Diego Gonzalez started making his own music in 2020, inspired in part by some of the tracks he loved from The Kid LAROI’s first album. “I was using GarageBand on my phone at the time,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what else to use.”
While killing time on TikTok, he came across posts from other artists praising BandLab, another free app that aims to make it easy for aspiring creators to create instrumental tracks and record vocals with a mobile phone. Gonzalez took to it quickly, especially the presets that add clarity and heft to a vocal. “You don’t need 1,000 buttons on there to make something sound good,” he says. With BandLab, he recorded his breakout hit, a mournful 6/8 ballad titled “You & I” that has more than 50 million Spotify streams.
For now, many of BandLab’s most successful users look outside the platform for beats. thekid.ACE, Luh Tyler and Gonzalez say they usually start by finding premade instrumentals on YouTube. “I’ll look up ‘indie-pop type beat’ or ‘R&B Daniel Caesar type beat,’ ” Gonzalez says. Then it’s a matter of seconds to download the right instrumental, open it in BandLab and “start thinking of random melodies,” explains thekid.ACE. He has made a pair of viral songs with BandLab, “Imperfect Girl” (7.3 million Spotify streams) and “Fun and Forget” (8.6 million).
Pop stars pay good money to vocal producers to adjust their pitch and stitch together the best parts of multiple takes. But BandLab lets users replicate a similar process with a few clicks, adding echo, toning down the “s” sounds and upping distortion. Built-in vocal preset options run from very specific — “Punchy Rap,” “Hype Vox” — to “let’s see what this does”: “70s Ballad,” “Sky Sound.” On top of that, “it’s insanely simple to make your own presets and adjust the reverb or the compressor,” thekid.ACE says. “Auto-Tune is super easy to do.”
SSJ Twiin, who has also enjoyed some viral success with BandLab tracks, recently started experimenting with a new panning feature that automatically throws his vocal from left to right. He’s also a fan of the harmony function that “takes your original vocal and layers it with that exact same vocal plus two semitones, another one plus four, another plus six and so on,” he says.
BandLab’s interface looks like a more cheery, streamlined version of a program like Pro Tools — each vocal or instrument track separated into a bright, clickable sound wave. “People will say BandLab is not a real [digital audio workstation],” SSJ Twiin notes. “But it’s getting to the point where there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do.”
