From a live webinar: Garageband basics

- Of this webinar,

along with this keynote will
be posted in the comments

and also in the Commons Facebook group.

And so the main thing is not to worry.

If things feel like
they've gone by fast today,

you'll have resources to turn to

and you'll be able to review those

at your leisure and watch and rewatch.

But my idea today is to make
you feel really comfortable

about using editing audio.

Sort of, you know,

if maybe some of you are here
for Steven Zucker talking

about Photoshop a couple of weeks ago,

but even a little bit of
Photoshop work on an image

can do a lot, the same
thing with an audio.

If you've recorded an audio
lecture or a, you know,

a part of a lecture or whatever,

even just a little
cleaning up of the audio

can make it so much more
enjoyable for people to listen to.

And there's really only, you know,

a few things that I'm
gonna teach you today

that are very straightforward.

And the idea of this next 20 minutes

is just to make you feel like,

oh, that doesn't seem
so hard, I can do that.

And then you can go back
and review the resources

and do it yourself.

So four reasons to use audio.

Audio and still images can do a lot.

You can, you know, just
like in audio guide

or you know, dark classroom,
you can focus on the image,

you can, you know,

have your students look at the image

while you're talking and
listening and they're listening,

and so it's just a really
effective way to learn

and communicate.

Editing audio, so much
easier than editing a video.

You know, when you edit a video,

and you've got some
ums you wanna edit out,

you've got problems with the video

and you have to add
B-roll to cover that up,

none of that is necessary
with editing audio.

And I should say before we go on

that if you have questions, use the Q&A,

and we'll be monitoring those
and we can answer at the end.

The other really good thing about audio,

which I especially appreciate

and don't appreciate about Zoom
is not being on the camera.

And you know, there's something
really relaxing about that

that makes it easier to deal with.

So we're gonna do these four things

to know about editing audio.

One is making cuts.

So being able to cut out an
um, cutting out some silence,

cutting out something

that you no longer wanna
keep into the audio,

moving the pieces, the
existing pieces together.

So you've removed something
that you've deleted

and you're gonna move the pieces

that continue to be there together.

Then you're gonna join.

I'm gonna show you how
to join those pieces

back into a seamless whole
and then export the video.

So we're gonna sort of
really GarageBand basics

but in a way, this is
really all you need to know.

So let's just start with
the most obvious thing.

This is what GarageBand
looks like when you open it.

It can look a little intimidating

but we're gonna focus on, you know,

really just the basics and
not a lot of functionality

because you don't need
a lot of functionality

to do what we're gonna do today.

So the wiggly lines, you see,
those are all the sounds.

That's the sound signature.

And really that's just
a visual representation

of the recorded sounds.

The flat lines are essentially silence

or the sound of the room,

smaller little bumps like you see here

are likely a breath or a quiet sound,

and then the bigger wiggles
are, or bumps are words.

And that's (chirping) for the
basics of the sound signature.

So let's talk about
setting, getting set up.

So the way that we structure
these conversations

is I'm gonna walk through this keynote

which we're gonna make available

and then I'm gonna do a live demo.

So you'll actually get to see this twice.

All right.

So let's just focus on getting
set up in opening GarageBand.

So once you open GarageBand
it looks like this

and you're gonna just choose
from the New Project menu,

you're gonna choose Empty Project.

Then you'll see this screen
and you wanna choose the icon,

that's the microphone and that you can use

for actually just recording in GarageBand

or dragging in an audio file

that you've recorded on a
microphone or from somewhere else.

Then the next thing to do is because,

most people use GarageBand for music

is that we have to sort of turn
off that music functionality

that we don't need.

And the two purple icons one
that seems to reflect beats,

one, two, three, four,

and the other that looks like a metronome,

you're just gonna turn those off

just click those buttons
and they'll turn gray.

And then we don't wanna measure
beats we wanna measure time

because we wanna keep track
of how long our audio file is.

So use that little pull-down
menu here and choose time.

All right, then you're getting,
you're close to all set,

you wanna open your finder
window and drag in an audio file

unless you've recorded an audio file

already here in GarageBand.

