How To Make a Tape Stop Effect In GarageBand

A tape stop is when a song sounds like it is being played on a tape deck and the speed of the tape comes to a halt very quickly. Both the speed and pitch ramp down. This is a common effect in modern music. Some audio and music apps have a fairly simple way to do this. GarageBand doesn't have a tape stop effect, but you can combine some techniques to get the same result if you know how.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode I'm going to show you how to do a tape stop in GarageBand.
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What is a tape stop? Well, a tape stop is an effect of modern music where it sounds like you're listening to a recording on tape and then the tape recorder slows down very quickly. So you're both changing the pitch and the speed and it creates an interesting effect. Now you can find all sorts of tutorials on how to do this in other apps. For instance, Logic. But I haven't found anybody talking about how to do it in GarageBand. It's a matter of applying a pitch bend using Automation and then also slowing down portions of a track. It's not easy to do in GarageBand but it is possible.
So here I've got my song in GarageBand. Now to make things more difficult I have three tracks here. It's a little bit simpler if you only have one track but for working in GarageBand chances are we have multiple tracks. So I'm going to show you how to do this even if you have multiple tracks.
First things first. You need to go to GarageBand Preferences and then under Audio/MIDI you need to make sure you've checked Enable Audio Units. We're going to use an audio unit effect to change the pitch. So you need to have that turned on or you won't find it. I can only create this effect on one track but I have three tracks here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create another track and it's going to merge these and only use that for the small portion where I have the tape stop.
So let's say I want to do the tape stop starting here and going to here. So this will be the region of the tape stop. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the playback head there. I'm going to use Shift and select all the regions of all of the tracks and then use Command T to split those tracks. So it's split right there. I'm going to go to the end and you can see it's already split because it's the end of a looping section for each one. But that's not good enough because I actually want to go a little bit past that and you'll understand why later on. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to past that and select these regions here and do Command T for splitting as well.
So now that I've got those split up I'm going to select all the portions here that are in this section and I'm going to do Command J to join them. It's going to create a mixdown. So I'll do a stereo mixdown. So that is a mix of those three there. Now that I've got it in one track I can do the tape stop. But I don't want to do it in this track here. I want to create a new one for it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this and do Command X to cut it out. Then I'm going to Undo. Use Command Z to undo to put this stuff back in here. I'm just going to get rid of the portions that I'm going to use. So instead of all six of these I'm going to get rid of these. I'm leaving this extra bit here for each one.
I'm going to create a new track. The track is just going to be a plain audio track. You can see it's just audio. I'm going to move it to the top here. I'm going to move the playback head here and with that selected I'm going to Command V to paste. It's going to paste in that section. So you can see here I've got the replacement here for this section plus a little overlap. So now I'm ready to do the tape stop on this section here. It's going to take two different effects. One is going to be a pitch change. It's going to use Automation. Then I'm going to have to do a trick to get to slow down that section as well.
So with this selected here I'm going to make sure that I see the controls. So if you don't see them click here to see the controls. You should see Recording Settings. I don't need that. You're going to see Plugins. Plugins is what I want. The default plugin is going to be the channel equalizer. I'm going to click here and change it to another plugin. Now you'll see Audio Units at the bottom because we turned Audio Units on. Only one type of Audio Units are the ones from Apple. We're going to choose AUPitch as the audio unit. There are other things in there like AUNewPitch and such but AUPitch is the one we want. I'll apply that. Now if I set this to loop and looping this area right here you can see I can play and hear what I've got so far. (music playing)
Now if I use pitch I can pitch it down so listen to what happens. (music playing) Great. That's what we want but we want it to happen automatically. So I'm going to adjust the pitch back to zero and I'm going to get rid of this control here. I don't need it. I'm going to turn on Mix Show Automation. Automation is what lets you change things but gradually. For instance you can change the volume gradually to fade in or fade out. I'm going to not change the volume here. I'm going to go down to AUPitch under Plugins and there's a whole bunch of different aspects of AUPitch I can change. But Pitch is the one I want to change. So we'll select that.
Now this Automation line here will effect the pitch. So I'm going to click on the line right here at the beginning of our section and I'm going to click right at the end of the section here and then lower the pitch. I don't have to go all the way down. I can also select some areas in the middle here and click and maybe two more to make it more like a curve than a line going straight down. Now listen to what happens if I play. (music playing) So it's actually pitching down slowly to get to this point. We're most of the way there because it actually sounds like a tape stop now. But what it's not doing is it's not slowing things down. It's still playing at the same speed just changing the pitch. The tape stop should be doing both. Slowing down the tape and also changing the pitch while it slows down.
We're going to select this track here. I'm going to click the scissors button there to go to the Editor down here. I'm going to click on the Show/Hide Flex button here and that should turn on Follow Tempo and Pitch for this here. Now I'm going to go to the beginning. As soon as I click in here it's going to actually create these little areas where I can drag this area right here and slow down a portion. I can click here and I can slow down another portion. Every time I do that it's going to create more sections and it gets kind of messy. But we can just clean it up as we go.
It's going to keep bugging you with these little Do you want to create a high speed section because whenever you compress something to these high speed sections it wants to warn you. We'll turn off that warning there. I'll continue to slow down. So this section here is going to slow down somewhat. A little bit. You can see when it's white it's basically the same speed. When it's gray it's a little slower. This section here will slow down more. We'll grab this next section and we'll slow that down even more. We can get rid of some of these sections here. So a little slowdown, more slowdown, a lot of slowdown.
If we move this playback head here we can see where the actual portion ends. It's right here. We have all this extra part here that I've been talking about. So let's go and create a slowdown that goes past the extra part. I'll get rid of that section there. So you can see how each section slows it down more and more and more. We end up with a high speed section. But we're not concerned about the high speed section because what we're going to do is we're going to grab the end here and we're going to shorten this to just go to the end of the portion that we want. So the overlap is now gone. So that overlap was there to absorb that high speed section as we expand pieces of the track we end up with the compressed part at the end. I'm cutting that off. So now we have something that slows down and changes the pitch. (music playing)
There's our tape stop. Let me take off the loop and start it back here. You can play it and see what will happen. So there you go. You may want to create a smaller section for the loop or even a larger one depending upon your needs. It takes a lot of practice to get this right so if you think you're going to use this in your music what I suggest is to throw some loops into GarageBand and make a sample song. Then practice doing it. That way you've got it down and you know how to create one of these tape stops when you need it.
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