Now really, either of these on-screen keyboards are a poor substitute for a real MIDI keyboard, but they may work in a pinch, if you need to add a single note or two here and there. Let's start here with the regular keyboard. So you can also switch between the two of these with these buttons up here. Now in case you don't have the MIDI keyboard, GarageBand does come with on-screen music keyboards that you can find under the Window menu here.
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We saw how this works in a previous chapter when I showed you how you could take a software instrument drum loop and have the notes played by a piano or a guitar instead. All you have to do is select the track, and then change the instrument that plays the data. You don't have to go back and try to recapture your performance by playing it again with a different instrument. For example, let's say you recorded yourself playing the Classic Electric Piano instrument we have here, and you're really happy with your performance, but a week later you decide you'd really prefer the sound of the Steinway Grand Piano. The cool thing about this is that since you haven't actually recorded any audio, you can pick other instruments to play your performance after you've recorded it. And when you play back your recording, GarageBand just reads the info you saved and plays the appropriate samples. The MIDI message of each note tells the MIDI device, again, in this case, GarageBand, what note to play, but also sends information like how long the note was held, how hard you pressed the key, whether you were pressing a sustain pedal, and lots of other information.
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What you're really recording is a series of MIDI messages. But the point is that when you record yourself playing a MIDI instrument in GarageBand, no audio is actually recorded. Other software instruments, like many of the horns and wind instruments, were made completely electronically. For example, the grand piano sound in GarageBand was made by recording the individual notes of an old grand piano, note-by-note. In some cases, a software instrument bank is comprised of samples that have been recorded from a real instrument. Software instruments are really just a large collection, sometimes called a bank, of individual audio files that mimic the sound of a real instrument. Now as you've already seen, GarageBand contains scores of software instruments, all of which can be played using a MIDI keyboard. Nothing in the controller itself creates any sounds.
There are no hammers or strings involved. When you play a MIDI keyboard, however, pressing the C triggers a sample, or recording, of the middle C that's been saved on your computer. Now when you sit down and play a note on a real piano, let's say you play middle C, you're actually causing a felt hammer to strike a string in the piano, which resonates to produce a sound. MIDI instruments are often referred to as MIDI controllers, because they're used to control MIDI software, such as GarageBand. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, MIDI, which stands for musical instrument digital interface, is a method for electronic instruments to communicate with each other, and with computers, and various other devices that speak the MIDI language. In order to do this, we have to talk about MIDI.
So let's talk about working with software instruments in GarageBand. And we've seen this before, but this is the default layout when you choose a Software Instrument track as your first track. For this chapter, I'm gonna create a new empty Song Project file, and I'll choose a Software Instrument track. Now let's talk about software instruments.
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