GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Regions

A region, in GarageBand lingo, is one of the rounded green, blue, or purple music blocks in the timeline. These are your GarageBand building blocks. A region may contain musical material or silence. Each may last only a fraction of a second, or the entire length of a song. Just by chopping, copying, pasting, and dragging regions around, you can build an infinite number of compositions that have never been heard before.

Loops, described in Chapter 2, are one kind of region (green or blue), but they’re not the only kind. In subsequent chapters, you can read about how to record material of your own. Regions containing MIDI note information are always green, Apple Loops containing digital-audio recordings are blue, audio recordings you make yourself are purple, and audio files you drag in from the Finder are orange.

The following discussions tell you how to manipulate regions in general—but these techniques are especially useful for manipulating loops.

Selecting Regions

Before you cut, copy, delete, split, join, or move regions around, you must first select them. This isn’t rocket science, of course—you perform the same “Select, then apply” ritual in just about every Macintosh program.

Here’s the complete GarageBand region-selecting handbook:

• Select one region by clicking it.

• Select an additional region by Shift-clicking it. If you Shift-click one by accident, Shift-click it again to deselect it.

• Select all the regions in one section of the piece by drag-selecting (Figure ...