Change Pitch In Garageband Ipad

When recording, mixing, and producing vocals, there are a lot of things that can be done to drastically change the nature of the vocal track, some of which I’ve explored in my guide. For example, you could apply a compressor, an EQ, a limiter, delay, or just reverb.

You could even set-up a phaser or comb-filtering effect for something a bit out of the ordinary. Other users like to “pitch” their vocals, which is another way of saying increasing the pitch like what can be heard in “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” but not everyone knows how to do it.

To pitch vocals in Garageband, select the vocal track that you want to change, and then go down into its plug-ins in the Smart Control section. Select “Pitch” from the drop-down menu, and then “Pitch Shifter.” You can adjust by how many semi-tones the vocals have been increased from 0 to 12.

There are other ways to pitch your vocals in Garageband, however, there is no question that this is the easiest way of going about it. In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through a step-by-step process for how to pitch your vocals using the Pitch Shifter, the Vocal Transformer, in addition to some third-party plugins.

by the way, I have a list of all the best products for music production on my recommended products page, including the best deals, coupon codes, and bundles, that way you don’t miss out (you’d be surprised what kind of deals are always going on).

GarageBand on a Mac has the ability to change tempo and transpose in the same song? Yes, you make the Tempo Track visible and the Transposition track, and you can can adjust the automation curve for tempo and transposition. GarageBand on a computer is very different from GarageBand on an iPad or iPhone.

How to change the pitch of audio files (vocals, music, etc) on iPhone/ iPad Garageband (mobile app).Thanks for watching, subscribe for more garageband tutori. This is how you can change the key (pitch) on a specific loop in GarageBand for iOS (iPad). You can't do that as easily as you can in GarageBand for Mac but. The first step to changing the pitch of an MP3 is to open GarageBand and create a new blank project file. Delete all existing tracks if you start with a template (click to highlight then press “command” and “delete”). Open the OSX Finder in front of the GarageBand window and locate the track you want to transpose.

3 Methods For Pitching Vocals in Garageband – A Step-By-Step Guide

1) Using the Pitch Shifter to Pitch Vocals in Garageband

Pitching your vocals means to increase or decrease the pitch of the vocal track by a certain amount of semi-tones or tones, and it can be done with the default plug-ins available in Garageband, notably, the Pitch Shifter which can be found in the “Pitch” sub-heading within Garageband’s plug-ins in the Smart Controls.

A) Select or Highlight Your Vocal Track

This is the same process for adjusting nearly any other plug-in in Garageband. What you want to do is select the software instrument or audio track region by simply clicking on it. When it has been selected, the track region will turn a light grey color, similar to what can be seen in the image below:

B) Go Down into the Plugins in the Smart Controls

To do this, you can either hit “B” on your keyboard to bring up the Smart Control with your track region selected, or you can simply click on the region in question. Either one will bring up the Smart Controls where the plug-ins can be found.

C) Click on the Plugin Slot and Choose the Category, “Pitch”

Once you’ve brought up the plug-ins in the Smart Control section, click on the right-hand side of the empty slot or a slot that has a plugin in it already and bring up the menu which is going to show all of the different types available, including “Dynamics,” “Amps and Pedals,” “Distortion,” “EQ,” and many others.

D) Select “Pitch Shifter”

Select the category, “Pitch,” and then you’ll be given two different options, “Pitch Shifter,” and “Vocal Transformer.” Truthfully, either one will work for getting the effect that you want, however, using the “Pitch Shifter” is the easiest one.

E) Set Up The Pitch Shifter

After you’ve chosen the Pitch Shifter, there are a couple of different parameters to play with, including “Semi-Tones,” and “Mix.” How you want your vocals to sound is up to you, but the one rule of thumb that I would use for increasing the pitch in this regard is to have the “Mix” set to 100% because this will ensure that none of the original signals will shine through.

Go ahead and set the “Semi-Tones” parameter to around 12 semi-tones, and then set the Mix to “100%,” and you can see how it sounds a lot like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

This is the first way of pitching your vocals using Garageband, however, there are other ways of going about it as well, in fact, I think the following tactic might even be the best one in terms of the way the audio actually sounds when it’s all said and done (by the way, if you’re in the market for singing lessons, you won’t go wrong with Singorama which is probably one of the most efficient ways of learning).

