Using Garageband to make a Whale Sound Effect

Hey, soundscapers, it's Eric from novel effect. Some folks at high-tech elementary in San Diego were asking us a few questions about garage band. So I thought I'd answer them here by showing you how to make a whale sound effect. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is remind myself how a whale actually sounds. So I went on YouTube and searched for whale song. And I found this humpback whale sound that I like a lot. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and imitate that with my voice. So I'm going to record myself right now doing that. The first thing I want to do, I've got garage band open here, is I want to turn off the count in and click. Those are like a metronome if you're recording music. But since we're not recording music, we don't need that. I'm using a fancy microphone that's right here. But you guys can use whichever if you have a microphone, you can plug it into your MacBook. Or you can use the built in microphone on the MacBook, or if you're using an iPad, you can use the microphone on the iPad. What I'm going to do is hit record and then perform my whale sound. So here it goes. Okay, not bad. I'm not the world's best whale imitator, but it's good enough for now. Maybe you have a friend that's better. So what I'm doing is just trimming up the file, what I do is reach down here till the cursor turns into a little bracket tool, and then I can drag, you can see where my actual recording that I want is. So I'm going to line it up here at the start, and let's listen to it. Okay, it kind of sounds like a whale. I'm just going to actually take the second one here, use that one. Now let's slow it down. So it sounds bigger. In order to slow my performance down, the first thing I have to do is switch this view to the editor view. So I go up here view editor, show editor. Now what I'll do is go down here, select region. Click follow tempo and pitch, and then I'm going to try transposing this down 12 steps. So once it says -12, that means it's going down. 12 steps. Those are like musical steps. Here we go. Let's listen to this. Not bad. Let's listen to the whale song again and see how it matches. It's maybe a little too low. So I'm going to split the difference here and try 6 steps instead of 12. Okay, not bad. The next thing we need to do is add some sounds of the ocean behind the whale. Okay, one sound that you hear underwater is bubbles. So let's do some ocean bubbles along with the whale. I've got a trusty mug here with full of some water and a straw. This is a bendy straw, but you can use a straight straw if you would like. So here's the sound. That sounds pretty good. Let's try recording that. Make sure if you're using microphone, make sure not to get water onto the microphone or onto your laptops. Here goes. I'm going to turn up the volume here. On my record button. Okay, that's pretty good. Now what I'm going to do is take this recording, I'm going to use this part here, so remember we'll drag this over. Here, and then let's try slowing this one down too, to make it sound instead of just like a tiny mug of water, make it sound like a whole ocean. Let's see if we can do that by pitching this down. So I'm going to select this region again, go down here, transpose it all the way down as far as it'll go. Let's hear this how this sounds. Okay. I like that. Now I'm going to create a new track, all I think I'd have to do is double click here. Now I'm going to drag this down, maybe move this over a little bit. Good. You know what? Since I've got extra bubbles recorded, I'm going to split this track, how do I do that? Split regions at play head? There we go. Now I've got two different regions. I'm going to take this one and drag it here. And then I'm going to pan them left and right, just to give a sense of spaciousness. So one is going to be panned, moved over to the left, and one will be moved over to the right. Pretty good. I like that. I'm going to drag this so that they're the same length. And there we go. Okay, so in order to add fade ins and fade outs to these bubble sounds, I'm going to go here, mix show automation, so now there's volume automation here. And then I can just click and draw in a fade out here, do the same on this track. And let's draw some fade ins at the beginning. Let's hear how this sounds now. Good. I'm going to make the fade out just a little bit longer. Let's hear this. The final thing I'm going to do is add what's called reverb to the whale. Reverb is like the sound of the when you make a sound in a building or a large space, you hear the sound kind of echo around, not really distinct echoes, but kind of a wash of sound. That is called reverb. Remember how I had you come up here to enable the editor. There's a faster way to do that. You can just hit this button, we'll show the editor, but I'm going to show this button, which is our plugins. Or control section, I'm going to click this, make sure that this master reverb setting is checked, and then I'm going to turn it way up like maybe 80%. Let's hear how this sounds. Pretty good. I like that. Maybe we'll even add some effects, some reverb onto the bubbles as well. Let's hear how this sounds. Maybe even a little more. Good, okay. So that's my whale sound. The next thing I'm going to do is export it. What I do is I go up to share, export song to disk. Then I want to export it as an MP3 file because that's what novel effect uses. I'm going to set it to highest quality. You don't have to do that. But high quality will sound a little better. And I'm going to export to this to my desktop and I'm going to call it. Whale. And here's my desktop folder. Whale and just check it to make sure it sounds good. So there's my whale sound. Okay, thanks everyone. I hope you have fun making your soundscapes. Bye.