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Garageband’s fingerprints are all over the sound of modern music. And as much as it encourages audio democracy, the app - which has been preinstalled on more a billion Macs, iPhones and iPads to date, with mobile and tablet versions introduced in 2011 - has also created audio homogeneity. What’s been in it for Apple, which has not only declined to make money on the app for 15 years but spent millions meticulously refining it? (Garageband’s premium version, Logic, costs around $200, but Garageband itself has always been free.) In unveiling the app on stage at Macworld in 2004 with a guitar-brandishing John Mayer at his side, Steve Jobs gave only one raison d’être: He wanted Garageband to “democratize music-making.” Yet it was an odd claim, for a company that also sold music-listening devices to users at a complaint-drawing premium price. “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.

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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. “I just started recording, without having to learn a new program, which was always one of the scariest things about music.” While other programs he’d tried in the past were sophisticated enough, including the one on the tour bus that day, Stump says, they were glitch-prone and impossible to use without frustration.

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“But I opened it that first time and never looked back,” says Stump, who talks about the software with a particular fondness, as if remembering his meeting with an old friend.

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While he’d heard of Garageband, a piece of free software shipped with all Mac computers, he’d thought it was more toy than tool - and no one else was giving it much attention then, in the early 2000s. Madly clicking around on his laptop in search of a new route, Stump happened to open one of its pre-loaded programs. I thought: I’m not going to be able to do this.” When you’re composing, time is everything, because you’re thinking the second guitar has to do this and the background vocals are going to do this and you just want to get it all out as quickly as possible. “When you’re being creative, you just want to get your idea out.

“I just lost it, screaming in the back of a bus,” Stump tells Rolling Stone, a decade and a half later. Stump can still precisely recall the panic in the moment he finally finished the rough sketch of a song only to see the whole apparatus glitch and crash on his computer.

On a lurching tour bus rigged with a wobbly Jenga tower of recording equipment, the singer and Fall Out Boy frontman had been trying to lay down demos for the band’s second album - it’d been hours, fiddling with rubber cords and finicky software - and nothing was working well together.