Create a podcast-friendly project file - GarageBand Tutorial

Alright. In the previous movie, we saw how to set up GarageBand to record from your audio input device and then how to set the levels for your recording. So, we currently have a project with a single track ready to record. Let's look at some other things we can do to set up this project and optimize it for podcast recording. Now you may or may not be aware that previous versions of GarageBand used to have dedicated podcasting tools. These days, however, GarageBand is primarily a music creation tool. That doesn't mean you can't record podcasts with it, but there are a couple of default settings we should change since they're intended to be used for music recording. First, we don't need any kind of metronome or click to keep a beat while we're recording. So let's come up here and turn off the count in option. By default, that also disables the click or metronome so we won't hear any kind of beat in the background as we record. And since we don't need to worry about beats and measures, I'm going to click here to the left of the center display and switch its readout to time. That way, we can keep track of the length of the recording as it's being recorded. You can see that it not only changes to the center display up here, but also the display across the timeline right below it. So you can see it now displays in seconds. Next, it's a good idea to name our tracks, even if we currently only have one track. If you end up adding more, and you most likely will, it's important to have each one named so you can tell exactly what's on each track at a glance. So I'll double click where it currently says audio one. And I'll just name this box one for my main vocal track. Now I'll press enter. You can call your tracks anything you want, as long as the name makes sense to you. You might want to call it "My Track" or "Main Vocal" if its the track you're recording yourself onto. In fact, let's say for this podcast, I know I'm going to be interviewing another person on another microphone, so I'm going to create another track right now. I'll click the plus button up here. And again, I'll choose the microphone option. Here under details, I'll select the second input on my audio input device. Again, you'll only be able to do this if you have an input device with two or more inputs. Everything else here can stay the same and I'll click create. There's my second track. I'll name it right away. I'll just call this track, "Guest" since I'll be recording the person I'm talking with on this track. And I'll also want to go through the process of setting the levels for this track like we did for the first track in the previous video. Now I'm not going to walk through that right now, but just remember that each track you record, should have its levels properly set before you record. And again, if you need to make any changes to the input settings after you've set up the tracks, you can come down to the smart control area with the info button selected to find your settings. So you can see here, with the guest track selected, I'm recording into input two on my audio input device and with the first track selected, I'm recording into input one. But I could click this menu and change these around if necessary. Now optionally, if you want to apply any sort of effect to your voice or to other tracks while you're recording, you can select the track and then come over to the library pane here on the left click voice, and then play around with the different patches here. Most of these are set up for singing voices, though. You can also apply these after the fact, so I'm not going to select any of them at the moment. In a later chapter, I'll be talking about how to apply effects and things like compression to your tracks to make them sound better. But for now, I pretty much have this GarageBand project set up for podcasting. I'm going to choose File Save and I'll just save this to my desktop. And I'll call it, "Podcast, Episode 1" You can of course name your podcast files anything you want but it makes sense to at least number them so you'll be able to keep track of your multiple episodes. Now click save, and now I'm ready to record.