And when you do that,

you'll see you've brought
in the sound signature,

it's that brown bar.

This is called the track here.

And you'll see here that one,

almost a quarter of the GarageBand screen

is taken up with this
thing called the library.

We're not gonna use the library

and we wanna really use the
whole screen here to edit.

So you're just gonna click
that and close the library

and then you'll have a nice
full screen to work with.

Now with with GarageBand,

you actually get two views of the audio

and we'll talk about
in a minute about why.

But you wanna go from
seeing on the bottom here

this equalizer, these equalizer controls,

you actually wanna use
the bottom area to edit.

So in order to make this
track appear down here

in the editor,

you just double-click
on the sound signature

and it will appear down
here at the bottom.

And this is really the
main area you'll be using.

So we learn our way around
GarageBand a little bit more,

we have this macro view and
that's a sort of big view,

that's sort of, you wanna
move big pieces around,

really what we're gonna be doing today,

all you need to focus
on is this bottom panel

which is where you
actually do the editing.

And, you know,

here it's looking really tiny
and narrow and hard to see,

so you can actually grab
this bar here and move it up.

And so you've enlarged the area

where you're doing the editing,

making things easier to see.

Okay.

Couple of more things
to know on both the top

and the bottom,

you'll see sliders in
the upper right corner.

These allow you to zoom in and zoom out.

So if we're just thinking
about the bottom editing area

you'll wanna zoom in when you
are doing kind of fine editing

zoom out a little bit when
you're doing less fine editing.

So it's a very important tool to use.

I use it pretty constantly
when I'm doing editing.

The easiest thing to do to play the audio

is to just press the space bar.

If you press the space
bar once on your computer

it'll start to play,

and if you hit the space
bar again, it'll pause,

so it's pretty easy.

Where is it playing from?

It's playing from where your play head is.

The play head is this vertical bar here

and your audio will always
play from that location.

You can also use buttons that
you might be more comfortable

with up here to play, to
go back to the beginning,

to go to the end and things like that.

So I made a little video here of moving,

how to move the play head.

'Cause there's only one
little tricky piece to this

which is that you have
to move the play head

along this beige top area,
not in the bottom brown area.

So put your cursor along the
beige colored bar at the top

and you can slide the play
head or you can jump around.

So there I am sliding the
play head back and forth,

and here I am jumping
around with the play head.

As long as your cursor is in
that top area you're fine.

We're gonna also use the play head

to mark where we wanna edit.

All right.

So now let's actually edit

or walk through the steps of editing

and then I'll do an actual demo

where you can see me editing.

So the first thing to do is to make sure

you've actually clicked on,

you've selected the area
that you're gonna work on.

So let me play this little short video

and I'll narrate through it.

So you see when I selected it

that top bar turned to that light brown

and let's edit out this
piece of silence here

between the words.

What you do is you put your play head

at the beginning and the end.

First, I did it here at the end

and I clicked command T to make a cut,

and then I did it at the beginning

and clicked command T to make a cut,

and then in order to get rid
of that part that I wanna cut

I went up to the Edit menu
and selected Delete and Move.

Now that all happened really fast

so I did it again in slow
motion so you can see.

And I'll demonstrate it.

So basically we put the
play head at the beginning

of where I wanted to cut, the
end of where I wanted to cut,

and in the Edit menu, Delete and Move,

and it joined those two pieces and got rid

of that middle piece that
I wanted to get rid of.

And again, I'll demonstrate this.

So really, really important,

this is a very common beginner mistake.

Before you move on,

once you've made the edit,

move your play head back a little bit

and listen to the edit that you've made.

It's really easy for
beginners to like, you know,

miss a little bit of a word

or cut into a little bit of a word.

So you can always undo your edit

but it's much harder to undo, you know,

something that you've done,
you know, 20 steps before.

So always listen and then
you can fix it immediately.

And you know, it's just
command Z, edit, undo command Z

and there it is.

Edit, undo.

Okay, then you wanna join...

So you've made all these edits,

you've removed ums and
all these other things

that you don't want and you end up with,

and you can see it on
the top and bottom here,

lots of pieces of audio where
in between those pieces,

you've removed some audio.

