Garageband Guitar Presets

GarageBand is a free DAW for all macOS, iPad OS, and iOS users. It is complete with over 10GB of free virtual instruments and effects, including guitar amp simulators, guitar pedals, and more. Plus, you can also use GarageBand’s onboard effects to shape your guitar tone a little bit further—enabling you to create high-quality guitar tracks for your projects.

Once you have an acoustic guitar running through your interface into GarageBand, the Mac version of the software actually has some preset acoustic guitar options for you. Unfortunately, these same options are not available in the iOS version. How to save custom preset sounds in GarageBand iOS (GarageBand iPhone and GarageBand iPad)GarageBand on the iPad and the iPhone may have thousands of sounds.

To use guitar effects in GarageBand, create a new guitar audio instrument track, connect your guitar, and choose between the hundreds of guitar presets in the sound library. Alternatively, you can also design your guitar tone by selecting the different amps, adjusting the mic positioning, and adding guitar pedals.

GarageBand has dozens of guitar amps, pedals, and presets that enable guitarists to shape the tone in many ways. The presets sound impressive, but you can make your tone sound more professional with a little bit of tweaking.

How Do you Use Guitar Pedals in GarageBand?

To use pedals on GarageBand, you need to click and open the pedalboard menu on the track settings. The icon looks like a guitar pedal next to the tuner and amp menu on the right side of the screen.

It will take you to the pedalboard menu, where you can drag, drop, and arrange pedals in any order. You can also tweak the pedals by turning the knobs—kind of like working with actual guitar pedals.

You can also select different pedal presets by clicking the drop-down menu on the upper-left corner of the pedalboard menu.

How Do I Make My Guitar Sound Better in GarageBand?

The key to making your guitar tone sound better in GarageBand is to adjust the gain, volume, and noise gate to a perfect balance. You need to avoid clipping, but you also do not want the volume or signal to be too low, resulting in a quiet and anti-climactic tone that does not have a good impact on the overall mix.

Choose the right amp and settings

The first thing you need to do is choose an amp or preset. You can locate presets for clean, crunch, distorted guitar, bass presets, and experimental sounds in the sound library.

You can also choose different amps by selecting the amp icon next to the track settings and controls to switch between amps and choose amp preset settings.

You can switch between different amps and presets. Plus, you can even change the mic’s position in this menu, allowing you to design and customize your sound fully.

Adjust the levels

To make your guitar sound better in free software like GarageBand, it starts by adjusting the levels. You can adjust the level on your audio interface first, then adjust the amp and master levels within the DAW.

Choose the right pedals

You can also add and remove pedals from your presets to improve the guitar sound when recording guitar tracks in GarageBand. Ensure that your pedals are in the correct order, which usually starts with compression, distortion, delay, reverb, and modulation. However, you can arrange the pedals in whichever way you like.

Factors that Affect Your Guitar Sound in GarageBand

Many factors affect your guitar sound and overall tone in GarageBand, such as the hardware you are using, the guitar itself, and the settings in GarageBand. Sometimes adding too much gain will affect the tone, making it sound a little bit dirty on the mix.

Volume and Gain

Volume and gain control of the signal coming from the guitar and your preamp. (audio interface) It is always best to adjust the sound before you start recording instead of fixing the sound in post-production—especially for audio tracks. Unlike MIDI tracks, you cannot modify the velocity of each note, and it is not a good idea to rely on virtual effects to fix the volume, especially if you want a professionally-sounding guitar mix.

You want to adjust the gain and output from the audio interface first before adjusting the volume within your DAW. The right levels can reduce peaking and clipping even when you accidentally strum or pluck the strings too hard.

Gear

The equipment you are using can also affect the overall sound output. To get the best sound, make sure you are using an audio interface with a built-in preamp. Your guitar can also affect the sound, so make sure you change the strings if they are old to get a full and brighter tone. You also need to make sure that your guitar wirings are intact and shielded to reduce white noise, especially for recording lead and distorted guitar tracks.

