How to Slow Down an iTunes Song in Garageband
I have Garageband 10.1.6 and I am attempting to take a song from iTunes and physically slow it down so that it plays back slower. Everything I look up says to slow down the tempo. I'm new to Garageband and not very musically educated, but to my understanding, the tempo is the speed in which the song is played. Therefore, lowering the tempo (BPM) should make the song slower, as there are less beats per minute. My first issue I ran in to was that in order to turn the imported iTunes song into an editable track, you must first change the track from orange to purple by pressing Ctrl + Alt + G and clicking on it. This does not turn my track purple, it does turn it blue though. Many of these tutorials tell people to Show Editor in order to enable the "Follow Tempo and Pitch" box. I, however, do not have a Follow Tempo and Pitch box.
Perhaps these instructions are outdated for an older version of Garageband, given that many of the tutorials I've found are dated around 2009-2011.
I did, however, find another way to change the tempo by going to the drop-down menu at the top and selecting Track and then Show Tempo Track, or by simply pressing Shift + Command + T to show the Tempo Track. As you can see here, my tempo is set at 120 BPM.
Now, if I decrease the tempo, it should, if I'm not mistaken, slow down the song, therefore making the song longer and playback slower. However, lowering the tempo only seems to make it contain less bars, but it doesn't actually affect the playback of the song:
If I click play, the sound hasn't changed one bit, it still sounds exactly the same as before. The only difference is that the entire song takes up less "bars". I also tried changing the signature. I tried everything from 4/4 to 4/1 to 4/64. Absolutely no difference in sound. I even exported the changed song back to iTunes and tried to play it, but it still sounds exactly the same and the the time of the song hasn't changed at all (4 minutes and 8 seconds).
As I said, I'm not very musically educated as to what tempo and signature are, but I figured slowing down the tempo would slow down the playback of the song, however it appeared to do nothing. I'm confused as to what changing the tempo and signature actually do. Changing these things must impact the song in some way. And what is needed in order to actually slow down or speed up the playback of the song?