So if you wanted to go back through this

and sort of do a finer edit,

just make sure there's nothing
that you wanna edit out more.

You don't wanna go and
deal with these pieces

it just makes it very hard to work with

so you'll wanna join these
pieces into one seamless audio.

And so to do that,

you click on the track up in
the lower upper left here,

it selects everything

and then you go to the Edit menu,

you click, choose Join,

say OK and then it joins it and
those little pieces are gone

and you can edit the audio easily again.

Then exporting.

Again, very straightforward,

go up to the Share menu at the top,

choose Export Song To Disk

and you can export it as
a WAV file or an MP3 file.

And really, you know, that's it.

It's sort of just like
copying and pasting, you know,

in Microsoft Word, you're
just deleting and joining.

So a really common thing that happens

is that you accidentally shoot,

click this little loop functionality here.

It's really easy to click by accident.

The first five times I did it,

took me like 20 minutes to
figure out how to turn it off.

So that's the loop button
in case you click it

just click it again to unclick it.

So editing principles.

When you're, you know,

these are sort of things that
we've learned over the years,

it's Smarthistory.

My dog just walked into the room.

One is to, this is the main thing.

Be ruthless, edit out
ums, pauses, breaths.

There goes an um.

It's just so much nicer to listen to

and when learners are listening,

you're competing against
a lot of other things

that are on their laptops

that they wanna pay attention to

and so the more snappy, the, you know,

the tighter you can make it the better.

If it's not relevant to telling
the story, just delete it.

Sometimes I'll be editing audio

and there'll be this passage
where I feel like I was,

oh, I just said that so well

and I just really wanna keep
it in, but it's not helpful.

It doesn't help me tell the story

that if I'm telling about the work of art

and you just have to bite
the bullet and delete it.

(chuckling)

I think of audio video length

is four to six minutes is ideal.

Of course you can do more,

but if you can break things
up into four to six minutes,

that always works.

That always works best.

And so that's my talk, my keynote,

but now I wanna go into,

and just to remind you to
visit the Smarthistory Commons,

I'm actually going to
open up GarageBand now

and actually do a real demo for you.

A live demo.

And I should say

that editing audio is one
of my favorite things to do.

It's just incredibly,
incredibly fun, I think.

And I'm gonna just make a new audio file.

So it looks exactly like the steps

that we followed in my keynote.

So here's GarageBand.

When you open it, Empty Project,

in the New Project menu,
I'm gonna hit Choose.

I'm gonna make sure the
microphone is checked here

and I'm gonna click Create.

Okay.

Now you notice that all those
things that we talked about

I'm gonna turn off the metronome,

turn off the beat counter

and go up here and set this to time.

And now you can see I've got
a little time bar up here

that's showing seconds

so I can see how much time has passed

when I'm working on my audio.

And I wanna get rid of this
big library pane here as well,

you see library here,

I'm just gonna click this box

that looks like a little cabinet
or something that's gone.

Then I want to make this
area at the bottom bigger,

'cause I know I'm gonna
be editing down there

and now I'm gonna go into my finder

and I'm going to go to my
desktop and grab the audio file

that I wanna edit,

and I'm just gonna drag it in here.

If you wanted to,

you could also just press
the record button here

and record right in
GarageBand and skip this step.

Now, in order to make
this appear down here,

I'm going to double-click here,

oop, made it small again
so let's make it bigger.

I can see the sound
signature really clearly.

Let's show you what happens
with the zooms here.

So, oop, that's volume, sorry.

Here's the zoom bar.

It's hiding behind the
zoom, the other zoom photos.

So here, so I've,

zooming all the way in
and then I'm zooming out.

Same thing here, zooming in
really tight, zooming out.

I tend to keep it about half way down here

so I can see the sound signature

and you can see I'm
gonna zoom in here too.

You can see I'm looking

at the same thing on the
bottom as on the top.

So here's this group of
words, same thing over here.

Okay, so let's actually
listen and you can,

I'll do some editing.

