Two Octaves in Garageband

[pressx2select]

Long time lurker here wanting to see if anyone has some thoughts on this. You guys always have some awesome ideas and conversations in this forum so I figured I'd pick your brains.

When using Garageband for keyboard typing I've always thought it was annoying that you could only really type one octave at a time. I was wondering if there's anyway to plug in a second usb keyboard and trick the computer into thinking it was a midi keyboard and modifying it to be able to produce two octaves. Ultimately you'd be using the keyboard something like the crude drawing I made.

The main reason I'm asking is because I have a bunch of old USB keyboards that would be great for this but I don't have any Midi Keyboards.

 

[Boyd01]

Wouldn't a real keyboard be better? I see new 2 octave keyboards for as little as $48 and used ones for $30 on the Guitar Center website, for example.

 

[Sackvillenb]

I'm not aware of any method to do this.

But you can definitely buy a cheap midi keyboard nowadays that will give you a few (or more) octaves, and the midi keyboard will give you a much better "feel" while playing, and control over note velocity, etc. 🙂