as sounds designed for EDM and Hip Hop. Smart Instruments make you sound like a pro — even if.

GarageBand for iOS is a great app for creating music, but what if you have a project in mind that requires specific sound effects? Unlike the Mac app, GarageBand for iOS has a limited range of built-in sounds, so this tutorial shows you how to grab what you need from free-to-download websites like freesound.org.

Sound Effects In Garageband Ipad 2

Sound Effects In Garageband Ipad

Get started with GarageBand for iPad The first time you open GarageBand, you see the Sound browser, where you can choose a Touch Instrument to play. There are Touch Instruments for keyboard, guitar, bass, drums, strings, and more, designed to help you make music easily.

Download

First you will you need an app that lets you download assets (like audio files) from websites. There are plenty that do this as downloading stuff is a popular activity! One that I have stumbled across recently that makes this fairly easy is iDownloads Pro as it has a built-in browser and file manager, and it’s only $0.99!

In the browser of iDownloads, navigate to freesound.org, or your website of choice for downloading free-to-use audio files, and make sure you read the licence agreements carefully—no stealing please!

Freesound.org requires you to be logged in, but once you find a sound you want, tap the ‘Download’ button. Choose ‘Download’ from the pop-up menu.

As with all apps of this type the file will download into the File Manager of the app itself—if you have already created sub-folders this will make organization easier.

Locate your file in the File Manager section and tap the blue arrow next to its name.

Tap the ‘Open with’ button which will make the ‘Open in..’ dialog appear (yes I know, why isn’t the ‘Open with’ button labelled ‘Open in..’?) Currently GarageBand is lagging behind other audio apps like BossJock and Audio Mastering for iPad which directly support the ‘Open in..’ protocol (strange as Apple develop both iOS and GarageBand!) so you will need to choose an audio editor app like TwistedWave or Hokusai (with Tools pack) as an intermediate step. So ‘Open in..’ one of these apps.

Edit, Copy, Paste

In the audio editor app carry out any editing that is required. How to use garageband ipad.

Sound Effects In Garageband Ipad Pro

Copy the audio file to the AudioCopy clipboard—this will enable you to paste it into GarageBand.

In GarageBand, create an audio track. This means choosing one of the two instruments that support audio files, the ‘Audio Recorder’ track or the Guitar Amp’ track. If you are starting a project from scratch you will need to ‘record’ something so a project is created and you can see the instrument as a track—then delete what you recorded.

In Tracks view tap on the track background—a pop-up menu with the ‘Paste’ option will appear.

Sound Effects In Garageband

Paste the audio file from the AudioCopy clipboard into your project. GarageBand doesn’t have an audio file manager either (like Logic Pro’s Bin) so to use the sound effect in other projects you will need to copy and paste it from one to the other. It’s probably worth creating a project just for keeping sound effects in for this very reason!

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