How to Record in GarageBand
Transcript
Hi, my name is Beth K. Gibbs of Lift Podcasting. And I'm here to help you set up your podcasts so you're recording in GarageBand. So let's get started. I'm going to make myself smaller here, get me out of the way, so you can see the screen.
First thing we're going to do is open GarageBand. It's on Mac computers and the Applications folder. So double click on that, and it will open up GarageBand. The thing that happens first is it opens up the last file that you had open in GarageBand. So we actually want to click File > New. And it will open up this screen for us. We have an empty project and all of these settings, we don't need to worry about these right now because we're going to change the settings in GarageBand itself. All we need to make sure his empty project is highlighted and then click the Choose button.
Alright, so we have this window that pops up, we're going to be recording using a microphone. So that is correct, we're going to make sure that this microphone is selected. And then the only other thing we want to make sure is I hear sound from and then have our external headphones or whatever we're using to listen to our podcast on. I always recommend headphones. Make sure that that's selected here, and then click Create. Okay, so GarageBand is really set up for making music. You can totally record a podcast on it. It's just that you have to change some settings to make it kind of more conducive to podcasting.
So the first thing I always do is I close this little library tab, I don't need it. So I'm going to get it out of the way by clicking this button in the upper left-hand corner. And then up top here, we have this tempo and, you know, beats, bars, what key we're in, we don't need that we're not recording music. But what we do need is timecode, because we want to see how long we've been recording. So we can actually change this, if you click on the button here and go down to time, it will change it so you see timecode and it also changed it here along our our, excuse me, our track, the mouse got stuck there for a second. So now we have it set up for time. The other thing that they always have set up here is that there's a countdown and a metronome, we definitely don't need that random clicking for our podcast. So click both of these and turn them off. And now that's all set up for podcasting.
The next thing we want to do is set up our audio track. So this is where we're actually recording into. I'm going to change this to mic one. And right now it's this track is highlighted and track right here is highlighted. So what we're seeing down here are all of our track settings. GarageBand hides a couple of the settings from you by putting it under this plugins tab. So if you click here, it will drop down and you'll see all of these different settings that are on already, we don't want master echo. And we don't want master reverb on our speaking podcast. And the channel EQ is probably not set up exactly how we want it, so let's turn it off for now. When you're editing or if you really figure out like whose voice is on which track you can set up the EQ to be appropriate for that track. But for right now, it's fine to just record your audio completely raw. So now we have those two settings turned or excuse me, those three settings turned off. And we want to make sure that we have the right microphone selected right now we have no input. So I'm going to use this microphone, it's a Samson Q2U. I'll drop down and select that. And we can see that now we have my voices popping up here. So the input is working. And that's that.
So now my microphone is hooked up here, if I click record, it's going to start recording my voice. And I know it's recording my voice because there's a waveform right here. When I'm done with my podcast, I can click stop, and it will have my track there. Now, if you have multiple people recording, all you have to do is right-click on this track. My mouse keeps sticking. Right-click on this track and then click new track with duplicate settings. And it will actually make exactly the same track below it. We can change this to say mic two. And then if I had another microphone plugged in, another option would pop in here. Right now this is just showing me two different channels from this same microphone. That's because right here, this button is mono. They do it in a very visual way. So one circle is mono. If I click it here, you'll see two circles is stereo. So recording in mono is just fine for a podcast. In fact, it's oftentimes helpful to do that because the file size is smaller for mono files and stereo files.
So all that being said, I would select the second microphone right here for now, I'm not going to select anything because I don't have another microphone, but that's what you do and you can do that for, I would say up to four microphones on GarageBand. Beyond that it gets a little bit overwhelmed sometimes depending on the speed of your computer, but for most computers, I would say four microphones at the max in GarageBand. Yeah, that is that so you are all set up to record in GarageBand. If you have any podcasting questions, recording, editing, any sort of tech questions, let me know send them my way. Comment below. You know how YouTube works. Thank you so much for watching and talk to you next time.