2) Using the Vocal Transformer to Pitch Your Vocals

To set up the Vocal Transformer, you just have to follow the same process shown above, but choose the Vocal Transformer instead of the Pitch Shifter, and you can see that this plug-in is a bit different. There are two different parameters on this plug-in, the “Pitch,” and the “Formant.”

The first one is self-explanatory, in that it merely adjusts the pitch by what I believe are tones. The “Formant,” on the other hand, is actually how you get that “Alvin and the Chipmunks” sound which can sound really cute and cool at the same time.

Adjust the “Pitch” to around +1, and then set the “Formant to around +12, and you can see how it sounds. Conversely, you can set the “Pitch” to the same amount and then drop the “Formant” down to +0, and you can see how it merely pushes the pitch up by one tone but doesn’t add the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” style sound.

Play around with this to find the sound that you want, but to get that high-pitched cute sound you may be looking for, I would recommend setting up the Vocal Transformer’s “Pitch” to +12 and then the “Formant,” to around +12 as well. And this is the second way of changing the pitch of your vocals in Garageband. There is one final way of doing it.

3) Using Melodyne to Pitch Your Vocals in Garageband

Using Melodyne 5 – Editor (from Plugin Boutique) is the best way of changing the pitch of a note in Garageband, however, if you’re looking for the pitch-change to come along with that cutesy Chipmunk vibe, then don’t use it. Melodyne is more for adjusting the pitch of notes while retaining the natural human quality, rather than as an effect like what can be heard from using the Pitch Shifter or the Vocal Transformer.

Using Melodyne is very easy to do, but if you haven’t done so already, don’t fret because I’ll make sure to walk you through it. The first step is to download the plug-in using my guide and then simply hit the transfer button in Melodyne after you’ve set it up in the plug-ins of the vocal track’s Smart Controls.

A) Hit the Transfer Button to Record Your Vocals

With the vocal track selected and ready to go, open up Melodyne in the plugins of the Smart Controls, and then hit the red “Transfer” button to begin recording your vocals into Melodyne so it can work its magic. Once you’ve done that, you just have to select all of the notes.

B) Select All the Notes and Then Drag Them Up One or Two Octaves

After you’ve selected every single note in Melodyne, you just want to drag them up as many notes as you want. It’s important to pay attention to the first note of the vocal recording. For example, in the image, you can see below, the first note is a “Bb.”

To move them up one octave, grab the notes and then drag them all so the first note is the Bb above the first one. This means you’ve moved everything up exactly one octave. As I already mentioned above, this is a great way to change the pitch, but it’s not the best if you want the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” vibe.

Using Antares Auto-Tune Pro to Pitch Shift Vocals in Garageband

Another good way of pitch-shifting your vocals which I recently discovered is Antares Auto-Tune Pro, which, other than Melodyne 5, is the best vocal tuning plugin that’s compatible with Garageband. It goes for a surprisingly reasonable price on Plugin Boutique and it’s quite simple to use.

Essentually, to pitch your vocals with Auto-Tune Pro, you just have to use the transposition button on the top-right hand side of the Auto-Tune Pro interface. Turn it up 12 to get the desired effect. Check out the video here to see what I’m talking about:

YouTube Video Tutorial

Conclusion

And that’s all for this tutorial. It’s really not that difficult to pitch shift your vocal recordings, in fact, it just takes a few seconds, regardless if you choose the Pitch Shifter or the Vocal Transformer. How you go about it changes only slightly if you’ve used one or the other.

To pitch vocals in Garageband, you just have to use the “Pitch Shifter” or the “Vocal Transformer” within the Smart Control’s plugins, and then adjust either the “Pitch” and the “Mix,” if you’re using the Pitch Shifter, or the “Pitch” and the “Formant” if you’re using the Vocal Transformer.

Changing the key signature and pitch in Garageband is pretty straightforward.

1) Open your GarageBand file.

2) At the top-center of the DAW, you should see four icons in order from left-to-right: the beat, the tempo, the time signature, and the key signature.

3) Typically, GarageBand has for its default setting the most common key signature in music, C Major, or as it’s written in the DAW (digital audio workstation), “Cmaj.”

4) Click on the Key Signature – “C Maj.”

5) Change it to the desired Key.

