-.- Posted February 22, 2006 Share Posted February 22, 2006 Some of the instruments in Garage Band are awesome however this Yamaha keyboard has some that are closer to the real thing and some that are different not necessarily better or worse just differnet and a matter of taste or preference. French horn sound #302 on Yamaha DGX-205 is a sound I would like to be in Garage band for adding editable tracks to some strings and piano, is there a way to add this and other instrument voices to GarageBand? Thanks for your help or comments! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/9700-any-garageband-experts-in-the-house/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
MundayMac Posted February 22, 2006 Share Posted February 22, 2006 I have been trying to find a similar solution...I have not done this yet, but after about a week of reading tons of info online this seems like the workable solution.... You need to provide a connection from your computer to the Yamaha keyboard via midi. Once you are triggering the external keyboard via Garageband, you will need to record the audio output of the keyboard into your mac as a 'Real Instrument' track in Garageband. I have a few questions for you, since this board is mainly osX86, are you doing this on a PPC mac or an x86 mac? Are you familiar at all with midi and digital audio devices? Ok, lets assume that you are using a ppc mac, and you know what midi is (dont hate me) Garageband (hereafter 'GB) does not provide midi output natively. The solution to this is a freeware program called midi0 from RetroWare...you can get it here: http://home.comcast.net/~retroware/ Once you download and install the midiO software, you then need to attach an external usb-to-midi interface to your computer. The least expensive ones are the M-Audio UNO, and the M-Audio Midisport (around $40-$50). I would avoid the Yamaha midi interface that is literally everywhere for like $40. I have read in many online forums that the Yamaha midi interface does not transmit or receive sysex messages, which is important if you want to realize the full use of your midi connection. Once you have midi0 installed and the usb/midi interface installed, you have to go to your Audio/MIDI setup in /Applications/Utilities and see that the devices are present, and then configure them..... Once you are confident that this part is done, you then would power off your computer, connect the midi cables to your external Yamaha keyboard, connect the midi interface to your computer, and then in this order, power on the Yamaha keyboard, and the power on the computer. Once all logged in, go again to the Audio/Midi setup and you may have to create a 'device' for your external keyboard and assign a midi channel and output port to it. At this point you should be able to fire up GB, and assign one of your existing midi tracks to the external keyboard via the midi port. Forgive me if the GB part is vague as I forget where this option lives in GB, but it should be easy to find as there are only like 40 options within the pull down menus. If you have sound coming out of your Yamaha keyb (you will have to hook up headphones or to powered speakers if none are built in) then you are all set. If there is no sound, the first thing I would check is that the Yamah keyb is set in the GLOBAL options for what midi channel it is listening on. You will have to find this for your specific keyboard. This channel should mach the same as the 'output' channel for the usb/midi port that you defined in the audio/midi setup program, and also mathc what you have se tin GB. If it all matches you should have sound.... Now, you want to get the sound of the keyb back into GB so it is part of your mix, The simplest way is to use an audio cable that matches the connector type of the Yamaha keyb (1/4" maybe?) to the mac sound card input (1/8"). This could be a stop gap measure just to see if it works. I recommend getting a dedicated audio interface that connects via firewire (which is what I am going to do as soon as I scrape together the cash) to avoid problems with latency. Audio via USB is heavly prone to latency issues. If you are only doing like 2 tracks in for recording at 1 time, you might get away with it, but one of my first projects is to digitally remake masters from what was originally recorded to a 4-track cassette, so I need to get 4 tracks into the computer at one time for that project. You also might want to have a look at and join the yahoo group for Garageband. There are many folks there much more expert than myself who can also provide help. It's free and the address is: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/garageband-ilife/. Also, pm me if you want to discuss this further. I hope this helps to get you thinking in the right direction. Please let me know either way.... -Adam Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/9700-any-garageband-experts-in-the-house/#findComment-60481 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swad Posted February 22, 2006 Share Posted February 22, 2006 Thanks for the detailed help, alipsius! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/9700-any-garageband-experts-in-the-house/#findComment-60482 Share on other sites More sharing options...
-.- Posted February 22, 2006 Author Share Posted February 22, 2006 Thanks for the help alipsius! I'll look into getting that. I am noob to midi, that is for sure. I have GB in a G4 powerbook 1.5Ghz, dont have it on osx86 but would like to. I was able it to get to usb it to garage band w/ yamaha's mac version of their midi driver installed (from their website), and able to play any of the garage band instrunents or input the keyboards instruments as a real instrument. I had already recorded a track in the keyboard recorder and then when I got it connected and seen by GB, was able to record it as a real instrument track in GB, and I found send to itunes in the menu and was able import it into itunes, when you click that it remixes and prompts you to give it a name... so I'm pretty impressed with GB and after I learned to turn off the internal mic the quality of the recording was very good... but very thankful you have pointed me to more proffessional set-up and lower latency (saving your instructions ) as well as the links, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/garageband-ilife/ & http://home.comcast.net/~retroware/ . The reason I was hoping to be able to store the yamaha's voices is this keyboard isn't mine it's my moms and I have to (for right now) settle for a much less expensive keyboard, a m-audio 61e. edit: not that it matters but I meant to say #301, because #302 sound just like the one in GB and #301 is the the one that sounds very different. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/9700-any-garageband-experts-in-the-house/#findComment-60847 Share on other sites More sharing options...
dponmac Posted March 13, 2006 Share Posted March 13, 2006 have you tried Propellerhead's Reason? If you like garage band you'll love reason. Its got a lot more sounds and way more flexibility.. too bad it's not unibin yet.. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/9700-any-garageband-experts-in-the-house/#findComment-74846 Share on other sites More sharing options...
-JD- Posted March 14, 2006 Share Posted March 14, 2006 -.-, how badly do you want the sound? Basically, there is a way to just steal the sound directly from the keyboard, but you need to be able to use the EXS24 or EXS24P... im not that familiar with garageband, so if it does not have a native sampler that is EXS24 compatible this may not be much help... anyway, here goes... Redmatica have released a piece of software called Autosampler the will automatically sample any MIDI capable instrument you connect to it. You just plug a MIDI lead into the input of the keyboard/synth you want to record the sound from, and connect it back to your PC/Mac/Hackintosh via audio cables. Autosampler will then send a load of MIDI information to your keyboard (it will sound very weird, but its for a reason!) and record the audio output. It will then trim and normalise each of the notes and map them into a sampler map. If you're new to sampling...basically all it does is record every note on the keyboard at varying types of touch (soft, medium, hard etc) and records them so you can play each note back by just using a sampler as a virtual instrument... Its a DAMN good way to keep sounds like that, and to back up old synth sounds! Heres the link: http://www.redmatica.com/Site/Pages/AM.php and it doesnt cost much at all, about £75... Sorry if this is not much help if you havent got access to the EXS24, but it is the only way that you can keep the sound so you can play it back however you want (you said you would like it to be editable!) rather than having to record the part as audio each time you want to use it... Cheers, JD Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/9700-any-garageband-experts-in-the-house/#findComment-75310 Share on other sites More sharing options...
-.- Posted April 27, 2006 Author Share Posted April 27, 2006 Thanks JD, it's a big help that was what I was looking for.. Thanks deponmac, it looks like it is unibin now... if that means the same thing as universal. This from their sitel: "Reason for Intel based Macs March 24, 2006: Reason 3.0.5 is now a Universal! This means that this version, which is currently in testing, runs on both PPC and Intel based Macs. This has been achieved without performance penalties on either hardware platform." Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/9700-any-garageband-experts-in-the-house/#findComment-103707 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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