Change the sound and feel of a whole song

So you've got the beginnings of a good GarageBand song...

...but it doesn't quite have that authentic hip-hop sound you were hoping for, or it's not poppy enough, or you want to make those bedroom-recorded guitars sound just that little bit more Live at Wembley. What can you do?

Fortunately, GarageBand has an almost instant solution for adjusting the overall feel and sound of a song, by way of the Master Track.

What's the Master Track?

The Master Track is GarageBand's way of allowing you to change settings that effect the entire song. It appears in GarageBand's main window along with all your real and software instrument tracks. (Actually, by default it doesn't appear at all. Hit B, or choose Show Master Track from the Track menu, and it will appear at the bottom.)

You can't, however, record music or drag loops onto the Master Track. What you can do with it, among other things, is automate volume and pitch changes (thus creating fade-ins, fade-outs, and key changes), but for this article, we want to access some of the Master Track's other settings.

Hit I (or choose Show Track Info from the Track menu) to bring up the Master Track's Track Info window so we can muck about with its presets.

The Master Track's presets

You'll recognise some of the settings you can change using the Master Track Info window, as they're the same as the ones you set when you create a new GarageBand song: tempo, time signature, and key. What we're interested in here, though, is the box just above these, the one that looks — like the one you use to pick a software instrument. By default, the selection is (surprisingly enough) Basic -> Default.

Start playing your song (hit the space bar), then choose Ambient from the left pane and Wide Spaces from the list that comes up in the right. You'll immediately hear a change in how your song sounds. In fact, choose any of the Master Track's presets and you'll hear a change, some subtle, some quite unsubtle. Some will sound good with your song, some won't. It all depends on the style of music you're working with, and how you want it to sound.

Experiment a bit.

So what's going on?

The way to understand what you're actually doing by choosing these presets from the Master Track's Info window is to click on the Details... triangle at the bottom of the window.

When you do, you'll see a list of effects somewhat similar to those you get for instrument tracks. The Equalizer and Compressor effects work in the same way with the Master Track as they do on instrument tracks, except that the effect setting you choose is applied to the entire song, not just — one track.

Similarly, if you choose an effect from the middle popup, it'll be applied to the whole song. You're not likely to do this much, unless it's a subtle effect. You could put the whole song through the Distortion or Phaser effect, but it might sound a bit strange.

But what about Echo and Reverb? These two effects look different on the Master Track Info window.

Reverb and Echo on the Master Track

These effects on the Master Track work slightly differently. What you're doing when you click the edit button and make some changes to Reverb or Echo is you're determining how those effects work when applied to instrument tracks.

This is all part of GarageBand's simplicity. Reverb and Echo effects are generally a bit more complicated than the simple sliders you get for the instrument tracks, but usually any changes you make to those effects, you'll want to apply in the same way to all instruments that have Echo or Reverb on them throughout the song. That's what the Master Track is for.

Take a look at the presets in the popup window next to the Reverb effect, for instance, and you'll see a series of descriptions from Bright Cathedral to Small Dome. This is because Reverb, added to an instrument, makes it sound like it's being played in a space, either large or small, empty or packed. Echo has a similarly "spacious" effect.

So what happens when you choose the various Master Track presets, like Live Gig? All that happens is that the settings for all of the Master Track effects are changed. The Reverb "space" is adjusted, Equalization is added, the whole song is Compressed a little and so on. Different genres of music use these effects differently, and often have different equalization settings and so on.

But really what it all comes down to is sound. How does each preset sound? Find the one that best goes with your track, play with it a bit if necessary, create your own even, and then get on with the business of making music.