This hint takes advantage of one of the Podcasting features in GarageBand 3 for musical use. In GB 3, one of the new Generators is “Sound Effects”, with presets such as “Applause and Laughter”, and “Radio Sounds” (which I’m particularly fond of). Let’s try it out:
- Create a new Software Instrument Track.
- Double click the track (or click the Info button) to bring up the details.
- Set the Generator to Sound Effects
- Set the preset to “Radio Sounds” (for now)
- Bring up Musical Typing (if you don’t have a MIDI keyboard hooked up) – Shift-Command-K.
- Type, you should be hearing various radio sounds corresponding to the keys.
Now this is cool, but it turns out you can add your own sounds to this incredibly simply: just drag a WAV, AIFF, or even MP3 file onto the keys in the Musical Typing window. This takes a little bit of finesse – if you click to focus on a Finder Window, GB hides the Musical Typing window – very annoying. The trick is to make GB not be full-screen, and have MT be the window with focus – then drag sounds from Finder onto the keys. Now, this is pretty primitive, so don’t expect things like timestretching to occur (this isn’t Ableton Live…) – but you can trigger samples, and do have a tiny bit of control over them (volume, filter cutoff, and release).
Some small caveats to this I’ve noticed:
- there may be a filename limitation – a file called TenzinJingme-djojungvariation.mp3 yielded an “ESX24 Instrument Error – Audio file “TenzinJingme-djojung#251D64.mp3†not found!”, whereas A1.WAV seems to have no problems. Keeping it under 20 characters seems safe.
- Be careful of punctuation in your preset names, calling one “g23’s sounds” yielded strangeness in that GB couldn’t seem to find the files, but “test2” worked ok.
For most people, this is probably a somewhat useless hint, but if you want to do live collage with samples, as I and my sometime band have been known to do, it’s well worth it, easier to use than DS-404, and much cheaper than Live or a hardware sampler. 😉