I'm curious about how people are using Ai. There are lots of steps that go into making a complete song:
writing lyrics
writing music
arrangement / coming up with parts
mixing
mastering
And I'm sure there are more steps in between. In what stage or stages have you used Ai? How did it turn out?
Personally, I've only used Ai for help in writing lyrics. What I've found is that if you tell it to write some lyrics to a song, it will spit out something that looks superficially good, but it doesn't really have a story arc, and it leaves you emotionally flat. So what I've done is to map out the story arc, and I explain to the Ai something like: "The next two lines should convey that the narrator realizes he needs to come up with money -- quickly!!" Then I might have the Ai generate several alternatives to choose from. This can work. I've found that if the Ai has a short enough assignment, and it knows exactly what to do, it can generate alternatives, one of which might be good.
I have yet to experiment with suno.com or alternatives like it.
i've only used AI for general questions and discussions. some medical stuff, some social media confusion, stuff like that. so far, i have no interest in using AI to create music, but i suppose that will change. it's a tool. to be used. maybe i need to ask an AI to inspire me to create some new music...
i don't have AI in my workflow, but I did use a free ipad AI tool once to remove some vocals in an old mix made years ago. It did an amazing job. When I listen to it I can barely tell there was ever a vocal in that track. Posted the results here : https://ibandstand.com/songs/6098
I don't have any ... I tried a few times the Isotope Ozone mastering AI assistant a few months ago. The results were... not subtle, not understanding the sound, not satisfying at all. I gave up. And - the way things go these days- i don't intend to give AI another chance. It's a personal opinion but i'm not here (on earth) to not learn and be lazy. I want to learn from my mistakes... That IS my workflow.
I use Drummer and Mastering Assistant in Logic and that's pretty much it. I'm terrible at mastering and 99 times out of 100 Mastering Assistant does a way better job than I can do. I'm even worse at writing drum lines.
I've played with Suno a tad. I actually find it kind of scary when it comes to the quality of songs it produced with just a few simple prompts. What was even worse was when I fed it some lyrics I'd written years ago and never done anything with. While the tune was nothing like anything I would have done, it was disturbing just how good it was. But it was also hilarious because I had several typos in the lyrics which it also attempted to sing. So there's that.
I used to post on MacJams years ago and had some positive feedback, but I never really had the time, equipment or performing and production skills to make recordings to the quality I wanted. That remains the case today.
Recently I put one or two of my fifteen-or-so-year-old songs into Suno, and I must say the result was deeply emotional for me. It felt rather like taking a poor old demo to a group of session musicians who treated it with great sensitivity and gave it the benefit of their experience and skill.
The lyrics, melody and harmonic structure were mine, and I still very much recognised it as my song — but suddenly it had been taken to a level of performance, production and development that I could never have achieved on my own.
I suppose I relate to the result primarily as a songwriter, with Suno effectively performing and producing a cover version of my song.
To those of you who have the time and skills to play, sing and produce everything yourselves, I completely respect the desire to keep doing that. For me, though, this technology has allowed some old songs that were effectively gathering dust to have a new lease of life. That has been rather wonderful, and I hope you'll agree that the results made the experiment worthwhile.
Keep the music coming!
Marc
