Democracy of Sound: Is GarageBand Good for Music?

Since its introduction in 2004, Apple’s GarageBand has become one of the most ubiquitous music-making tools on Earth, though its actual real-life utility is up for debate. Art Tavana surveys a host of artists to discuss the program’s egalitarian perks, fe
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Article: Democracy of Sound: Is GarageBand Good for Music?

by Art Tavana

September 30, 2015

Over the last decade, GarageBand has become the Starbucks of digital recording studios: consumer-friendly, global, omnipresent. Pre-programmed into every Apple device, anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac can open the program and record something amazing (or, perhaps more likely, something totally embarrassing). And with Apple selling nearly 300 million devices in the last year alone, it's no wonder that GarageBand has engendered praise for its egalitarian simplicity as well as some ire for its creative limitations.

While GarageBand effects have directly blended into the sound palette of even the most popular music—the beat for Rihanna's "Umbrella", for one, was created using one of the program's loops—it's played a greater role by compressing the space between an expensive studio and a DIY artist's bedroom, between professionalism and amateurism. For many musicians, the rudimentary software acts as their first home recording tool, digital effects pedal, practice space, and, in many cases, their first bandmate.

Take Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, who spent years tooling around with GarageBand in Montreal's underground scene while searching for her voice as an artist and producer. Those experiments eventually led to the 27-year-old's breakthrough album, Visions, which was recorded entirely on the digital audio workstation, or DAW. Eventually, though, she realized the software's limitations couldn't keep up with her appetite for digital complexity. "It really can't do anything," Boucher once told Clash magazine. "There's not a lot of stuff in GarageBand that's good." Boucher has since graduated to more advanced DAWs like Ableton Live.

Grimes: "Oblivion" (via SoundCloud)

For others, like dream pop singer/songwriter Dee Dee of Dum Dum Girls, GarageBand is about as far as they'd like to explore the digital realm. "I open programs like Ableton and sort of stare mouth agape at the screen," says Dee Dee, who began her fuzzed-out girl group project in her Los Angeles bedroom using GarageBand and still turns to the program while demoing her ideas. Along with records by Best Coast and Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls' debut album, I Will Be, helped define indie's lo-fi sound in the late-2000s; Dee Dee created that album's backbeat by manipulating Apple drum loops to simulate an effect similar to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, essentially utilizing digital software to give modern music a vintage feel—a strategy that could make some analog purists' heads spin.

Though DDG albums are augmented by professional producers and engineers, the process of transforming Dee Dee's GarageBand demos into studio recordings is never about washing away the digital effect. "It's essentially the backbone of her work, so we just enhance a lot of what she does in GarageBand," says longtime DDG producer and 75-year-old industry lifer Richard Gottehrer, whose 50-year career includes co-writing Brill Building pop hits and manning the boards for Blondie's first two albums. Gottehrer's open-minded approach shows that the acceptance of GarageBand as a legitimate music-making tool isn't solely based on one's age or experience.

Dum Dum Girls: "Jail La La" (via SoundCloud)

The idea of using GarageBand in conjunction with more traditional studio methods is seconded by producer Ariel Rechtshaid, 36, who has collaborated with what he calls "GarageBand-ed out" musicians like Blood Orange's Dev Hynes and Haim, as well as more established artists including Madonna and the Killers' Brandon Flowers. While working with Haim a couple of years ago, Rechtshaid discovered one of the trio's GarageBand demos, casually dubbed "My Song 5", which included a horn native to the software. That staggering baritone wobble—which "sounds like a bass because it was set two octaves down by accident," according to Rechtshaid—eventually became the most distinctive sonic earmark off Haim's wildly popular debut album, Days Are Gone. "GarageBand has made anyone who buys an Apple computer a producer," gushes Rechtshaid.

Andrew Garver, a professor at USC and a Grammy-nominated mastering engineer, agrees that the program has vastly increased the accessibility of music-making, but he's decidedly less enthused about it. "There's been a devaluation of audio engineering because GarageBand makes it look so easy to do," says Garver, whose studio mastering work includes projects for U2 and Madonna. Garver and many others believe that GarageBand has created an entire nation of wannabe musicians as well as a paralyzingglut of new songs constantly being uploaded to the Internet. "Anybody who thinks they can write a song can do it now, and a lot of the time, they're pretty shitty songs," says Garver. "It's hard to find those gems."

He's got a point: From 2004 to about 2008, MySpace was GarageBand's default aggregator—spreading countless songs of questionable quality across the web—and now even more homemade tracks are being disseminated thanks to successors like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Tumblr. But while navigating through the noise can be frustrating for some, for artists, it's simply how music is released in the age of digital DIY.

