Garageband doesn't exactly have the best loops for metal. I'm wondering if anyone knows of a place that does have some more "metal" drum loops for Mac Garageband (preferably free). I tried a site called macloops.com, or something, but I can't seem to get it to register with the rest of the loops. Thanks.

Programming drums is really easy in Garageband, so I would forgo loops in favor of creating your own drum parts using midi. It might be kind of stressful at first (especially if you don't have a midi keyboard) but you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly and you'll have more control over the music you're trying to create.

Maybe I should. I did try programming for a little bit, but I'm really drum illiterate. Is there anyway to make any of the drum loop presets have double bass? None of my drum loops that came with Garageband have double bass and that's what I'm most interested in (maybe besides blast beats).

Well, if you use the green drum loops, you can go into the piano roll and edit them on your own. So in those cases, yes you can add as many double bass notes as you want. You could also move around the midi to create blast beats, but in order to make it sound even remotely good, you're going to have to fuck with the velocity a lot.

Out of curiosity, what are you trying to make?

Specifically right now I'm trying to make something along the lines of Swedish death metal with a few doom influences.

At other times my mind is all over the place, but having the ability to use double bass would help since so much metal uses it. I'll try using the piano roll, which I haven't used before. Thanks for the suggestion.

Best thing would be to create some basic "go to" beats in the piano roll and then save the patterns.
Once you have some patterns down you can simply copy & paste them into your sequencer and modify velocities/placements a bit for each bar to make it sound more organic.

I found having a library of basic patterns saved makes it easier to then build something a bit more intricate. After a while you could have a whole library of beats and fills ready to go.

If you are struggling to create certain beats you could download something like guitar pro or tuxguitar and find a decent tab with that includes drums that are along the lines of what you need and look at the structure of the beats.

I never liked the tone of the drums in Garageband so I switched over to using Hydrogen (which is free) to program drums and then importing those files into Garageband. How do y'all get a decent tone out of garageband? With Hydrogen you can do the same kind of archiving a library of beats and fills that Hayisforhorses mentioned, which helps a ton.

As far as getting downloaded loops to register, be sure you are saving them in the loop browser and that the files are the same format as the existing loops. How exactly are you going about trying the macloops.com website?

I downloaded the loops and dragged them into the Garageband loops. I have no idea where the new loops were saved, but maybe my problem is that the new loops are the same type of file as the Garageband loops.

I could try Hydrogen if it's free. How would you go about saving Hydrogen loops to Garageband?

I'm not to bothered by how the Garageband loops sound, tough I admit it's not the best sound. I think I'll try programming loops and saving them for later use.

That is odd about the loops not working after dragging them in there. Maybe you might have to find the actual folder the files are saved in?

With Hydrogen you can export midi files which you can drag into the instrument work area in Garageband to a software track and edit is like you would otherwise but then it acts more as a controller for writing stuff. If you export the Hydrogen file as a song you get the sounds Hydrogen just by dragging that file into a real instrument track. Hydrogen gives you ADSR, layering, gain, resonance, cutoff, and a random pitch tool I can't get to be useful yet. After importing into Garageband you can EQ and add GB's effects etc.

Ok, thanks. As long as it works for Mac I'll definitely play around with it.