6) The moment you switch the key signature and play the track, you’ll notice it sounds higher or lower. It’s that simple.

But the main problem with this simple method is that you’ll change the key signature for other MIDI instruments in the song, and you may not want this.

For instance, if your drum tracks have been created using a MIDI-keyboard like the Arturia KeyLab 61-key from Amazon which has the most value for the price, changing the key signature will likely throw the drums completely off, changing kicks to snares, high-hats to cymbals, and snares to shakers.

Although, in some cases, it leaves your drum-kits alone, depending on what kit you’re using.

If you’re interested in changing the key signature for just one part of the song, check out the section below.

By the way, if you’re new to GarageBand, it doesn’t hurt to turn on the “Quick Help Button,” that way you can you hover your cursor over whatever is in GarageBand, and the software gives you a quick run-down of everything. It’s on the top-left-hand corner. For the vast majority of my “How To Guides,” I’ll be referencing the name of things as titled by GarageBand.

How To Change The Key Of One Track Without Altering The Others

1) Click on the music in your track.

2) Copy the file by double-clicking it, or using the two-finger method on your Mac.

3) Once you’ve copied your file, save it, and then open a new project.

4) Click on “Software Instrument.”

5) Now, set your “Software Instrument” to what you were using before.

6) Copy and paste your music into the track region.

7) Click the Key Signature, and then transpose the track into a new key.

8) Copy your new music.

9) Now close this file and open up your other file from which you copied your track.

10) Open a new “Software Instrument,” and post your transposed music into it.

11) And voila, you’ve successfully changed the key of one track in your DAW.

If you want to change the pitch of ONE and not several “Audio,” tracks, whether it’s a guitar or microphone recording, and without altering the key signature of your other tracks, you have to do it another way, through a plug-in.

Important Things To Note

By modifying the key signature of your music in GarageBand, the pitch of the music will change either up or down, in accordance with a particular key signature. There’s a difference between changing just the pitch and the key signature.

Assuming you’re new to musical concepts, pitch refers to how low or high the note sounds. A high note means the sound wave is vibrating very fast, and a low sound means that it’s vibrating very slow. This is why when fast-forwarding a tape, the pitch of the sound is higher rather than lower.

Altering the key signature of a song transposes the music into a different key, so the music will sound the same, just at a higher or lower pitch, depending on to what key you’ve migrated. But if you switch music from a major key into a minor key, the tonality will shift from a happy-sounding to a sad-sounding piece of music.

Transposing music means to change the overall position of the music, thus, changing its sound.

Adjusting the pitch, on the other hand, is a slightly different beast. Changing the pitch of every note in a musical passage by one semi-tone, for example, will likely create dissonance.

Dissonance is a fancy word for, “it just won’t sound quite right.”

This is the case because the distance between notes changes depending on the key signature. For example, C to D is different by a full-tone, whereas E to F is just one semi-tone.

Looking at the keyboard above, going from C to C# is one semi-tone, (a half-step), whereas going from a C to a D is a whole-tone (full-step). This is just one thing that I learned from taking the piano course, PianoForAll, from their website a few years ago.

Thankfully, GarageBand comes with the ability to change the key of a specific passage when adjusting music from a MIDI keyboard or your laptop’s keyboard, rather than just adjusting the pitch.

How to Change The Key Signature (Pitch) Of An Audio Track

1) Double-click on your “Track Header,” and bring up where it shows your plug-ins down below in the “Smart Controls” settings.

2) Now go into your Plug-In options and choose the one that says, “Pitch.”

3) Choose “Pitch Shifter.”

4) Now you can select how by many semi-tones your “Audio” recording is either increasing or decreasing.

Change Pitch In Garageband Ipad App

5)Make sure you turn the “Mix” option, up to 100%, that way it minimizes the original notes playing, and accentuates the pitch-corrected version.

Like I talked about in my guide on pitching vocals, the big problem with this, I find, is that it doesn’t sound nearly as good. It’s an imperfect transposition, because it changes every note by exactly a semi-tone or a full tone, rather than changing the notes so it fits in a particular key signature.

In other words, some of the notes will sound dissonant.

Another thing you can do is change the pitch using the “Pitch Correction function.”

