GarageBand – How to change a loop tempo

Okay so I’ve recently made the jump to the Apple Army and I’ve been pretty happy with it. Whether you are a Mac user or not, you know that one of the big benefits of Apple products is how intuitive the software/hardware combo is and the ease of use of interface. For the most part, I’d say this is definitely true and I’ve made the switch from Windows XP to OSX pretty easily.

This weekend, however, I found myself in a pretty frustrating situation with GarageBand ’09 and couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a solution for what I was wanting to do.

First – some setup:

At my church, we use click/loop tracks almost every week. I’ve talked about this before and they are a pretty standard part of our worship team toolbelt. In the past, I’ve pulled a stereo wav track in to Audacity, split the stereo file and run the audio channels to either front of house or in-ear monitors. If we need to make tempo changes on the fly, Audacity can handle that through one of their little drop-down menus.

This past week, I decided to try using GarageBand to take a pre-recorded click/loop track of “Sing to the King” and add some organ and pad parts. Here’s a shot of the GarageBand project -

Two things to notice. First, the click and loop tracks at the top of the window is orange. Second, see in the bottom left-hand corner where it says “Follow Tempo & Pitch”? That’s greyed out – no option to check that box.

Okay – so we play the click during rehearsal and soundcheck and after our first service decide that the tempo is just a touch slow. The loop is programmed at 118 and we want to run it at 120. Unfortunately, changing the master tempo of the GarageBand project from 118 to 120 only changes the timing of the programmed organ track and does NOT change anything with the click and loop tracks.

After a quick look through the menus and searching through the help files, it looks like I’m out of luck. I jump over to my Windows laptop, fire up Audacity, adjust the tempo from 118 to 120, export as a wav, upload to Dropbox and then wait. Too bad for me – not enough time between services to get the new click/loop track re-inserted to GarageBand at the new tempo.

Got more questions about GarageBand? Check out this eBook over at Amazon – Take Control of Making Music with GarageBand ’11

So yesterday I’m thinking to myself that there must be a way to do this with GarageBand. I begin hunting around on Google and eventually find out that switching the tempo of a pre-programmed loop track is definitely possible but.. get this.. it is not documented in the help files and not available anywhere in the menus. How stupid is that? Apple – you should be ashamed!

Alright, so what is the solution? It goes like this. Remember our orange click and loop tracks? Hilight those tracks and press Control-Alt-G. Click somewhere in the track window and those tracks should now change from orange to purple, like this -

And what’s this? Remember our “Follow Tempo & Pitch” option that was greyed out? Tada!! It’s alive! Click that checkbox and now your click and loop tracks will be slaves to your master tempo for your GarageBand project.