Plus, some artists don't have the access to expensive gear or the room to house a dusty Tascam 388 tape machine. And criticizing the Facebook-generation guitarist for exploring more affordable digital methods of recording can seem like a form of classism that draws a defensive line between experts and would-be experts. So while audiophiles and classic rock enthusiasts might sneer at the software's humorously simple design, digital natives simply see it as making something impenetrable now liberatingly accessible.

Because of this embedded impartiality, GarageBand connects with the punk ethos of music for all—regardless of expertise, race, or gender. "There's an aspect of GarageBand that threatens the status quo," says Drew Schnurr, an L.A.-based electronic music composer and lecturer at UCLA. "So while it might not be good for the studios or the industry, you can make a great record on GarageBand—just look at Grimes."

"The feminist implication of GarageBand definitely encouraged a lot of my female friends to explore something that had previously seemed out of reach."

—Dum Dum Girls frontwoman Dee Dee

Photo by Jimmy Fontaine

"I know a lot of 'real musicians' prefer more advanced programs like Pro Tools or Logic," says Frances McKee, 49, of Scottish alt-rockers the Vaselines, "but I'm a part-time punk." When McKee and her Vaselines partner Eugene Kelly started making music together in the late ‘80s, the two were inseparable during the creative process. But the two were rarely in the same room while working on their 2010 comeback album, Sex With an X; they began to collaborate by sharing GarageBand files over email—a process McKee describes as "black magic." The experience hooked McKee on GarageBand as a songwriting tool, or a digital four-track. "Up until then I hated using computers," she says. "But [GarageBand] changed everything."

The Vaselines: "Sex With an X" (via SoundCloud)

Carrie Brownstein shares McKee's sentiment. Earlier this year, the Sleater-Kinney guitarist told The Wall Street Journal that GarageBand is a songwriting tool she wishes she had when she was younger. Through the years, the program has become the tech-averse musician's way of crossing a digital divide where Pro Tools certifications, gear-talk at Guitar Center, and the coded gender of technology often blocks their path.

"You can feel the silent chuckle from people when you say you've used GarageBand," says Brooklyn-based singer Julianna Barwick, who first began recording her ambient, Brian Eno-tinged arrangements on a Fostex four-track in the mid-2000s. Initially, Barwick was intimidated by digital recording technology. "I actually put an ad on Craigslist that said, 'Please help me learn Logic.' But then this guy came over and tried to teach me—and I needed a whole lesson in gear and audio recording talk." For some artists, the endless range of layering, editing, and audio tinkering offered by advanced DAWs like Apple's Logic can feel like the digital editing equivalent to prog-rock bravado—what UK musician, writer, and GarageBand loyalist Georgina Pringle refers to as "the machismo of software."

In Barwick's case, GarageBand was a nonjudgmental partner during her entry into the digital realm; she needed just one lesson at an Apple Store in Manhattan to get started. "It opened up a world where people are less intimidated to make stuff on their own," says Barwick. "It felt inviting." Released in 2009, Barwick's second album, Florine, was recorded in her bedroom on GarageBand, and she still creates demos on the program that are then sent to her producer to master into finished recordings.

Barwick's experience highlights GarageBand's most provocative impact: A digital force for democratization in music. Until the advent of GarageBand and MySpace in the mid-2000s, female musicians were chained to an entire infrastructure designed by men, from recording, to distribution, to marketing. And while the "silent chuckle" Barwick refers to isn't explicitly by men, the fact is that the technical side of music is still largely a boys' club. "The feminist implication of GarageBand definitely encouraged a lot of my female friends to explore something that had previously seemed out of reach," says Dum Dum Girls' Dee Dee.

For Emily Lazar, the engineer behind Haim's Days Are Gone and Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City—as well as the first female mastering engineer to ever be nominated for a Record of the Year Grammy, for her work on Sia's "Chandelier"—the industry's quiet biases have always been more direct. "I could describe so many awful experiences," says Lazar, "but doing that would give the people that have behaved so offensively more attention than they deserve."

The rise of the riot grrrl movement in the early ‘90s fortified the resistance against patriarchy in music, but it never targeted the machismo inherent in the medium's technical side. Along with open-source recording software like Audacity, which was originally released in 1999, GarageBand has allowed women to freely explore audio recording without being discriminated against. "As a woman, I was used to being undermined and having my creative abilities doubted and my physical allure pitted against me," says Pringle. "I knew I could make something interesting in GarageBand, so I stuck with it and didn't let the haters get me down."

By no means has the software shifted the paradigm completely, though. Speedy Ortiz frontwoman Sadie Dupuis, who used the software along with her PowerBook's built-in microphone to record her band's first demos, believes GarageBand's feminist impact has been minimal: "While it may have introduced a whole lot more people of all genders to an array of options for home recording and self-producing, an overwhelming majority of engineers in studios are still male." Indeed, recent estimates reveal that less than five percent of sound engineers and producers in the music business are women.

