At the very least, you now have a solid demo that you can build on, or - if you’re in a band - show to your fellow musicians instead of just humming their parts to them badly. I usually re-record my original part to better fit the rest of the “band,” and maybe use a better mic to do it. You can now go on and create your masterpiece in GarageBand. You can move any of the notes to fine-tune the bass line, although in my experience Music Memos usually comes up with pretty solid bass parts. It’s a MIDI file, which is like a computer version of the punched paper roll from an old player piano. GarageBand’s Drummer is like having a real drummer, only it doesn’t try to steal your girl/boyfriend. It’s all standard GarageBand Drummer stuff, only it’s applied to your custom drum track instead of one of the built-in ones. Using Drummer, you can tap different drums on a virtual kit to toggle them on and off, as well as tweaking complexity, volume and the number of fills. You can also move the position of the first downbeat if the app didn’t do a good job of detecting it. Here you can change the detected chords, trim the song itself, choose a time signature (3/4, 4/4 or 6/8), and pick the tempo of the drums, setting them to half or double speed. To enter the advanced drum editing mode, you just tap the song waveform. This lets you fine-tune the volume and complexity of the accompaniment, as well as picking modern or vintage drum kits, and electric or upright basses. To edit them, long press one of the icons and you get the controller above right.
To toggle the drums and bass, you just tap their icons. If you want to dig in, you’ll find a ton of options here.
The Music Memos version is cut down to the essentials, but when we move to GarageBand later, you get the full lineup of features back. In GarageBand, Drummer is an amazing way to get a song started, or just to create a beat to jam along to. Music Memos uses GarageBand’s Drummer, a virtual drummer that can match the tempo of your recorded track and kind of improvise a drum part around it. Next, we take a look at the built-in drummer and bass player. Now, I rename the track, add some stars to rate it (usually I give a track three stars if I plan to work on it in future, but this one was easily a five-star recording). The only thing that went wrong was my guitar playing. Auto-record lets you grab take after take, hands-free.