I'm gonna press the space bar to start

(audio rolling)

- [Narrator] We're in one
of the first galleries

in the Uffizi in Florence looking at,

in a room filled with enormous images

of the Madonna and child.

- All right.

So a couple of things immediately

that I know I wanna edit out.

You could see the play head
moved as I was listening.

I'm gonna go back to the beginning.

So I'm actually going to hit
this button up here at the top

or I could drag my play head.

So obviously I wanna get rid
of this whole beginning area

of just room sound at the Uffizi.

So to do that, I'm going
to put my play head,

remember the play head

when you wanna move the play head

to be in this beige area at the top,

make sure it's selected.

Here it is, unselect it.

I've just clicked and selected
it with the play head here,

that's where I wanna pick up.

I'm gonna hit command
T and that made a cut.

If I move the play head,
you can see the cut there,

made the cut right where the play head is.

And I'm actually in this
case just going to drag it

to the left because there's nothing before

that I wanna keep.

Now to drag,

just make sure your cursor
is in the form of an arrow.

One of the tricky things about GarageBand

is when you're up here
the cursor is an arrow

When you're down here it's a cross hairs.

Make sure it's an arrow, click and drag.

All right, let's go back
to the beginning again.

I'm gonna click this button up here

to take my play head back to the beginning

and hit the space bar.

- [Narrator] We're in one
of the first galleries

in the Uffizi in Florence looking at

in a room filled.

- Okay, so I wanna get rid of looking at

so that the audio says we're
here at the Uffizi in Florence

in a room filled with.

So let's see where I'm
gonna zoom in a little bit.

I'm gonna use my little slider here,

zoom in a little bit more,

go back to the beginning

and try to locate where
I wanna make the cut,

where I say looking at.

- [Narrator] We're in one
of the first galleries

in the Uffizi in Florence looking at.

- Okay. So looking at is right here.

And in case I'm not sure I
can just hit the space bar

'cause it always plays from the space bar.

And indeed that's where,

- [Narrator] Looking at.

- That's where looking at is.

So now I'm gonna hit command T

and I wanna pick up here with,

- [Narrator] In a room fill.

- In a room filled,

so I'm gonna put the cursor here.

Remember make sure that
the area you're working on

is selected with the beige top.

I'm gonna hit command T

and let me move that with me.

Play head out of the way

and you could see I've cut this section.

There's a cut at the
beginning and the end of it.

I'm gonna select it by clicking on it,

and then I'm gonna go up here,

this is what I showed
you in the keynote twice.

This happens really fast.

Where you go up to Edit and
click, choose, Delete and Move

it's gonna really quickly
delete that central area

and bring the other two pieces together.

So watch closely.

(barking) there, it happens really fast.

So I want to undo it
command Z would undo it.

I could do it again, delete and move.

So now my audio is two pieces.

So if I continued working,

I would end up with an audio
in lots and lots of pieces

and just quickly to show
you how to really join them.

So you have a seamless audio file again

in case you wanna go back through it

make sure the track is chosen.

So do that up here.

(dog barking)

Sorry.

Do that up here.

Like the tracks so it's
all beige like this

in the Edit menu, it's
Join Regions, command J,

create a new audio file,

and you'll notice when
you look at the audio

when you look at the sound signature

there are two sound
parallel sound signatures

that's because the recording is in stereo.

And our joining is done,

and now we've got one seamless file.

So that's audio editing,
really straightforward.

And when you're done share,

export song to disk and
you can save it as an MP3

or as a WAV file and MP3 is
condensed the WAV file is raw.

So those are the basics

and just doing a little bit of that

will help your audios a lot.

And now I'm happy to take any questions

if anybody has any.

Any questions today?

Stop the audio, stop the recording.

- Let's see it.

I'm popping into to help with the Q and A.

- Yeah, thank you.

- For anyone who doesn't know
me, I'm Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank.

And it looks like we just
got a couple of questions

in these last few minutes.

And it's looks like it says,

is it possible to clean
up the audio speaking part

from the echoing noise?

It's a good question.

- Ah, really good question.

So this was not something I mentioned,

but there is,

there is a noise reducer and
an echo reducer in GarageBand.