"You can feel the silent chuckle from people when you say you've used GarageBand, but it opened up a world where people are less intimidated to make stuff on their own."

—Julianna Barwick

Photo by Shawn Brackbill

There's a belief that for GarageBand to be a truly nondiscriminatory force for democratization, it needs to be open-source and free for everyone, not just people with Apple devices (though the tech giant has no plans to make such a move in the near future). But at least one intrepid music maker found a way around this financial obstacle: When his computer crashed, 25-year-old Brooklyn rapper and producer Prince Harvey turned a nearby Apple Store into his creative lab. As he was in the process of getting evicted from his Bushwick apartment, Harvey managed to record a full album that he titled PHATASS—aka Prince Harvey at the Apple Store SoHo.

Prince Harvey: "The New Black" (via SoundCloud)

Harvey's a capella-style recordings are an example of how artists can manipulate GarageBand—as well as the Apple Store's more lenient customer policies—like a hacker trying to crack Apple's musical mainframe. But, according to several musicians, newer versions of GarageBand make it harder to innovate and customize, showing that there's a fine line between a program that's accessible and one that's too accessible. "You feel like you're being told what to do now," says Harvey. "So I just use an old version because I like the control it gives me." In general, advanced users of GarageBand prefer the version of the software they first recorded on, suggesting that these digital natives aren't above the comforts of nostalgia and familiarity.

As a result of GarageBand's increasing trend towards automation, more artists are ready to move on to more powerful DAWs. "I feel like the new GarageBand is devaluing my intelligence in a way," says Speedy Ortiz's Dupuis. The comment is in line with Grimes' experience, where GarageBand acts as a gateway DAW: The first pill in a journey that leads to more nonlinear interfaces. Looking for complex and manual features, some artists and producers aren't interested in the elementary plug-and-play framework or colorful display of GarageBand, which can stifle their ability to share patches in forums and code their own software instruments. "I know more people who jam with Ableton than GarageBand now," says 23-year-old Cloud Nothings leader Dylan Baldi, whose early GarageBand demos helped him garner interest from record labels, though he no longer uses the program.

In an attempt to further level the playing field and perhaps win some old fans back, GarageBand's latest update allows users to publish their songs directly to Apple Music Connect, a MySpace-esque social networking site for artists to post updates, including new music, and receive comments from fans. Unfortunately, Apple Music Connect is exclusive only to artists who sell their music on iTunes, and includes a submission process that's been described as "clunky." Even Apple Music head Jimmy Iovine has admitted that, when it comes to Connect, "we still have some work to do." The pathway from GarageBand to Apple Music Connect, currently divided along both status and expertise, seems to diminish the returns on GarageBand's two most revolutionary design points: amusing simplicity and egalitarianism.

Georgina Pringle believes what made GarageBand so popular in the 2000s has also led to its backlash in recent years: "It's easy to make fun of people for using software that anyone can operate." And for many longtime audio engineers who saw Pro Tools board-up the windows to their analog studios, GarageBand is like a pirate looting their already besieged village, or a lewd teenager engaging in an intellectual debate it doesn't belong in. For professionals, GarageBand is too mass-produced, too consumer-friendly for real recording. The same cynics see GarageBand as just another aspect of Apple's corporate upgrade strategy, where consumers are required to download or purchase their way into more advanced features.

Georgina Pringle: "Pop Hit" (via SoundCloud)

Given the prescience of writer Bill Flanagan's 1989 prediction that the "the next… Beatles may be a technology," GarageBand is probably more like the Monkees—a pure product designed to hit every possible demographic. And like a hit record, it's influenced its competitors as well. Lewin Barringer, the host of Garageband and Beyond, a popular YouTube channel dedicated to the software, believes DAWs like Ableton Live have simplified their design to compete with GarageBand's pop appeal. The result has been a host of musical products designed in "in the key of easy," part of the GarageBand gene pool, like Game Boy-esque pocket synthesizers by Teenage Engineering and portable studios like the soon-to-be-released KDJ-ONE.

When first introducing GarageBand in 2004, Steve Jobs read a survey stating that "one half of U.S. households have at least one person who currently plays a music instrument." While it sounded like an inflated number at the time, over the last decade, GarageBand has undoubtedly bolstered its veracity. And with mobile versions of the program gaining popularity since their debut in 2011, the software has bred an entirely new category of musician that jams on "Smart Instruments," posts finger-tapping iPad drum solos on YouTube, and creates multi-touch piano melodies on the subway. As a result, GarageBand is the most clickable and widespread DAW in history, a fact that's subsequently added a whole new layer to the modern sound palette. So even if GarageBand is not for everyone, its democratic ideals are universal.