How to use GarageBand on a MacBook Air

GarageBand is free and usually already installed. If it is not in your Applications folder, it is a free download from the App Store, and it is a large one, so start it before you need it.

On opening, choose Empty Project rather than any of the templates. The templates load instruments and loops you do not need for a voice, and they slow everything down.

You will then be asked to pick a track type. Choose Audio with a microphone icon, not Software Instrument. Software Instrument is for playing notes; Audio is for recording sound.

In that dialogue, set the input to your microphone and, if you are using headphones, turn off input monitoring until you have them on. Monitoring through the laptop speakers causes immediate feedback.

The MacBook Air's microphones are genuinely good for a laptop, and they are still the weakest part of this setup. They sit far from your mouth, they point up rather than at you, and they pick up the room and the keyboard.

If you are recording anything anyone else will listen to, almost any external microphone is an improvement. Even wired earbuds with an inline microphone sit closer to your mouth than the laptop does, and closer beats better specifications nearly every time.

If the built-in microphone is all you have, sit close to the screen, in a room with soft furnishings, and do not type while recording. Those three changes do more than any amount of processing afterwards.

Check the input in System Settings under Sound, and watch the level meter while you speak normally. If it barely moves, raise the input volume there before you touch anything in GarageBand.

Before recording anything real, speak at your normal volume and watch the track's level meter. You want it moving comfortably in the middle, peaking around two thirds of the way up. Red means clipping, which cannot be fixed later.

Adjust with the Recording Level slider in the track's settings, or on the microphone itself if it has a gain knob.

Press R or the red record button. Press the spacebar to stop. Record ten seconds first and play it back before committing to a long take, because every problem on this page is silent until you listen.

Leave five seconds of silence at the start before you speak. It gives you room to trim and, on other tools, a noise profile to work from.

Trim the start and end by dragging the region's edges inwards. That removes the shuffling at the beginning and the reaching-for-the-keyboard at the end.

Cut out mistakes with Command and T to split, Delete to remove, then drag the following region left to close the gap. GarageBand will not close it for you.

Open Smart Controls with B and apply a Voice preset such as Narration Vocal. It sets EQ, compression and limiting in one click, and it is better than most people's manual attempt.

Then export: Share, Export Song to Disk, MP3, 128 kbps. Check the cycle region is off first, or you will export only part of it.

Performance is not the constraint. A modern Air handles a dozen audio tracks without complaint, and for one or two voices it will never be the limiting factor.

The constraints are the microphone and GarageBand's lack of tools for speech: no noise reduction, no ripple delete, no way to find a filler word without listening for it.

For a voice memo, a short narration, an audition piece or a class recording, this setup is entirely adequate and costs nothing.

For a weekly interview show, the editing time is what will stop you. Hilite records in the browser on the same machine and edits through the transcript, and we make it, so weigh that as you like.