Amps

Some amp presets will still need tweaking, especially in a free DAW like GarageBand. Although it is deemed as a beginner DAW with essential functions, a little bit of tweaking and adjustments with the amp’s volume, gain, and EQ levels can go a long way.

Pedals

Garageband guitar presets full

When building a pedal chain in GarageBand, it is like building a signal chain in real life, where the arrangement of the pedals can affect the overall tone. Make sure to arrange the pedals properly for a cleaner and tighter tone.

Other Effects

Aside from guitar effects, GarageBand also features a ton of built-in effect plugins, such as reverb, chorus, delay, EQ, bit crusher, pitch, modulation, and many more. You can use these effects for all tracks, including guitar tracks, and these effects can help shape and master your guitar tone to fit well into the mix.

Recording Guitar: Audio Interface vs Mic to Amp

Using an audio interface is the most convenient way to record guitar audio tracks. It is easy, and you don’t need an amp, guitar pedals, and a mic. Also, you don’t need to worry about technical details like mic positioning and other factors.

However, using a solid-state or tube amp will definitely result in a more organic sound, better than any digital instrument, which is best for recording rock and lead guitar tracks. It will definitely have more intensity, and it is the best way to record guitar-driven songs. You can still use digital effects to enhance the guitar sound in post-production, but the power will come from the guitar, pedals, and amp itself. However, tracking guitar using this method is not as simple as using GarageBand presets with an audio interface.

Related Questions:

How do I listen to the guitar while playing in GarageBand?

To listen to your guitar while playing in GarageBand, you need to turn on monitoring by clicking on the monitor icon. It looks like an upside-down WIFI icon between the track volume and “mute” and “solo” icons. If you want to listen to the recorded guitar track by itself, you can toggle solo or toggle mute on the other tracks.

Can I use my GarageBand as my guitar effects when performing live?

You can use GarageBand as your guitar effects when performing live shows. It may be powerful enough, but you need to make sure you are equipped with a high-end sound card or audio interface to avoid problems with the signal and latency.

There are MIDI pedalboards you can control with your feet, but GarageBand does not support MIDI mapping. Plus, using GarageBand as live guitar effects is not a good idea if you constantly switch effects in the middle of playing. However, it can work if you stick to one or two presets during songs, allowing you to switch in between.

In this tutorial, I’m going to lay out all of the different features of the Amp Designer in Garageband, as well as a step-by-step process for using it. Digital Audio Workstations are incredibly versatile, especially Garageband and its Amp Designer software, however, I think there are just a few steps for getting it set up and ready to go.

To use the Amp Designer in Garageband
1) Connect your guitar via a Scarlett 2i2 audio interface
2) Open an Audio track
3) click the Amp icon on the top-right of the Smart Controls to bring up the Amp Designer
4) Choose a preset like “Custom Studio Clean” from the drop-down menu.

The best thing about the Amp Designer is all of the included presets. They are a great way of becoming accustomed to what the Amp Designer has to offer. Each preset has its own amplifier, cabinet, and microphone combination and you can clearly see how they have changed when you switch through each one. If you get tired of the Amp Designer, however, I couldn’t recommend Blue Cat Audio’s Axe Pack from Plugin Boutique enough.

What The Amp Designer in Garageband Includes

  • Amp Heads (Fender, Marshall, Mesa Boogie, Vox, Randall, Orange, and more)
  • Cabinets (Same brands as well as different sizes, 4×12, 1×12, 2×12)
  • An adjustable Pedal Effects Board – Delay, Reverb, Chorus, Flange etc.
  • Hundreds of presets
  • Ability to move microphone positioning on the virtual amplifier cabinet.
  • Dynamic, Condenser, and Ribbon microphones modeled after the most famous microphones.
  • Noise Gate (eliminates feedback and other unwanted noises)
  • Guitar Tuner

A lot of people are surprised to see that Garageband comes with a plethora of amplifier combinations and pre-sets for both the guitar and the bass guitar.

