Indie singer-songwriter Bly shares TikTok video, revealing her song lemon – with 100 million streams – was produced in GarageBand on a school iPad with an inexpensive plug-in microphone.
The pop singer, whose full name is Brianna Noel Sebring, says her experience proves you don’t need fancy equipment to achieve musical hits, repeating the promise Steve Jobs made when he released the Mac app in 2004…
GarageBand was originally Mac-only, and at its launch Steve Jobs said this:
GarageBand is for everyone, it’s for all of us, and it’s about turning your Mac into a professional-quality instrument and a complete recording studio in one app (…)
If you have a child who plays the piano and has a Mac, you can gift them GarageBand, headphones, and a USB keyboard. There’s a $50,000 grand piano in the bedroom (…)
That video can be seen below, along with Lemons’ video.
When one of Bligh’s fans asked her how she produced the song, she made a TikTok video saying,
“Lemons,” which was all the rage during 2020’s quarantine, was actually created in GarageBand on my school’s iPad, believe it or not. At my high school, everyone was given an iPad, and we created Lemon there.
When I was in high school, I loved making beats with GarageBand. I wrote a school musical using GarageBand on my iPad, then created a little demo for Lemons and recorded it with a scary little plug-in microphone.
I posted this to insult a man who had done something terrible to me, but it got under fire. So with all of this in mind, how crazy is it that a song that gets played on Sirius XM radio, has been streamed 100 million times, and could literally chart on the world’s Top Viral 50 or something, was literally made in GarageBand?
No fancy equipment required. You don’t need a degree to make money and turn it into a career. Sure, it’s good to learn and fun to upgrade, but if you’re on a budget, you can use GarageBand on any Apple device.
As John Gruber notes, this is why Apple created GarageBand, to allow anyone to create, share, and upload music without the need for expensive equipment.
If Bligh’s story isn’t exactly what Steve Jobs was talking about when he introduced GarageBand in 2004 and GarageBand for iPad in 2011, I don’t know what is. Right down to the fact that she did it on school equipment.
Six years later, Bligh uses Logic Pro and has a full-fledged home studio, but he doesn’t really need it to get started or make a hit.
please listen lemon:
Watch Steve introduce GarageBand.
