Don’t rely on the Smart Drums, go manual and create sets of patterns and effects for your GarageBand tunes. Here’s how to create at 16-beat track drum section
There are two sets of drums that can be used in GarageBand for iPad. The Smart Drums and the Regular Drums. The Smart set just consist of placing drum symbols on a grid to create the overall pattern. The standard Drums come with three standard kits and three drum machines. The drum kit involve more manual playing with your fingers, but can still use some automation to provide the main track over which additional drum sounds can be placed.
The first thing to do is to plan out your drum sequences in terms of Song Sections so that you have drum sections for the intro, main song, chorus and ending. How varied these are is completely up to you but they are split into Section with user-defined bars. The default option is 8 bars, which lasts around 18 seconds. You can just copy these, but it’s a little easier if your main sections are 16 bars long and that’s what we are recording here in the step-by-step found below.
Banging The Drum | GarageBand For iPad
Set Up The Track
Load up GarageBand for iPad and then tap on My Songs to exit out of any current songs that are already loaded. Then you just need to tap the plus sign to create a new song and select Drums as the first instrument to use.
Main Drum Track
Go the Track view then tap on the Section Length icon in the left corner. Tap on Section A and change this to 16 for a longer track. Then, tap on the red record button and place two fingers on the Snare Drum, one above the other.
Start Drumming
Move fingers apart vertically to increase the volume, then twist them sideways to increase the drum speed. Record your main Snare sound all the way through to the end of the 16-bar track ten tap on the stop button.
Add The Rest
Move the counter back to the start of the track. Tap on Record again and as the existing drum track plays, add Bass drum effects throughout the track. Repeat the process for cymbals and hi-hat. This is the opening drum track that can be duplicated.
Around The Kit
There are more options than you might think for a set of drums that you just tap
Set The Length
The Song Section icon allows each section to be duplicated and the length to be set to a specific number of bars like 8, 16 and 32 or to be left on Automatic for a free-form recording session. Tap on Add for the next Section
Hit The Beat
The drums are impact sensitive so the harder you tap them, the louder the noise they make. Some drums and symbols also make more than one type of noise depending on where you tap them
Instrument And Song
The drum icon show that you are currently using this equipment to play and record with. Tap on the track selection icon next to it to switch over to the songtrack editing mode
Recording Options
Here are the Mixer options including setting the volume, master effects, amount of reverb from the kit and also the echo level to make it sound more cavernous. You can turn off the multi-effect drum recording mode as well
GarageBand For iPad – Automated Drums. As well as the drum kit here, there’s also the Smart Drum. To use this you place the drum elements on a grid that sets how loud and how complex the tune is. This is useful for a generic piece of drum sound in the middle of tracks but you’ll want to mess it up with some individual sounds for the intro, chorus and finish. Although we used the Snare drum in the step-by-step, you could set up the Low Tom for the main drumbeat using the manual drum kits.
See Also
- Your Guide To GarageBand For iPad
- Edit Your Music | GarageBand For iPad
- Utilise Setting To Record a Track | GarageBand For iPad
- Convert DVD To iPad – How To
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