I’ve counted approximately 7 collections of pre-sets.

In this order, they are Clean Guitar, Crunch Guitar,Distorted Guitar, Experimental Guitar,Clean Bass, Crunch Bass, and Experimental Bass.

There’s also settings for the Acoustic Guitar as well. There are 5 of them, Echo Strum, Natural Flat Pick, Natural Stereo, Natural Strum, and Natural Chorus.

Each one can be either used with a bass guitar or electric guitar, but the titles suggest for which instrument they’re designed specifically.

Under each category, there are approximately 21 presets (with a few exceptons), and many of them are quite good. My personal favorite is the Dublin Delay and Dyna-Trem which are found underneath Clean Guitar.

Now, all of these presets are basically pre-determined settings with Amplifier Models, Cabinets, Microphone positioning, and effects units running on them.

For that reason, they are a great jumping off point for getting started.

Some of my favorites right from the start were Cool Jazz Combo, Clean Echoes, Dyna-Trem, and Dublin Delay, which are all under the Clean Guitar pre-set.

After you get sick of messing around with the innumerable amount of presets, you can go into the Amp Designer to begin making things sound exactly as you want.

Before you’ve even entered the actual Amp Designer, you’ll notice there are some settings to adjust in the Smart Controls. In the image you can see below, I’m on the “Clean Echoes” setting.

What You Need To Use The Amp Designer In Garageband

Before we begin talking about all of the tips, tricks, and secrets of using Garageband’s Amp Designer, let’s talk about what you actually need to get started (my guide on how to connect your guitar to Garageband).

The article mentioned above shows you what you need to connect your guitar to the DAW, however, for the sake of this tutorial. I’ll also include a brief list of necessities here as well.

In order to play guitar in Garageband, you need a couple of different tools.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that you have a Mac Laptop – (although, if you don’t already have one, I suggest this one from Amazon).

Due to the port changes made by Apple in recent years, I’ll also include necessary adapters/connectors.

***Moreover, the gear I’ve recommended is all of the gear that I USE; it’s not necessarily the best in the world, additionally, each link shown down below will take you to Amazon.

  • Audio Interface (Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite)
  • Guitar Cable (Planet Waves Right-Angled Jack Cable)
  • USB-C to USB-Female Adaptor (You don’t need this if your laptop isn’t the brand new one with the new USB-Type C Port)
  • Monitors or Studio Headphones (I recommend Audio-Technica ATH-M50x)

And that’s pretty much it.

Once you’ve got your guitar hooked up to your computer and playing directly through your monitors/headphones, we can start talking about using the Amp Designer at its full potential.

***As I wrote about in my article on latency, it’s important you don’t have your computer connected to a Bluetooth speaker, because then there will be a significant delay between what you’re playing and what you’re hearing.

Obviously, we don’t want this.

Garageband Guitar Presets Tutorial

How To Use The Amp Designer

First things first.

If you’re a beginner to using the Amp Designer, the first thing you can do is select the “Amp Collection” option when you’ve first opened a new project.

If you choose the “Amp Collection,” it’ll bring up a 6 different amplifiers and pre-sets, Dublin Delay, Surfin’ Stereo, Royal Rock, Double Brit Phaser, Maelstrom, as well as Wide Wide Wah.

To bring up the Garageband Amp Designer, hit the little icon in the bottom right of the Smart Controls that looks like an Amplifier (at least it’s supposed to look like an Amp/Cab combination anyway).

The Amp Designer comes with a plethora of different cabinets, amplifiers, models, and Microphones.

If you want, you can also change not only the style of the microphone but where it’s located on the cabinet speaker.

I can’t lie, this is one of the Amp Designer’s coolest features, and it’s impressive Apple managed to get it right.

