Reverb in Garageband
Wheee! Garagband!
Working in Garageband was great when I first stared recording digitally. My dad (the coolest one in world) had just bought me a Presonus Firepod (10X10 interface) and an Apple G4 laptop. Up until then I had been using a Yamaha 4-track casette deck, with DBX noise reduction and varispeed knob…soooo cooolll. But moving into digital was awesome.
Multiple tracks? Check.
Volume/Pan Automation? Check.
Monitor Inputs and add reverb to headphones? Check.
Free? Double-check.
I was in a whole new world.
But the more I learned, the more I wished I could do more. The biggest annoyance for me was that everytime I asked someone “how do you get your reverb to sound like that?” They always responded “you’ve got to EQ it.
“But there’s no way to put effects on your reverbs,” I thought, “Reverbs ARE effects. What the hell are they talking about?” (I hadn’t even heard of effects bussing yet.) Once in a while I work with someone using Garageband, and I still run into this problem. How do you get reverbs mixed right, when you can’t do anything to them? You see, Garageband still doesn’t support setting up aux tracks/busses. It uses them for the “echo” and “reverb” controls, but those are hard coded and you can’t add fx to them.
The simplest workaround is to use a reverb plugin that has built in EQ controls. Garageband has one called AUMatrixReverb. Here’s a picture:
AUMatrixReverb
Um… isn’t Garageband supposed to be SIMPLE? This is insane. All I want to do is turn the Hi’s nd Low’s down on my reverb, and instead I’ve got to learn a page of sliders? Well the truth is, most reverbs are this complicated – they just show the controls with pretty knobs and buttons. Garageband has an annoying tendency to replace the graphical interface with a bunch of sliders.
If you want something a bit simpler – and I definitely did – check out Ambience by Magnus of smartelectronix. This thing is free (you can donate to them if you choose) and it installs in about two seconds. (Download it, copy the .component file into Harddrive>Library>Audio>Plugi-Ins>Components, then Launch Garageband.)
Select Ambience from your list of effects on your track in Garageband.
Select Ambience... yeah I'm a plugin junkie...
Your AudioUnits (.component) plugins will all be listed under the dividing line in the menu in alphabetical order.
When you open up ambience you’ll still see a ton of controls, but thankfully they’re divided up visually in groups based on function.
The Key ones to focus on (if you’re not too reverb saavy) are:
Dry Gain and Wet Gain which let you turn the original track and reverb up and down respecitively
Lowshelf Cut and Lowshelf Freq which let you set a lows EQ cut or boost and choose the frequency. This is basically just like a “lows” know on your mixer but you get to choose the highest frequency it affects. (note the HZ listing next to the numbers is misleading. those aren’t the actually frequenies… it’s just a parameter that translates into frequencies in the coding) Just set the Freq where you think it sounds good.
Highshelf Cut and Highshelf Freq which lets you do the same things with the highs. The only difference is this time you’re choosing the lowest frequency to affect.
There’s lots of other things you can do inside this reverb – but until you feel kind o comfortable with that it’s easy enough to just choose a preset – set your Dry/Wet Gains, and your EQ. Bam you’ve got customized EQ in Garagband in under a minute.
Now pat yourself on the back.
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