Make sure your piano track is selected then click on the dial icon in the top left of GarageBand’s screen to open smart controls. The Space Designer being my personal favourite. GarageBand has loads of great stock reverb options available. Repeat for all the automation points along your region.įinally you will probably want to add some character and depth to your piano sound by slapping some reverb onto it. You can always adjust to your liking afterward. Make sure you drag it all the way down to zero as this gives the most changes. Now, click on and drag the automation point on the left of your group of two all the way down to zero. Now you want to place automation points along the orange automation curve, one at the point where your main notes kick in and another on the very next point on the grid. If you click on that menu, you can select ’sustain’ from the next menu.
An automation window will appear beneath the piano roll.
Click the Automation icon in the top left of the window.
GARAGEBAND HOW TO PLAY PIANO SOFTWARE
However you do it, switching up the velocity of your notes goes a long way towards humanizing your software instrument sound.Īnother great way to humanize the sound of GarageBand’s piano sounds is to use automation to simulate the pressing and releasing of a piano’s sustain pedal.ĭive back into your track’s piano roll. Or you can change the velocity of groups of notes. You can go through and adjust the velocity of every individual note. To give these notes a more natural feel, jump in and manually adjust the velocity of the notes. This results in an unnatural, robotic feel when you play the notes back.
If you’ve drawn in notes using the pencil tool in your software instrument track’s editor window, or recorded a melody using a controller that isn’t velocity sensitive, the velocity of your notes will all be the same. Velocity is the measure of how hard a key is pressed when you play or record a key on a piano. Depending on how you’ve recorded your software instrument performance, you may need to do a little work with the velocity of your notes to make them sound a bit more natural.