GoKawiilIndie singer-songwriter Brye has shared a TikTok video revealing that her song Lemons – that notched up 100M streams – was produced in GarageBand on a school iPad with a cheap plug-in mic.
The pop singer, whose full name is Bryanna Noelle Sebring, says her experience demonstrates that you don’t need fancy equipment in order to achieve a music hit – and echoes the promise made by Steve Jobs when launching the app for the Mac back in 2004 …
GarageBand was initially Mac only, and here’s what Steve Jobs said about it at the time of launch:
GarageBand is for everyone, it’s for all of us, and what it does is it turns your Mac into a pro quality musical instrument and complete recording studio one app […] If you’ve got a kid that plays the piano and they’ve got a Mac you can get them GarageBand, a pair of headphones, and a USB keyboard – and they’ve got a $50,000 grand piano in their bedroom […]
You can watch that video below, along with the Lemons video.
One of Brye’s fans asked her how she produced her songs, and she created a TikTok video saying this:
Lemons, that went super viral during quarantine back in 2020, was actually produced, if you can believe it, in GarageBand on my school iPad. My high school gave us all iPads and I produced Lemons on there. I used to just like make beats on GarageBand in high school. I wrote musicals for my school with GarageBand on my iPad, and then I made that little demo for Lemons and recorded it with my horrible little plug-in mic. I posted it to spite a guy who was being horrible to me, and it blew up. All of this to say, how crazy is it that a song that could be on Sirius XM radio, streamed 100 million times, literally charted on a global top viral 50 or whatever, was literally made on GarageBand? You do not need fancy equipment. You do not need a degree to make money and to do this as your job. Obviously, it’s good to learn, it’s fun to upgrade, but if you are working on a budget, GarageBand is for you on any Apple device.
As John Gruber observes, this was why Apple created GarageBand – to enable anyone to create, share and upload music without the need for any expensive equipment.
If Brye’s story isn’t exactly what Steve Jobs was talking about when he introduced GarageBand in 2004 and GarageBand for iPad in 2011, well, I don’t know what is. Right down to the fact that she did it on school equipment.
Brye says that, six years later, she now uses Logic Pro and has a full-on home studio, but you absolutely don’t need this to get started – or even have a hit.
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