Within the Library pane you should see a list that contains Clean Guitar, Crunch Guitar, Distorted Guitar, Experimental Guitar, Clean Bass, Crunch Bass, and Experimental Bass. If you don’t see the Library pane choose View > Show Library. Adjust the guitar’s tuners until each string reading is in the green. Pluck a string and the meter will tell you how close you are to the correct pitch. Now that you’re getting sound into GarageBand, select Brit and Clean again and then click on the Tuner button (the one that looks like a tuning fork) in the control bar. If you see nothing in the meter and your guitar’s volume knob is turned up, choose GarageBand > Preferences > Audio/MIDI and make sure that the Output Device and Input Device pop-up menus are configured correctly.
Feel free to select another track and enable its Input Monitoring button to hear its sound.
The sound of your guitar, as channeled through that track and its amp and effects, will play through the output device you’ve selected. To hear what you’re playing click on the orange Input Monitoring button in the track header. If you play your guitar you should see the meter within the track react. These range from “clean” sounds such as Brit and Clean and Amazing Tweed to tracks with a load of effects and overdriven amps such as Modern Stack and Maelstrom.īrit and Clean is selected by default. When the GarageBand window appears the track header will display 15 guitar tracks. From the Audio Input menu choose the input your guitar is using-Built-in Line Input if the guitar is plugged directly into the Mac or the name of the audio interface you’re using-and click the Choose button. If you don’t see the Details area at the bottom of the window click on the triangle next to Details. To do that launch GarageBand and, because we’ll shortly be looking at what it can with a guitar, choose Amp Collection from the project chooser.
Regardless of which you choose, you need to configure GarageBand so that it can “hear” your guitar. Configure GarageBand’s input and output settings.