Best Garageband OD tones

alex1fly

alex1fly

Well-known member
I'm playing with Garageband for the first time. I want to play with all the amp sims, mainly the high gain ones right now. Will going direct from my guitar to laptop be effective, or would I be better off using my amp's line out? What do you Garageband users do?

Right now I'm going direct from my guitar to my laptop. The high gain tones sound a little fizzy, well, bad. I know I'll have to spend some more time with it, but I'm pretty newb at this point.
 
Re: Best Garageband OD tones

I use a PODxt into garageband, with decent results.
The amp sims are horrible. Drum sounds need to be Eq'd and compressed, just to sound semi-passable. It takes a while to learn how to make decent recordings with garageband.
Check my sig, you'll hear a serious progression, as I got better at recording.

Good luck.
Nick
 
Re: Best Garageband OD tones

You have some nice tones, even at the beginning! I had been looking at a POD of some kind. Are you just turning the Garageband cab simulator off and completely using the POD? One last question about the POD... is the POD XT practical for live use?

Did you use Garageband's drum sounds?
 
Re: Best Garageband OD tones

I played around with it for the first time the other day too, and I kinda liked the tones in it - I don't know which ones I ended up using most though. I was using it like a vitual amp though, not recording. I was also using an old imic I had laying around as the in-between.

Revalver MKIII just came out - I'm going to try out the demo as soon as I get time. For $250, might not be a bad deal. Might be able to get away with the demo for short songs, short parts within songs, etc.

You could always nab a good free VST like simulanalog's guitar suite (the one with the killer jcm 900 sim) and get that $99 VST-to-AU converter. I might be getting the converter cause there's a lot of nice VSTs I had gotten for my PC I'd like to use in my mac.

I might process the guitars in my PC, which has a complete Revalver MKII and then just import the processed stuff into the mac for mixing. Sorry, thinking out loud there. Anyway, there's always more options. For under two bones, you could get logic express - it's got amp sims too.
 
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Re: Best Garageband OD tones

Yep. I don't even bother with the garageband guitar stuff. Not even delay or reverb. Everything with the PODxt. If you set the PODxt up in your mac settings, with the proper drivers, you can route all sound through the xt for better monitoring, and quicker tracking during recording. Don't use the built-in mac soundcard.

I suppose you could use the PODxt for live use, if you got the FBV shortboard...but that's almost as much $$ as the PODxt itself. There's also the PODxt LIVE version, which has all the stomp pedals, and expression pedals built in. Haven't used it though.

Those are garageband drum sounds, after much tweaking.
 
Re: Best Garageband OD tones

if i dont have my amp mic'd then i tend to run through my pedals and then directly into garage band. The EQ and filter options are good enough to dial in most tones if you have a decent pedal set up for versatility. as afore mentioned, the amp sims and effects are really not worth it. i love garage band for the ease of recording and the eq filter tweakability (which by comparison to a lot of things still sux btw) but the built in fx are worthless
 
Re: Best Garageband OD tones

I spent some time playing with Garageband's amp sims. Everyone is right, they are bad. Cleans are passable, but distorted tones just fail. I tried all sorts of EQ and compression settings with many amp models, and nothing sounded close to a real amp - flat, lifeless, like a keyboard trying to cop a distorted guitar sound. Using the line out from my Spider helped add some life to the tone, but the Spider's distorted channel can really only do buzzsaw type distortion (which I like to play, but it sounds way bad recorded).
 
Re: Best Garageband OD tones

After checking out the converter, I just want to clarify that the VST to AU converter I mentioned up the thread is more or less completely useless for transferring cool plugins for windows to the mac, given that most good VSTs in windows are .dll files. The way they market the converter, it makes it seem like you can take all your windows plug-ins and use them on the mac. Only the ones that are .vst can be converted. Of the hundred+ I have for the PC, not one of them is .vst. I don't see the use of their little converter.
 
Re: Best Garageband OD tones

Welcome to the forum.

Unfortunately, your post is eight years too late to help the opening poster. Garageband has certainly come on a long way since 2008. So has digital amplifier modelling software in general. Many of these sound fine in a mix, right up until the moment when you add the sound of a valve amplifier through a microphone.

Apple Loops can be fun. Try shortening the drum patterns to create compound time signatures.
 
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