How To Change The Pitch Using Pitch Correction

1) You do that by sliding the “Pitch Correction” bar to either the right or the left, depending on whether you want it to increase or decrease, although, there are a few other useful parameters of pitch correction that I’ve explored before.

While Garageband’s default pitch-correction is great, don’t get me wrong, a whole new world is opened up once you’ve tried Antares Auto-Tune Pro from Plugin Boutique, which is a way better tool in every way.

Another Way For Changing the Key (Pitch) Of Vocals.

1) Double click on your “Audio” vocals in GarageBand.

2) Open up a new “Track Header,” that says, “New Track With Duplicate Settings.”

3) Now go into where it says, “Voice,” on the left-hand side.

4) Click on, “Compressed Vocal.”

5) Now go into your “Smart Controls,” and select the option in the top of the bottom-right-hand corner that says, “Pedals Button,” when you hover over it with your “Quick Help Button” turned on.

It’s kind of hard to see, but I have the “Pedals Button,” circled with a black circle. It’s on the top-right-hand corner.

Change Pitch In Garageband Ipad 2

6) This will bring up a whole bunch of Analog-style pedals that people use when doing Analog rather than digital recordings.

7) Click on the Drop-Down Menu where it says, “Manual.”

8) Go down to “Pitch,” and change the pitch of the song to what you want. For the sake of an example, we’ll choose “Octave Up.”

9) That will make your vocals a lot higher, or you can choose one from the other 14 options listed.

That’s how you change the key signature or the pitch of your recordings in GarageBand. For the sake of clarification, I wrote a brief explanation of what key signatures exactly are, and how to go about using them.

It’s just an introduction, but it should help if you’re confused.

Change Pitch In Garageband Ipad Download

What Are Key Signatures And How Do I Use Them?

A key signature is a collection of all of the accidentals (sharps and flats) within a scale.

For example, a scale has seven notes. We’ll use the C Major Scale to illustrate the point.

The C Major Scale has 7 notes, beginning from C: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then C again.

From left to right, the scale is pictured below:

Assuming you’re a total beginner, the notes on top are the official musical notation, whereas, the numbers below are guitar tablature. There are serious advantages to learning how to read music as well as tablature if you’re a guitar player.

(I can’t lie to you, however, I’m a lot better at reading tablature, as I’m sure a lot of other people are).

Beside the treble clef, you’ll notice there aren’t any sharps (#) or flats (b). In the Key of C Major, there are none, but, if we were to transpose the key up to E Major, it would change.

In Key Of E Major, there are four sharps: F, C, G, D.

From the order of left to right, you can see there are four sharps, F, G, C, D. The scale below is an E Major scale written in the corresponding tablature for the guitar.

Technically, this piece of music is written so that it’s still in the Key Of C because there aren’t any sharps and flats written beside the Treble Clef, which is the thing that looks like a sophisticated G on the left side of the 4/4 symbol (time signature).

Now, I’m going to write the music so it’s in the Key Of E Major. Beside the Treble Clef in the image below, I’ve put a circle around the four sharps, which indicate this piece is in the Key Of E.

Whenever you see 4 sharps before a piece of music, you know it’s in the Key Of E.

Also, you can see that you don’t have to write the sharps beside the music notes anymore. There’s no need for that because the music reader knows we’re in the Key Of E, therefore, anytime you play an F, C, G, or D, those notes have to be played one semi-tone higher.

There’s nothing overly sophisticated about a Key Signature. Essentially, it’s just a way of communicating the range in which the pitch of the song lies.

In other words, you know how high the song is on your guitar fretboard, or you know how high it is up on the piano keyboard.

What Is The Purpose Of A Key Signature

Change Key In Garageband Ipad

The purpose of a key signature isn’t to confuse up-and-coming musicians, although, I know it can feel that way.

The purpose of the key signature is, essentially, to minimize the number of sharps (#) and flats (b) written in a piece of music. If there were no key signatures, a composer would have to write a sharp and flat on many of the notes, which would be pretty time-consuming.

Can You Change Pitch In Garageband

Conclusion

Change Pitch In Garageband Ios

This is just a very brief introduction to key signatures in music theory. If you want to learn more basic theory, I recommend heading over to musictheory.net, as well as picking up a copy of Mark Sarnecki’s book, The Complete Elementary Rudiments, which you can read about in my post of all my most recommended products.