With the Musical Typing keyboard you can play multiple keys at the same time. Play GarageBand with your Mac’s keyboard. So, the keyboard’s middle row of keys acts as the piano’s “white keys.” The W, E, T, Y, U, O, and P keys are the piano’s “black keys.” S is the D note a whole step above Middle C, D is E, F is F, G is G, H is A, J is B, and K is C, an octave up from Middle C. The Mac’s A key corresponds to the Middle C pitch. When you activate this keyboard you can play GarageBand’s instruments with your Mac’s keyboard. Slightly more useful is the Musical Typing keyboard, which you can invoke by choosing Window > Show Musical Typing (-K). It plugs into the back of the keyboard and serves the same function as a piano’s sustain pedal-it holds notes when the pedal is pressed and then cuts them off when you release the pedal. You can purchase a sustain pedal to go with the keyboard as well. These use plastic keys and a “semi-weighted action,” meaning that the keys don’t offer nearly as much resistance as a piano when you depress them. M-Audio can be had for about $100 and up. There’s no need to install drivers or do much in the way of configuration-GarageBand can automatically sense when such a keyboard is connected to your computer.Ī not-terribly-expensive MIDI keyboard can get you back to playing. To set things up, just string a USB cable between the keyboard and the Mac, switch on the keyboard (if it’s not powered by the USB connection), and you should be ready to go. Most of today’s keyboards have a USB connector. At one time these keyboards had a special five-pin MIDI connector and required that you used a MIDI interface between the keyboard and Mac to make the connection. To begin, we’ll concentrate on a real keyboard that you connect to your Mac.Ĭonnected musical keyboards use something called MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) to transmit the keys you’re playing on the music keyboard to your Mac. You have a few ways to play those instruments. Essentially, GarageBand turns your Mac into a music synthesizer-one capable of playing purely synthetic sounds as well as mimicking real instruments such as pianos, other keyboards, guitars, drums, basses, voices, and orchestral instruments.

Embedded in the application are software instruments. But this isn’t the only sound it’s capable of producing.

In our last lesson I told you that GarageBand has a collection of prerecorded loops and a Drummer track.

Piano midi for mac