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So You Want To Record Authentic-Sounding Guitar In Your DAW

In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to plug your guitar into GarageBand. The way that I find works best is the most convenient and sounds pretty good as well while minimizing latency and other problems.

Garageband Synth Plugins

How to Plug Your Guitar Into GarageBand

• May 06, 2017  The free option is GarageBand for iOS, which features a section dedicated to amps and guitar effects. It is also a bit complex to set up, so we’ll choose a dedicated app that’s just plug and play.
• ‎GarageBand turns your iPad and iPhone into a collection of Touch Instruments and a full-featured recording studio — so you can make music anywhere you go. And with Live Loops, it makes it easy for anyone to have fun creating music like a DJ. Use Multi-Touch gestures to play keyboards, guitars, and c.
• How to plug your guitar into iPad and GarageBand. You probably already know how easy it is to create a song on the iPad, so we are going to show you how easy it is to connect your guitar to the iPad. Using Jam by Apogee Simply connect Jam to the dock port on your iPad using the provided cable.
• GarageBand features a built-in tuner, accessed via the button to the right of the LCD display in the transport bar. This examines the incoming audio signal, whether it’s from a connected mic or guitar input, and displays its pitch on a circular readout, so you can use it to check whether your instrument is in tune before you record it.
• May 28, 2015  The 16 best free GarageBand plugins. Synth: Podolski. Mac musicians in the know are keen to the amazing line of commercial synths and filters from U-He Software, and their free. Synth: Tyrell. Synth: Lokomotive. Synth: Crystal. Synth: PG-8X.
• Work with up to an astounding 32 tracks with GarageBand for iOS. 2 With a compatible third‑party audio interface, you can even plug in the entire band and record everyone simultaneously on separate tracks. Take multiple passes to nail your performance using Multi‑Take Recording — just choose any Touch Instrument, tap Record, and play.

Nov 12, 2010 Plug Your Guitar into your iPhone and iPad with this DIY iRig. The red and white RCA plugs will be the audio out to your headphones and the yellow RCA plug will be the audio input from your guitar.

There are a few different ways of doing this, and some are significantly better than others. I’m just going to show you the way that I do it.

Mac brew install java. By default, it installs Homebrew so you can use the brew command without typing the sudo command and providing your password.Run the following command once you’re done to ensure Homebrew is installed and working properly: brew doctorUPDATE: The below command is no longer necessary. Homebrew Cask is now automatically installed as part of Homebrew itself.Once you’re done, run the following command to install. Press Enter and then provide your password to install it.

I have a couple of pieces of necessary gear:

• Obviously, your guitar.
• A Firewire to USB Cable
• an Audio Interface (I use the Focusrite Saffire 6USB. The Scarlett 2i2 is good too.)
• A USB-C to USB cable (The only reason this adapter is necessary is I’m using the latest edition of the MacBook Pro. The older generation MacBook Pro doesn’t need this adapter).
• Regular Guitar Cable.

If you’re new to music production, understand that a lot of this equipment will come in handy for years to come.

If you’re serious about recording and producing, much of this equipment and more are a necessity, so just grab some of it off Amazon and be done with it.

Without further ado,

The actual steps:

1) Connect your Firewire cable to your MacBook Pro. In most cases, this cable will come with your purchase of an audio interface, or a MIDI keyboard. However, if you don’t have one for whatever reason, I’m sure you can pick one up from Amazon for cheap.

2) Usually, the port for the firewire cable is on the back of the Audio Interface. Plug the other part of the firewire cable into the back of the Audio Interface.

In my case, the Firewire to USB has to go into the USB-C adapter that I mentioned earlier.

3) Now, assuming you have the Focusrite Saffire 6USB, it should be powered by your computer. You don’t have to plug it in or anything like that, so all of its lights will turn on which you can see on the front of the unit.

4) Open GarageBand.

5) Click “Open Project,” or one of your old existing files. It doesn’t matter.

6) Once it brings up the “Choose A Track Type Page,” Click on where it says: “Built-in Input.”

7) This should be all that’s needed for this part of the process. However, assuming this is the first time that you’ve ever done this, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to click on where it says, “Built-in Output.”

8) That should bring up your “Output” and “Input” Devices under the Audio-MIDI region preferences.

