Creating a professional-sounding fade-out

So you've all but completed your latest pop ditty, and it only remains for you to give it some sort of ending. Why not a fade-out? It's an ideal solution for a catchy pop song, to keep it circling endlessly in your public's collective ear and leaving them with that moreish "where can I buy this thing?" feeling.

So how do you do it?

First you need to have in place the part of the song you're going to loop while fading. You'll need about 30 seconds for an unhurried-sounding fade (change your playhead position display to minutes/seconds rather than measures/bars by clicking the clock symbol () to get an idea of how long this is), then extend your final loops however many times are necessary to fill this space.

Next, drag the purple end-marker right up close to the last loop to mark the end of the song. (This isn't an essential step as, when exporting to iTunes, GarageBand only makes the song as long as the musical parts. It does, however, stop the playhead from wandering off into infinity when you play it in GarageBand.)

Bring up your song's Master Track by hitting -B or choosing Show Master Track from the Tracks menu. If you haven't used the Master Track so far in your song, you'll see something like this:

Otherwise, simply make sure the grey popup menu is on the Master Volume option.

Now for the fade. Scroll along to the end of your song, and about 30 seconds before the end, click the purple volume line on the Master Track at the 0db level (i.e., exactly on the line see below for an explanation of dB.) A purple blob will appear. This is a volume control point:

A volume control point normally tells the Master Track to change the volume, but here we're using it to tell the Master Track not to change the volume. Why? Because we don't want our fade-out to start till after this point. So, by clicking on the Master Track we're telling GarageBand not to change the volume in the preceding section of the song.

Now click the Master Track again, directly below the end-marker, this time as low (close to the bottom) as possible, which will give you a value of -144.0dB. (If you don't manage that low on the first click, don't worry. Just select the purple blob and drag it downwards. You can move volume control points, but only in one direction at a time.)

You should now have a diagonal line moving from 0dB to -144dB at the end of your song. Play your song, and you will hear a gradual fade-out:

A more professional-sounding refinement

Listen to your fade-out and you may realise something. For most of the 30 seconds, you'll be hardly able to hear anything, and for about 10 seconds of that final fade you'll be listening to near complete silence. It's just like having 10 seconds of silence at the end of a track, 10 seconds you have to sit through waiting for the next track to begin. Not what you want to keep your pop-hungry listeners happy. (For a technical explanation of why this is, see the note on dB at the end of the article)

For a more professional result, you'll want a two-stage fade. First, a long gradual fade over 80 or 90% of your song's final 30 seconds, then a quick fade once the sound level is low enough for a discreet exit. Something like this:

Here, I've added a point near the end of the fade at about the -18.0dB level (the exact level doesn't matter use your ears to judge the best setting). A much more professional result.

Note that even with volume control points on the Master Volume track you can still use the main volume slider to control the volume of the song (in this respect, the Master Volume track works differently to individual Track Volume automation).

A note on dB

dB (decibel) values can be a little confusing until you understand exactly what they mean. How come, for instance, you can hear your song at 0db, but if you set any volume knob to zero you hear nothing?

The answer is that dB is not a measurement of volume, but amplification. 0dB means that a signal is unaltered, i.e., left at it's original level. In terms of the Master Volume track, 0dB means that the output is at the level set by the master volume slider. Any negative value means that the volume is less than the master volume.

dB values have a second, rather mathematical, peculiarity, and this is that dB values are logarithmic. What this means in practice is that adding 1 to the current dB value does not (in the best Spinal Tap tradition) make the resulting sound "one louder", it actually multiplies its volume. Changing from 0dB to a negative dB value reduces the volume you hear in a similar way. This means that a straight line from 0dB to -144dB (as created on the Master Track to provide a fade-out) is actually moving very much more quickly towards silence than it appears to be. Hence the need for a two-stage fade.