“It’s funny - we re-recorded that intro section with strings and horns, but we ended up using a lot of my Garageband stuff,” Stump says. For Fall Out Boy’s 2007 “Thnks fr th Mmrs,” Stump and his bandmates decided they actually liked the sound of the app’s virtual instruments more than real ones they tried in a studio. Vincent, Rihanna, Duran Duran and Usher are among artists who’ve all released music using Garageband’s suite of free sounds or audio loops. “The Hand That Feeds,” a Nine Inch Nails anthem, came out as a Garageband project file for fans to play around with on their own computers that same year Radiohead offered up the same idea with “Nude” in 2008. T-Pain, in 2005, made his whole first album Rappa Ternt Sanga with the Garageband app on his laptop. Producer Oak Felder, who’s worked with artists like Ariana Grande, Usher and Alicia Keys, says Garageband has made collaboration much easier by allowing even the most tech-unsavvy people to explain their ideas with self-cut tracks, rather than with an abstract tangle of words.įor better or worse, Garageband lets anyone from a veteran sound engineer to a novice teenager cut a track that’s professional-sounding enough to make it directly onto the radio - which it often does. Or I can write a song from start to finish in a couple of hours.” Other “digital audio workstation” apps that also splashed onto the scene in the 2000s tech boom, such as Pro-Tools, Ableton and Fruity Loops Studio, are often dismissed as intimidating or time-consuming, especially when compared to the bare, intuitive and friendly interface that’s become a signature of Apple design. “I can quickly get something out of my head. “It allows you to not be constrained by what you can or can’t play,” Dan Smith, frontman of British band Bastille, tells Rolling Stone. Artists from Radiohead to Kendrick Lamar have used the app to demo, produce and sometimes even finalize master recordings. Musicians’ applause for Apple’s Garageband - which celebrates its 15th birthday this year, humbly, still living in the media shadow of many of the tech giant’s more glittering products - is similar across genres and skill levels.