Importing Garageband Creations into iMovie

The 4th graders that I have been working with are ready to import their Garageband poetry creations into iMove, which will feature their own artwork!  This tutorial will show you how to send your Garageband song to iMovie, and how to add pictures from the iPad's camera roll into your movie.

Step 1: Select Song in Garageband
We have to choose which project we want to send to iMovie. This has several steps, and I got lots of pictures to help guide you through the process.

In the "My Songs" section of Garageband, touch SELECT in the upper right hand corner, as depicted above.

A new set of icons appears in the top left.  Touch the song that you want to send to iMovie to select it.

After you have selected your movie, touch the share icon (the box with the arrow point up, out of the box) and you will see the menu picture above. Click on Open In...  

After selecting Open In...  

You will see the above window, where you are able to customize any of the information about your song before it imports into iMovie. You do not have to change anything, but the option is there. 

Click on SHARE.

After you click on Share you will see the above menu. Click on iMovie to import your song.

iMovie opens, and you need to choose where your song should go. For this project, we will choose Create New Movie. 

You can see your song in the movie -- depicted by the green. To start adding your images from the iPad camera library, select the word Photos, circled in yellow in the picture above. Then choose Camera Roll from the resulting list.

On the upper right of the above picture you can see the pictures in your camera roll. Simply touch on a picture and watch it drop into your movie!

Put all of the pictures that you wish to use into the movie in the order you wish them to appear.  Once there are multiple photos in the movie, the length the picture will be shown in the movie can be edited.  Do not try to change the size of the image until there are multiple images in the movie!

When you have your images in the movie, to adjust the length of time they are shown, highlight the image you wish to shorten or lengthen. When it is highlighted yellow, as in the above picture, touch the right side thick line and drag it closer to the left (to make it shorter) or further away (to make it longer).  Adjust the other photos in a similar manner until they are exactly the way you with to see them.

When you are finished, touch the back arrow at the top left of the screen.

This takes you to the above screen. You can do several things at this screen. Play the movie, as indicated by the triangle button with the box around it; Share the movie, as indicated by the share button - the box with the arrow pointing up and out; or Trash the movie, as indicated by the trash can.

Also from this screen you can change the name of your project. See below:

Press and hold on the title to bring up the keyboard to change the name of the movie.

At this point, your movie is finished! Congratulations!

Using iOS GarageBand with 4th Graders Discovering Poetry

Our district is integrating iPads for all grade levels, and I have the good fortune of teaming up with one of our wonderful 4th grade teachers in using iPads to bring poetry to life!

The following is a basic tutorial for the concepts we will be using in the unit.

Getting Started with GarageBand on the iPad

When the program opens, it will create a new song, and take you to the instrument choosing screen. To select different instruments, swipe across the screen horizontally in either direction.

I recommend starting with SMART GUITAR.

When Smart Guitar opens, you can see several different chords in tabs across the front of a picture of a guitar.  The strings are interactive. You can play individual strings, strum across all six, or even bend the strings!

Touching the letter names of the chord plays full chord.  

The circular dial above the Bb is the "auto play" dial.  Setting the dial at either 1, 2, 3 or 4 and then touching one of the chord tabs starts a strumming or picking pattern that is repeated. It will keep playing until you touch the same chord again to stop.  You can easily change chords while auto play is going -- it is a very cool way to get an idea of what different song styles would sound like.

Before we start to record, there are some settings we have to change!

1st- We need to turn the metronome off.

To turn the metronome off, touch the WRENCH icon, and you will see the menu pictured.  In that menu, touch the blue and white area next to Metronome that show it as ON. When you touch that, it will slide to the left and turn gray, which indicates that it is off.

Next we need to adjust how long GarageBand will record for.  It automatically starts with 8 measure sections. It is easy to change, and best to do it before we do any recording.

In the top right hand corner, you will see a plus sign.  Tap the plus sign and you will see this menu.

Tap on the words SECTION A  and you will see:

Touch the grayed out toggle next to Automatic and you will see:

Which is what we want.  We have told GarageBand to keep recording until we tell it to stop.

Now --- for RECORDING!!

To record the cool sounds that you have created, simply touch the red circle at the top, and wait for the count in, and start playing. 

Make sure that the cursor (small tab that follows the music along the measure indicator) is where you want it to be before you hit record, or you may end up recording over something that you already recorded.

When you are finished recording, simply press the stop button. (The white square -- it only shows up during recording or playback.)

Now -- let's add another instrument!

To the left of the playback controls, you can see two buttons.  One that looks like a guitar, and is blue, and a tab with a bunch of lines.   The guitar is blue, because we are using the guitar right now.

Touch the tab with the lines and you will see:

This is the TRACK VIEW.

To add another instrument, click on the plus sign in the bottom left hand corner.  It will bring you to the instrument selection screen. Swipe across the screen until you find the microphone, for the audio recorder. This is what we will use to capture the student reading their poems.

When you select the microphone, this is the the screen you will see:

Start and stop the recording in the same way you did with the smart guitar.  This time, when you tap record, the guitar music you recorded will play in the background.

When you are finished recording, press stop again, and then tap the TRACK button -- the one next to the blue microphone.

Now you can see that your song has a guitar track, and your vocal track.

If either the guitar or voice are too loud, tap on the picture of the instrument you want to adjust the volume of, and then click on the "mixer" button.  (It is between the loop and the wrench.)

In this menu, you can adjust the track volume, or how loud the selected track (or instrument) is.


When you are finished with your recording, click on "My Songs" in the upper left hand corner.  It will save the project, and bring you back to the screen where all of your projects are.

Garageband doesn't force you to choose a name for your project right away -- it creates a temporary title "My Song #."  To change the title of the song, simply TAP AND HOLD the current title of the song until a keyboard pops up giving you the chance to create a new title for the song.

Next time we will discuss how to get these creations into iMovie, to create a movie using the students music to accompany pictures of the students artwork.

This is fun and exciting!