Master beats in GarageBand

Create fantastic fills and block-rocking beats on your iPad

- CARRIE MARSHALL

ONE OF OUR favorite GarageBand features is the Beat Sequencer, which enables you to create your own drum and percussion patterns, even if you’ve never hit a hi-hat or smacked a snare drum before.

As we'll discover in this tutorial, it’s incredibly easy to use, but it’s also a very powerful creative tool. The Beat Sequencer enables you to create very complex patterns, and it’s very simple to then incorporate multiple Beat Sequencer patterns in your song and tweak the patterns to keep things musically interesting. A really useful thing about Beat Sequencer is that if you know how to use it in GarageBand, you’ll be able to use the Step Sequencer in GarageBand’s bigger sibling, Logic Pro. That's because the Step Sequencer in Logic Pro is based on this feature in GarageBand, and while it has been given quite a lot of extra features — it has got more customization, and can be used across more instruments — it works in the same way.

HOW TO Use the Beat Sequencer

Start your song

Create a new song in GarageBand, and swipe along until you get to the Drums option shown here. If you look at the icons below the picture of a snare drum, you'll see the Beat Sequencer icon second from the right. Tap that icon.

See the sequencer

GarageBand will now open the Beat Sequencer with a blank grid filling most of the screen. It's straightforward: each column is a beat, so we've got 16 beats going across. Each row is a bit of the drum kit, starting with the kick drum.

Build a beat