As a general rule, moving the microphone toward the center of the speaker will add more “brightness” and “crunch.” Essentially, we’re getting a boost of higher frequencies by centering the microphone on the speaker.

As we move the microphone further out to the left and right of the center, we’re getting more mid and low frequencies, essentially “darkening” the sound.

Also, there is an option for adjusting how much of the screen the Amp Designer actually takes up. Looking up at the top right-hand side of the Amp Designer, notice the button that says, “View.”

You can choose from the options, 50% up until 200%, depending on how much of the screen you want the Amp Designer to take up. I normally keep it at 100% or 125%.

If you click on the “Manual” drop-down menu on the right side of the “On” button in the Amp Designer, you’ll have access to even more presets.

If I had to make a guess, I’d say there are around an additional 100 presets to choose from, within the categories of Clean, Crunch, and Distortion.

As I said before, for the most part, all of the amplifiers and cabinets are modeled after a few different companies, including Fender, Vox, Marshall, Mesa Boogie, and Orange.

Moreover, all of the knobs, are exactly how they’d be on a real guitar amplifier, including the Gain, Bass, Treble, Mids, Reverb, Master, and Presence.

There’s no reason to go into the details on each one of these, but I’ll give you a brief rundown on all of the knobs in case you’re not too familiar.

Gain – Increases the power of the signal.
Bass – Increases the lowest frequencies
Treble – Increases higher frequencies
Reverb – Increases the virtual size of the room (That’s what it sounds like. I’m not sure precisely how reverb really works).
Master – Increases the total volume.
Presence – Boosts frequencies that are even higher than the regular treble frequencies.

Now, there are additional EQ controls, notably if you click on the button that says “EQ” above the Gain, Mids, Bass, and Treble options.

If you click on the EQ button, you’ll get several 5 different options, including Modern, Vintage, US Classic, British Bright, and Boutique.

Also, there are a number of different Reverb options as well if you just click on the Reverb Dropdown menu where it says “Reverb.”

It’s worth noting that you can actually crank the Master Volume on the Amp Designer without actually turning the volume up on the actual track of your Guitar Track Region.

***In other words, you can push your virtual amplifier to its potential without worrying about the correlated increase in volume.

There’s also an “output level” slider on the bottom right-hand side that just turns up the total strength of the signal.

The microphone options are based on the three main microphones, the Dynamic, Condenser and Ribbon Microphone.

We’re not going to get into the many differences between Dynamic, Condenser, and Ribbon microphones because they are numerous and people in Audio Engineering debate this topic all of the time.

The primary difference, however, between the Dynamic and Condenser microphone is the Dynamic is far more common than the condenser, and the Dynamic doesn’t need an additional power source like the condenser.

The condenser is normally associated with more power. I’m likely wrong about the main differences between the microphones, so you’ll have to go somewhere else for that information.

Apparently, a ribbon microphone apparently is a microphone where thin pieces of metal are “suspended between permanent magnets.”

Maybe someone in the comments could discuss the differences between these three microphones in regular person language.

Moving on…

Most of the microphones in Garageband’s Amp Designer are modeled after actual microphones, like the Shure 57 – a classic microphone.

Now that we’ve discussed all of the relevant parameters of the Amp Designer, let’s get into actually how to set one up and use it.

How To Actually Use the Amp Designer in Garageband

For this section, I’m going to run through a set-up that I’ve created.

And if you mimic what I’ve done here in your own Amp Designer, you’ll get a feel for all of the ways in which we can adjust the Amp Designer to our choosing.

Compare the Blackface 4×10, for example, with the Sunshine Stack 4×12, and the difference is quite noticable.

The three big changes you can make in the amp designer are the Microphone positioning, the Amp/Cabinet combination, as well as the type of microphone you want, whether it’s Dynamic, Ribbon, or a Condenser.

