See the Light

My first foray into making music with AI involved. How involved you ask? Is this shit even real?? Well I think it is indeed real. I did use Suno in the process of creating what ended up at the streaming links above, but I didn't start there.

The song started the same way probably 80-90% of my songs have started, me strumming an acoustic guitar and finding a chord progression I like. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to have the foresight to actually record the idea while it's fresh and I did that here. The next step for songs that start out this way is to listen to them while I drive and see if words/melodies jump out to get to the next place in songwriting, knowing what the song is actually about. Here's the acoustic recording I started with:

Well unlike some other examples no words and melodies were jumping out at me. One day I was listening to my Release Radar and I heard a song where the drum beat and groove hit me. It was kind of a late 80s early 90s guitar rock thing somewhere between U2 and Toad the Wet Sprocket, faster with an off beat snare mixed in. I thought this is what the song needs, this kind of a moving groove to it. I used EZ drummer's library of beats to find a couple that were close and strung them together into something I could put electric guitars and bass on top of.

Now I started to get some melody ideas from the lead guitar and kind of a chorus, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus structure. And (while driving of course) the lines, "Long as I can remember I've been on my own, Feels like forever in a world so cold..." and the "See the Light" concept came into play. I decided the verses needed to be a little more agressive with a lot of words "crammed in" a la Even Flow.

Here's where Suno comes in. As a musician, I've always seen new developments as tools to make my job easier and of course, make my recordings more professional. I had already played a bit with Suno and the whole create something from just a descriptive prompt stuff. And while it definitely gave me back some professional sounding stuff, there's no way I'd ever "release" something like that as if I'd created it. What I hadn't tried yet was uploading something like a fully formed song and just asking for a "remix". Before uploading what I had, I wanted to put in there something like a full lead vocal even though I only had ideas for maybe 25% of the words. Here's what I uploaded which is just the MIDI drums with my guitars and bass and a vocal on there. A lot of the words are just improvised syllables, and those first two lines I had so clear when I was driving got mixed up, but no matter, I'll be rewriting this stuff. 

What's kind of funny is, I can go into Suno now and pull up that upload, and there are full lyrics for everything I uttered.  Some of them are what I sang, some of them are different even where I did sing real words, and some of them are just what Suno made up out of the syllables. Then it gives me back a couple of versions of what it thinks I'm trying to get to. And that's where I found this to be a really useful tool for fleshing out arrangements. You can hear that what ended up in the "release" which is now available on the streaming platforms is not light years away from where we started. I'm not going to share the full Suno versions here, I'll just say I "remixed" a few times before I really liked the rocking instrumental outro, and at the same time I got the lyrics finalized.

My initial plan was just to make sure all the guitars and vocal were me and use Suno as kind of a "backup band", they have that thing now where you can download stems which is great. Logic Pro, which is what I use for recording, has "session musicians" you can add to your songs where you can dial in the range, complexity, amount of "fills" etc, I figure this isn't much different from that. And to be honest, I think all my previous best writing going back to the 80s has happened with a full band in a rehearsal space. Even if I'm bringing in a fully fleshed out song as far as my part is concerned, it's the other musicians playing along that really take it to a finished project, and inevitably I end up changing my guitars and vocals somewhat to lock into what the rest of the band is doing. Playing along with these stems felt like the closest thing to "band practice" I've had in almost a decade.

So then it's all got to get put together, mixed down and mastered. I've mentioned in other posts that dialing in mixes is not my specialty, so I'm always going to farm that out. The Online Recording Studio had reached out to me a couple of years ago to tell me what they would do with one of the tracks I've already released. While I didn't want to put the time in on something that's already streaming, I kept then in mind and I reached out to them for this one. I met with the engineer and sent him all the stems which included drums, bass guitar and synth from Suno. The synth I really only included for the part at the end where the drums drop out for a minute. The electric guitars and vocals were me playing along.

After the first couple of mixes and some back and forth, the engineer pointed out that the one thing that really didn't quite fit was the bass guitar. I was scheduled to go on a cruise and didn't want to wait 10 days to get this done. I wasted a little time asking Suno to redo the bassline based on my guitars playing long with their drums, and the results got worse everytime. Here's where Suno kinda sucks. It uses a totally different sound on the bass everytime as far as effects and eq, and no "prompting" seems to be able to control that aspect, at least not when I tried it. But, The Online Recording Studio will play instruments on your songs for you, and the engineer himself put down a new bassline that was much more in sync with what my guitar was doing along with the drums, problem solved. And more importantly, that's one more human instrument and one less piece of "AI".

So in the end we've got six stems that are human made and two that are generated, so it's at LEAST 75% human, but it started 100% human with just some generated input. it real? You tell me!