I have found them

over the years to be
very difficult to use,

and also I find that they add,

they add a kind of
distortion to the audio.

So with Smarthistory,

actually I use a plugin in
GarageBand called CrumplePop

and it's I think it's pretty inexpensive.

CrumplePop has,

there are two CrumplePops,

one to reduce noise that works really well

and another that reduces echo really well.

And so I would recommend using CrumplePop

but there is that same
functionality in GarageBand

also if you wanna give that a try.

- It looks like we have another
question about PC users.

- Okay.

- Is there other options and
do we have any experience

or do you have any experience with them?

- Yeah. Yes.

So actually I started editing audio with a

on a PC and I used Audacity.

So Audacity is a free
program that you can use.

It looks and works very
similarly to GarageBand

and some people prefer it.

So, and there are tutorials online

but it's basically the same
idea cutting and then joining.

Any other questions?
- It seems.

It looks like those are
all the questions for now.

- Let me just show CrumplePop quickly.

Maybe I can do that just
so you can see where it is.

- [Lauren] That's a good idea.

- So I clicked on this thing

that looks like a little time clock maybe

I never know what these icons are

and down here under plugins,

I'm gonna add a plugin.

Let's see if CrumplePop is showing.

So here it is.

So I've installed CrumplePop in GarageBand

and I can de-noise or I can remove echo.

So if I do audio de-noise,

it defaults to 80% which
is generally too much.

So you can hear it now.

- [Narrator] Ahead of us
when you enter the room,

is by the great artist.

A great Florentine artist Chateau.

This is called the Earlier Santi Madonna.

- So you can kind of turn it
on and off and play with it.

- [Narrator] And on your Santi an-

- And you can also,

I generally keep it
about 20% when I need it

or else it also starts to,

to distort the audio.

And other plugins for, you know,

for GarageBand like reducing
noise can be found down here

in this menu here.

Any other questions?

- We do.

We have a great question

and it'll be very easy to answer it.

And it's,

can you cut a section of the audio

and paste it into another
area of the audio?

- Yes. Yes.

I didn't demonstrate that today

but I can do it really
fast now if you want.

I'm gonna cut, close that,
double-click up here,

so we're looking at it again.

- [Narrator] We're in one
of the first galleries

in the Uffizi in Florence.

- Okay. So say I wanna
put that later somewhere.

I've got my play head here,

the track is selected right
now I'm not brown anymore

I'm blue and light blue

but I know it's selected when
that light blue comes up here.

I can do command T.

Now what I usually do is I go up to track

and do new track with duplicate settings

and click up here.

So we're here again, and
then I'll take this piece.

I'm gonna zoom in up here.

This is where you, it's
good to use the macro view,

and I'll take this piece

and I'll just hide it down here briefly.

And then I'll scoot this
over, back to the beginning,

and because I don't wanna listen to this

I'm gonna actually turn off the audio.

Then I'm gonna go back to the beginning

to the piece I'm listening to

which is blue and select it.

- [Narrator] In a room
filled with enormous images

of the Madonna and child.

- So say I wanna put it right there,

command T,

and here's where it's
good to use this top,

macro view, I bring it, just
drag it and bring it up,

join it and bring those pieces together.

- [Narrator] In a room
filled with enormous images

of the Madonna and child.

We're in one of the first
galleries in Uffizi in-

- So yeah, that's sort of like,

that would be lesson two

if we were gonna proceed on to lesson two.

- Well, we have one final question

I think is a great way to cap
today's webinar and that is,

will we address adding the audio

to images in our next seminar?

- Yes.

And that's you Lauren, you're-

- That is me.

- Yeah.

So the next step in making
a Smarthistory style video

is to take this audio, export it,

and bring it into a
program called ScreenFlow

and add images and
annotations and zoom and pan

and Lauren will show you
how to do that next week.

(chuckling)

We're good?

- Yeah. Thank you everyone.

And if you have questions

please post them to Facebook
or shoot us an email.

- Yep.

Well, I'm happy to answer any
questions about audio editing.

Thanks everybody.