Garageband Guitar Presets

Of course, the Gain/Mids/Bass options are important as well, but their importance goes without saying.

It’s really up to you to decide what you want to use. It’s a matter of messing around with the controls.

I used the Dyna-Trem preset, and then fine-tuned it to my preferences afterward.

Match it to the dials I’ve used in the images, and you’ll get a feel for how things sound.

I’ve included the Instagram Post below so you can see what it sounds like. You’ll have to excuse my messing-around. I was having fun playing around with it.

In this case, I used the neck pick-up, obviously, with the tone and gain cranked all the way up. The gain is always the best when it’s near maxed in my opinion. Maybe around 8 or 9.

You can check out the settings within the Smart Controls as well. There are a few differences between the settings in the Smart Controls as well as in the actual Amp Designer.

Garageband Guitar Presets

The settings in the Smart Control essentially control the actual effect of the preset, in the case, the “Chorus” or the “Dyna-Trem” as Garageband calls it.

The Gain knob is the same as the Gain knob in the Amp Designer, but the Tone knob is different.

Explained in another way, if you turn up the Gain in the Smart Controls, it’ll also turn up the gain in the Amp Designer at the same level.

As I said before, it’s really up to you and your ear. You can figure out how you want to go about it.

How To Adjust the Pedals In The Amp Designer

The order of the pedals in the Amp Designer is actually pretty important, and shouldn’t be ignored. This is the case in real life as well (when using actual analog pedals and amp/cabs).

How you organize the order of effects matters a lot, but it’s best to experiment with this on your own.

Normally, it’s common practice to use the dynamics pedals first, ie, EQ, Compressor, etc, and then the effects pedals afterward.

If you want to access the pedalboard, click on the icon that looks like a pedal beside the Amp Designer button.

This is how I approach it anyway. Obviously, there are other ways of doing things.

My thinking is that it’s best to EQ the sound to the way you like it and then add the effects after.

Garageband Guitar Presets Free

By the way, if you’re wondering if you can use our actual effects pedals for Garageband, then yes you can.

Garageband Guitar Presets Reviews

The order of the signal chain is as follows for me, Guitar > Effects > Audio Interface > Computer.

Important things to Remember

Garageband Guitar Amp Presets

1) Make sure that you only have the “Monitoring” button turned on the track you intend on recording and listening through.

The “Monitoring” button is the little button that looks like an upside Wi-Fi symbol. When it’s turned on, it’s the color orange. It looks like this.

If you have the monitoring button turned on every single channel, you’ll likely run into some problems, including latency, lagging, and probably even feedback at times.

2) Make sure that you have either Headphones plugged in or actual speak monitors, otherwise, you’ll likely run into some seriously annoying feedback or other problems.

3) Ensure the “Count-In” button is either turned on or off. It can be somewhat of a nuisance depending on whether it’s on or off. Personally, I prefer having it on, because then I can literally count in as the name for it suggests. Others may find it annoying though.

It’s also notable that the guitar doesn’t record during the count-in period, so keep that in mind.

4) Your Audio Interface signal has to be dialed in at the appropriate amount. What I mean by that, is that if you’ve turned it up too much, the signal will be coming in hot, and thus, you’ll get some distortion.

5) The Noise Gate is actually pretty dope.

The Noise Gate option is in Garageband’s Smart Controls, which you can bring up using the “B”-key on your keyboard. In my opinion, the Noise Gate setting is usually good to dial in around (-45) – (-50dB).

Around that area. Maybe a little less. The Noise Gate eliminates all of the undesirable sounds, like hissing and so on.

6) Turn off the Master Echo and Master Reverb if you don’t want it turned on. Recording guitar parts are different from MIDI because if you’ve recorded with a ton of delay or reverb, it’ll stay on the track.

7) Garageband also comes with a tuner. Personally, I don’t like it that much because it’s not of the greatest quality, but it’s there. It’s the symbol that looks like a tuning fork.