9) Make sure you’ve selected “Built-in Output,” if you’re using your computer as your speaker, or the speakers that are hooked up to your laptop.

10) Select your Audio Interface for the “Input Device.”

11) Now, once you’re back at the “Choose A Track Type Page,” then click on one of the two subheadings below, either the “Guitar option,” or the “Microphone option.” This should bring up your MIDI Region and all of your controls.

12) In the “Smart Controls Area,” make sure that you’ve selected your audio-interface where it says, “Input.” How to put omnisphere 2 library on external hard drive for mac.

13) Now, plug your guitar into the front of your Audio Interface.

14) Click on the “Monitoring Button,” which looks like an upside down Wi-Fi symbol. This part is important, otherwise, you won’t be able to hear what you’re even playing.

15) You can now select whatever kind of amp you want, whether it’s a “clean guitar,” “crunch guitar,” “acoustic guitar,” “distorted guitar,” “experimental guitar,” “clean bass,” “crunch bass,” and “experimental bass.”

16) You want to hit the “Monitoring” button beside your track-header as well. I’ve highlighted the upside down Wi-Fi-looking symbol with a black circle. It’ll turn orange once it’s been selected.

Under each heading, there are quite a few options that all sound pretty good, especially after you tweak them to your preferences.

And it’s pretty much as simple as that.

There are some problems that you can run into when doing all of this for the very first time. For that reason, I’ll explain some of the problems that I’ve had when I first started out.

Common Problems and Annoyances As A Beginner

1) Make sure that the gain on your Audio-Interface isn’t turned up too much, otherwise, you’re going to be feeding GarageBand too hot of a signal, which will make it sound distorted and bad.

2) Make sure the “Pad,” and “Inst,” buttons are turned off on your audio interface, assuming you own a Focusrite Saffire 6USB. I imagine there are similar controls on other audio interface models.

I find that these buttons make the signal too powerful as well, and thus, create distortion.

3) Latency. I’ve never actually had latency problems when using an Audio Interface, but some people do have this problem. I have an entire article on Latency which you can read more about here.

Essentially, if you’re having latency issues, there could be a number of different causes, however, most of them will be a result of your set-up and incorrect settings for your gear.

For instance, you want to make sure that – if you’re running more than one track – you have the monitoring button turned on for only one of them, rather than every single track.

Other Ways Of Recording Your Guitar In GarageBand

1) You can also use your MacBook’s microphone. This is for very rough demos, obviously, because this way of doing it is going to make a very low-quality recording. However, if you’re desperate, and want to record something, this method will work.

• To do this, you just open a new “Audio” track in your workspace.
• And then click on the “Record” button.
• Start playing the guitar with your amplifier close to it, and that should be enough for a very rough demo.

2) You can also purchase a Guitar to USB cable and hook your guitar directly up to GarageBand. This is an inferior way of recording guitar tracks as well, but it works if you’re running on a string budget.

(This is what a guitar-jack to USB looks like. I don’t own one so I couldn’t take a picture. I had to piece these two images together, but this is what it looks like).

GarageBand will immediately recognize this as an input, so you don’t have to worry about there being compatibility issues.

However, like the method above, you’ll likely run into latency.

3) Use a small portable audio interface if you plan on only running one instrument through your DAW. This is pretty much the same as the main method which I described in detail above.

The only difference is that you’ll be using a much smaller, and likely, limited audio interface. The good thing about this is that it’s relatively inexpensive. Small interfaces are becoming exceedingly popular, like the iRig for example.

I haven’t picked one of these up yet, but once I start traveling around Europe, I imagine I’ll eventually purchase one. I’ll make sure to write a review on it once I do.

Update: You have to use the iRig HD if you want it to work with a PC computer or Mac. The iRig 2 is only good for mobile.

4) Another popular way would be to mic your guitar amplifier up to your audio interface and then through GarageBand.

This is a decent option, but I prefer just to run my guitar directly through GarageBand, rather than doing this. Amplifiers are too big and cumbersome, and I would much rather limit the amount of gear I own.

Before playing your guitar in GarageBand, know that there’s an actually fairly useful tuning mechanism set up in the DAW. It’s not as good as a good old fashioned Korg tuner, but it still works pretty well. I usually use it if I’m too lazy to go over and grab my tuner.

