Let me tell you a story. I don’t plan on using names, because it can apply to any trendy teen musician. A boy (or girl, respectively) grows up in a musical household. This boy (or girl) learns the piano, the guitar, the drums and possibly the recorder. The teenager then proceeds to use none of these skills as he/she climbs the charts using Apple’s GarageBand.

It’s so unreal, and completely baffling, that this pseudo-instrument has become so dominant throughout independent music. GarageBand’s like an electronic keyboard of seamless instruments, perfect beats and the most unconvincing sounds I have ever heard. The biggest flaw in modern day music, at least to me, is the use of pitch correction. Listen to any modern day rap song and you’ll hear this lame robotic drone attached to the voices. “Attack of the Show” host Kevin Pereira even made fun of Kanye West by producing his own song and video with GarageBand. It’s just uncanny to me how easy it is to do this. In reality, it’s making businessmen into musicians, and musicians into myths.

I miss the analog sound of the past, where reverberation in the room was key to a convincing sound, but that doesn’t seem to be what anyone wants to hear anymore. Even artists who don’t conform to using Apple’s GarageBand still record digitally, with a direct input of guitar into a computer instead of using microphones and capturing the real energy of a song.

The advantage to recording digitally is volume; you can get everything as loud and clear as possible, but that’s what I hate. The idea that every single note has to conform to a standard is lame. Listen to anything from the ’60s or ’70s; it’s not going to be as loud as Angels and Airwaves or Green Day’s new album, but it certainly has a lot more heart.