Music: Ai Ai Ai!
This ain't your Daddy's A-1 sauce...
A friend has been cranking out fully-realized studio-quality original songs. Great vocals, even blends; pro-quality bands. It took more than a year for me to ask him how he does it. The answer surprised me, and I’ll share it with you in the form of my own workflow to do something similar.
But first…
My middle-step offspring and my grandson introduced a game to the family a few months ago. Here are the rules:
On your device, create a themed song (funny, weird, sad, etc)
Share it with everyone playing the game
The song that realizes the theme most convincingly wins
What? My grandson is composing songs?
Before you get too overwhelmed, consider this: anyone who’s able to use GarageBand can play this game. Recently, I got to play along, and I’ve got to admit that my grandson’s compositions were pretty awesome. In fact, everyone who played made pretty good music.
How was that possible? GarageBand is, actually, VERY easy and satisfying to use for this purpose.
Yes, the songs don’t have to be very long, or have lyrics. And yes: you too can make music using even the non-AI features of Garageband to produce fully realized drum tracks, weird melodic stuff, and music capable of winning a family song competition, all in less than ten minutes.
Here are a couple of my “entries” from that evening’s shenanigans. You’ll have to decide what the themes may have been.
Warts:
Woof:
That’s all cool, Bill, you say, but what’s in this for me?
Patience, I’m coming to that.
One of the things I’m occasionally asked to do is compose music to fit lyrics. Over the years, I’ve made a few of those, and they’re time-consuming fun projects to do. The downside is that I’ve not had a convincing way of melding music and lyrics. One example:
Back to my friend’s prolific music studio…
It turns out that, in just a few clicks, one can make a complete song. And…wait for it…you don’t even need to have lyrics or music to start.
Here’s the high-level workflow:
Make the lyrics
Paste the lyrics into an AI music engine and tell the engine what style you want
Click GO and enjoy the results
So, let’s walk it down. I chose SunoAI as my engine and, while there are others, this was the best available. I say “best” because I’m still looking for an engine where I can give it the lyrics, the melody, the meter, and maybe even a rhythm stem or fully-realized song, then have the engine sing the lyrics. But AI isn’t quite there yet, so this process is second best.
First, the lyrics. For this example, let’s use a poem I wrote called “Names.”
Next step, copy and paste the poem into SunoAI. Click click. Now comes the fun part.
In SunoAI, I can select from various canned styles or create my own. For Names, I chose “slow rap” and clicked Generate. Within a few seconds - really - I had not one but two fully-realized musical versions of Names. The first one I listened to made my cry. Below, I’m sharing the version that resulted after messing with the lyrics a bit to round the song out and add pauses where they felt necessary.
You can do this with lyrics you write or lyrics you obtain some other way. My friend has been trying it out with lyrics from well-known pop songs to see what will happen. That’s actually a very compelling thing, but I’ll leave it for another day.
For the next song I’ll share, I used ChatGPT to help write the verses based on my existing ideas and direction for the song, but I used my own un-AI’d chorus lyrics. Don’t get stuck though because you can’t find words: SunoAI will generate those for you if all you have is an idea for what the song ought to be about!
It’s a whole new world these days. I’m thinking of a whole series of social commentary songs based on unique insight….
So am I selling out here? What say you?
Stay tuned!