Editing real instrument recordings (part 1)

So you've spent hours perfectly recording a real instrument part into your latest GarageBand masterpiece, but when you play it back you realise there's a tiny glitch. Something went pop or click, or perhaps the cat jumped onto your lap with a meow while you were pausing between lines of the chorus.

If everything is perfect but that one glitch, you might be tempted to leave it in rather than re-record, simply because GarageBand doesn't offer much in the way of editing a real instrument part once it's recorded.

But there is a way round it. In this two-part article, we're going to look at editing a real instrument part you've recorded. First let's look at a way you can use GarageBand to edit out an unwanted portion of a recording.

Lickety Split

Using GarageBand you can replace an unwanted portion of a recording with silence. Here, for instance, is a part that needs editing. It's a lead guitar lick, and is just what I want apart from one annoying pop caused by a bad cable. (Okay, I should buy better cables, but let's just go with the example.) The bit I want to remove is the spike-shape in the audio wave just before the red position marker:

How do I remove it? First, bring up the Editor portion of GarageBand's window, by clicking the scissors button, or pressing -E. Use the zoom scroller in the bottom left-hand corner of the window to zoom in till you can see the glitch it a bit more detail. Now click and drag to highlight the section you want to remove:

Note that you can turn off GarageBand's Snap to Grid feature to get a bit more accuracy in where your selection starts and finishes. (With it on, GarageBand will automatically select chunks of a minimum of a 16th of a beat in length, the exact size of the grid-snap depending on how far in you've zoomed). You can toggle this option on and off via the Control menu, or by pressing -G.

Once you've highlighted the section to remove, double-click it. GarageBand will turn the highlighted section into a separate part, leaving you with three parts in all — the bit before the part you want to remove, the part you want to remove, and the bit after it — as you can see in this picture:

Now it's simply a matter of selecting the part to remove and hitting delete. You can't select it in the Editor window, however, so you'll have to select it by clicking on it in the upper part of GarageBand's window, the tracks window. Hit delete and the unwanted part disappears:

(If you're tidy minded, like I am, you might be tempted to select the two remaining parts of your recording and hit -J to join them together, but doing this simply re-inserts the part you've deleted.)

Although this is a good method for getting rid of unwanted parts of a recording, it isn't as versatile as what you get with the more fully-featured (and expensive) music applications. In the next part of this article, I'm going to look at using an external audio editor to make changes to a GarageBand recording.

See also

Editing real instrument recordings (part 2)