I want to touch today on really at the beginning
of what it means to create a song.
The pathway, when I started, I had a four-track recorder
-because getting-- -Who else had one?
Raise your hand.
And the pathway to really record a song at a high quality was
basically inconceivable because it costs so much to get into a studio.
To put that equipment in your house was just not a thing you could do.
But now, fast forward to now,
and the power of what you have in your pocket,
looking at your iPhone, knowing that you have
Voice Memos with that song ideas like we talked about,
countless choruses, notes with tons of lyrics,
hundreds of lyrics I know that I have.
Some will never see the daylight for sure.
-I think we all have that. -You know what I mean?
GarageBand, Logic, the fact that you can use
your phone camera to create your artwork for your album.
And so I'd love to get your perspective
on what it means right now to be a creative today,
and a bit about your process and some of your experience.
When I started realizing access to Voice Memos and--
Game changer.
Totally. When I was in The Civil Wars,
there's actually a song that we were recording
one day just in a write in my back house.
And we wound up using that actual recording
on the record and just mastered it.
So that's just, to me, that's just really cool.
You can take something that happened in a moment that was really raw,
-and then you can make it. -And transfer it.
Yeah, and you can make it and put it in that sort of master sense
and share it with the world.
And that can be professional like that too.
And that it's accessible for all of us.
We have our own experience.
Luke, how about you?
Yeah, for me,
I started off recording on cassettes,
started with a boombox, graduated to the four-track cassette recorder.
You did the press record thing.
-The double. -Yes.
When I graduated to that four-track, I don't know that they sounded any better.
And I've never been an engineer.
I need something that's user friendly.
To me, that's what the technology now has done.
And if I was a kid, and I had access to GarageBand,
-I can't imagine… -Game over.
Not saying my music would be amazing, but just how much fun that would be.
And so now, at 44 years old, it is fun.
I feel like I'm in my bedroom making music.
-But I have all these tools. -Absolutely.
And I started off five years into a publishing deal.
I was like, I want to take control of the recording of my demos.
So I finally saved up, got a laptop,
started with GarageBand,
used that for a few years.
Now, I'm in Logic.
It's so amazing. The sounds, the built-in plug-ins.
-The plug-ins are awesome. -Guitar tones.
I literally did a demo one time with Keith Urban.
He called me that night, he's like, "Let me ask you."
And Keith is a world-class musician.
He's got really expensive guitars, a lot of incredible gear.
I can't do the Australian accent.
Don't. We're good.
He was like, "How did you get that guitar tone?"
I was like, "Keith, you don't want to know.
Go to your presets in Logic."
He was like, "No way."
But that's the power of the technology now.
And you can make incredible sounding stuff really, like you said, on a budget.
And it's amazing.
And what you touched on is that the fact that back
when you didn't have that option, the repetition that you have
now to be able to try things that might not work, right?
Because I remember trying to stack vocals on a four-track.
But now, you can literally try something, "I don't like that."
Make adjustments. Try something else.
And come up with a whole new voice.
Nondestructively.
It's totally not only utilitarian
and really useful, all these tools, but they're widely accepted
amongst the best of the best of the best
as the tools to use, and also that it's okay
if you can make a Grammy award-winning record with your phone.
-Exactly. -That's rare. Don't get me wrong.
But it's like, it can happen.
And it's because the quality of what we have to work with
between all these different tools that we have is,
they're not only here for you to use,
but they're universally accepted as world class.
Depending on how you use them.
No, and that's something I know a lot of the Today at Apple events
that I've been a part of, you see people's and creatives' faces
light up when they realize, "Wait a minute.
I had GarageBand on my phone."
They just didn't open it or weren't aware that they had it,
or weren't aware that it was free and loaded with loops
and royalty-free things, and if you don't have a guitar player,
or you can't play the guitar, you can use smart keys
and figure out how to do full chords just with a press of a button.
And it's fun. It's also really fun to do.
If you can't, if you normally don't play.
After all these years, I still am like, planky-plank on the piano
and I'm pretty planky-plank on guitar.
And you can take that and you can flush something out.
I have a song that's coming out on my new record
that started on an airplane,
me playing around in GarageBand.
I picked a couple loops, couple different things.
And some of those loops ended up like kind of making it.
And then later on, I took those tracks, and we went
and played drums over it, did different things.
But the whole entire structure of the song before words were written
started half drunk on a plane with GarageBand on my iPad.
-How most things start. -Yeah, exactly.