How To Tune Your Guitar Using GarageBand

1) Your guitar is plugged into your audio interface in the computer, so it’s as simple as clicking on the tuning fork beside the center of the DAW where it shows the time signature, tempo, and key signature.

2) When you click on the tuning fork icon, it’ll bring up the meter where you can tune your guitar.

Other Features

One of the great things about using a DAW for your guitar is all of the great VST plug-ins that you can use for your guitar.

For example, you can download amplifier simulators and cabs for your set up, and while it may not sound good as the original which the plug-ins are modeled after, they still sound good enough to use, and they’re good enough for the vast majority of people who aren’t tone-purists.

I’ll show you how to download plug-ins into your DAW in a later article.

That’s all for now. If this helped you out, do me a favor and share it on social media.

YouTube Video Tutorial

In order to take advantage of the great guitar-processing apps available for the iPad and iPhone, you need a way to get the signal from your guitar or bass into your iOS device. For that, you’ll need a dedicated guitar interface or a more fully featured audio interface that can handle not only guitar and bass connections but also microphones and sometimes even MIDI as well.

Two different types of guitar/bass interfaces are available on the market:

• Digital interfaces, which connect through the dock port on your device

• Analog interfaces, which connect through the headphone jack on your device

Going digital

Initially you could only find analog guitar interfaces for iOS, but the last couple of years have brought forth plenty of digital models. These offer better sound quality than the analog ones, because they convert your instrument signal into digital audio and keep it in the digital domain as it goes into your device. Conversely, analog interfaces bring the signal in through the analog headphone jack, and it doesn’t get digitized until it gets into your device.

These digital interfaces offer 24-bit audio resolution, which is the same resolution used in most professional computer recording software. The result is that your guitar or bass will sound the same going into an app as it does coming out of your guitar, and no noise will be added.

Some of the best-known interfaces of this type include:

• Apogee Jam

• Apogee Jam 96K

• Griffin Guitar Connect Pro

• IK Multimedia iRig HD

• Line 6 Mobile In

• Peavey AmpKit Link HD

• Positive Grid’s JamUP Plug HD

• Sonoma Wireworks GuitarJack Model 2

The only disadvantage to digital interfaces is their cost, which is typically in the $90 to $120 range, depending on the product.

Connecting one of these interfaces to your device is easy: Just plug it in to the dock connector, plug your guitar or bass into its 1/4” input jack, and you’re ready to rock.

Note that some interfaces feature the older-style 30-pin connectors, which means if you have one of the newer generation of Lightning-equipped iOS devices, you’ll need one of Apple’s Lightning-to-30-pin adapters in order to connect it to your device. This adapter will set you back about $30, so figure that into your budget, or choose an interface such as IK Multimedia’s iRig HD, or Griffin’s Guitar Connect Pro, which supports both formats out of the box.

If you plan on using both MIDI and audio in your live rig, make sure you buy an interface that supports both. You only have one data connector, after all— don’t make your devices fight for space!

The analog alternative

Analog instrument interfaces offer an inexpensive alternative to the digital products. Although analog audio isn’t as clean and pristine as digital audio, for a lot of applications, the difference won’t be particularly noticeable. Analog guitar interfaces tend to sell in the $20 range, for the most part, so if you’re willing to live with a signal that might be slightly noisy at times, you can save quite a bit.

These interfaces connect through your device’s headphone jack, using a kind of connector called TRRS, which is a special type of mini-plug that allows audio to travel both in and out of your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. This is important because not only do you want your guitar signal to go into your iOS device, you want to be able to hear it and any background tracks or other music you’re playing with it at the same time.

If you’re wondering where you’ll be able to plug your headphones into, since the interface is connected to your headphone jack, there’s a simple answer. All of these analog interfaces have their own built-in headphone output jack, so you can listen to the audio coming out of your device at the same time as your guitar’s signal goes in through the iOS device’s headphone jack.

Because they’re 30-pin devices (a format that Apple has replaced), analog interfaces may not remain on the market all that much longer. But currently, these three were still available, all at reduced prices (under $30):

Garageband Drum Plugins

• IK Multimedia iRig

• Positive Grid JamUp Plug

• Griffin Guitar Connect Pro