The GarageBand User Guide for iPhone is the official manual covering how to use Apple’s GarageBand for iPhone to play, record, and share your music. Drag the yellow controls in the EQ display to adjust band 3 frequency and gain values. Band 3 control point: Drag the yellow control point (or the shaded area) to change the band 3 frequency and gain values. Band 4 On/Off button: A parametric bell filter that cuts or boosts frequencies around the set frequency. Drag the green controls in the EQ. A bright yellow line will appear, and you can add additional nodes. Drag a node down or up to decrease or increase the volume level for that track at the given moment. Rane SL1 Serato Scratch Live USB DJ Audio Interface with 2 Serato Control Vinyls. $69.00 + $14.99 Shipping. Record your audio track from built-in line input or from your audio interface. Choose plug-ins from “Library”. How To Fade In Garageband. Click the track you want to fade. Click Mix Show Automation from the menu or press A. Create points and adjust the yellow volume line. 1) Hit ‘A’ for Automation on your keyboard, and Garageband will bring up the yellow volume bar. 2) Drop two automation points on the yellow line (there are three in the image above because I made a mistake). 3) Now select both of the points by clicking and dragging a box around them.

Mastering music in Garageband is a fairly straightforward process. With some practice, it can be quick and easy.

When I first started out, I ran into a few problems with simple solutions that escaped me at the time, so I’ll be sharing some of those with you today.

I’m sure there are sophisticated ways of going about this with precise and premium plug-ins like FabFilter’s Mastering Suite from Plugin Boutique (which is typically described as the best you can buy), but in today’s tutorial, we’re just going to use all of the plug-ins that come default with Garageband.

You really don’t have to get too fancy when it comes to something like this. The simplest way of doing things is usually the best. Let’s just get right to it.

To master a song in Garageband:
1) Export your song as an AIFF
2) Import it into Garageband
3) Set up a Channel EQ, Compressor, and Limiter
4) Choose the “Pop” preset for the EQ, “Platinum Analog Tape,” for the Compressor, and then set the Limiter’s “Gain” to +2.0 and the “Output Level” to -0.1

The brief summary above is a quick and dirty way of going about it, however, for this walk-through, I’ll use a song that I created recently that includes a lot of MIDI instruments in addition to a guitar recording to fully show how I go about doing it.

Rather than going through a step-by-step process, I think it’d be more useful to have a beginner’s checklist at first, due to the fact we’re only doing very basic mastering.

However, afterward, I will guide you through a step-by-step tutorial.

Truthfully, if you’re reading this guide, chances are you’re not a professional mastering and recording engineer.

You may have to go somewhere else for more advanced tactics, for instance, Bobby Owsinski has a great book on mastering from Amazon.

Moving On…

When you’re just starting out, there are just a few basic questions in need of answering, and each of the three links below take you to articles and tutorials that I’ve written specifically for the subject.

For instance, what is compression and how do we use it? How do I adjust EQ so it actually sounds good? What’s the point of a limiter?

How do I export my music to SoundCloud and YouTube so it’s 1) actually listenable, and 2) as loud as my competition?

In fact, how do I upload my music to YouTube in general?

These are the kinds of question we want to answer at first. And this tutorial explores just a few of them.

In this guide, we’re primarily going to explore how to get a decent sounding mix uploaded to our favorite platforms and have it sound good.

The links above, however, we’ll answer some of the other questions.

Let’s start with the check-list

1) The first thing you want to consider is your VU meters on all of your track regions.

As I’ve mentioned in my mixing guide, you want to make sure your VU meters are going into the green for the majority of the track and only the yellow during the loudest parts of the song.

Your VU meters should never be clipping, whether we’re talking about the software instrument tracks, recorded instruments, loops, or other miscellaneous recordings.

If you’ve mastered a track where the VU meters are going into the red, you’ll notice the distorted sound in the final product.

2) The next thing you want to do is ensure your master volume slider on the top right-hand side is turned down to +0.

Although, it’s not a big deal if your master volume meter is going into the red.

I’m not entirely sure why the master volume doesn’t matter so much for this phase, but either way, I’ve noticed that if it’s going into the red a little bit, it doesn’t matter, but if it’s cranked, then it does.

3) There should also be no plug-ins running on your master channel. To check this, hit ‘B’ on your keyboard to bring up your Smart Controls, and then click on the “Master” option beside where it says “Track.”

Usually, by default, the Channel EQ plug-ins will be on, but there won’t be any boosts or cuts added to it. Just turn that bad boy off.

It’s ok if your individual track regions have plug-ins running on them, in fact, you can have even more of them if you want. It’s not a big deal.

4) By hitting the ‘A’ key on your keyboard, you can bring up the Automation track to see if there are any adjustments in volume you want to make.

The Automation channel is handy for setting up a volume increase or decrease depending on where you want changes in the mix.

**However, remember that you don’t want to increase the volume to a point in your mix where it’s clipping.

This is quite the annoying problem to have, because you’ll wonder why your song is clipping at certain points but not others.

Say, for example, you want the last part of your track to hit really hard, just hit the ‘A’ key, select the Yellow line to drop Automation points, and then adjust the volume according to an incline or a decline.

It’s fairly intuitive, so you should get it right away.

Mastering, like creating music, is an art form rather than a science, so, none of the following advice is meant to be like the only way of doing it. Everyone has a different way of making music.

Personally, I like to master a song as quickly as possible. Hopefully, I can have it finished in around 15 to 20 minutes, but sometimes, it takes even longer than that.

For this tutorial, we’ll run through how to master using just a few plug-ins, notably, the compressor, the Channel EQ, the multipressor, as well as the limiter.

How To Master Using My Step-By-Step Process

1) The first step in the mastering process is to check off all of the boxes that I outlined in my checklist above.

Garageband Yellow Line Map

You’re ready to export the track as an AIFF file. An AIFF file was created specifically by Apple Computers back in the late 1980s, and it stands for an “Audio Interchange File Format.”

An AIFF file is an uncompressed file format. Therefore it’s very large and high quality compared to a regular mp3 file. An mp3 is quite small.

You can export a track in Mp3 format or a WAV if you want, but the AIFF file is going to give you the highest quality recording to work with, so I’d suggest using it.

2) Click on the “Share” button in the top of the toolbar and click on the button that says “Export To Disk.”

3) In the drop-down menu, click on the circle that says, “AIFF,” and then hit the “Export” button.

From here, I make sure I’ve exported the song to my desktop rather than in my files somewhere because I’ve noticed it kind of disappears into the wilderness otherwise.

4) At this point, I’ll normally drag and drop the AIFF file from my desktop back into Garageband beneath all of my track regions.

In other words, I like to master it first using plug-ins and what not in the original file like you can see below.

The reasoning for this is that you can easily adjust the volume of other tracks without ha