Sometimes I wake up and I have a random melody in my head, or maybe 5 seconds of an orchestral arrangement. I whistle it to myself under the shower, and as I continue my day it fleets away just like it came.

I’ve often considered writing these snippets down, but even if I did, it probably wouldn’t suddenly make me create an album because I don’t have the skillset to produce good-sounding music in a DAW, and learning it takes literal years. My piano playing isn’t good enough either to where I can express ideas on the keyboard, the hands are simply too caught up in the mechanics of it.

Music man. It’s something I really wish I were better at but I don’t have the grit to see it through.

Well just the other day a cowoker did a brownbag presentation about Suno AI (shoutout to Nuris <3), and I mean I had seen it before — there was a phase where everyone and their mothers sent meme songs to each other — but I was triggered to revisit it this week, and wow their v5 model has gotten REALLY good.

Come on? If this was released in ‘97 people would lose their minds.

I mean it’s not like I’m talking any credit for it, all I did was write a prompt and listened through 20 variations until I found one I liked.

But. You know how like some producers were really well known for their meticulous drum programming — Photek for example. Ni Ten Ichi Ryu is still one of my favourite tunes, even though I was 4 years old when it came out… but good music is timeless man. Listen to the drum variety!

It must have been hours and hours of painstaking work to get those drum patterns right in those early versions of Cubase.

And with Suno, you can do it in seconds. Seconds! It’s not like AI needs to copy paste 8 bars of a drum pattern over and over to save time, it just imagines drums continuously so you get these natural variations for free basically.

And like if I can lay down an IDM breakbeat in 3/4 meter while I have a finger up my butt and the other hand covered in cheeto dust, then it’ll be interesting to see what actually skilled musicians can do with AI.

Sure there are kinks yet to be ironed out, the lack of control you often have over the AIs output does feel super limiting, and editing the output doesn’t work well at all yet, so you either have to take the AIs output or leave it. But it’s early days, right?

AI really is the great democratizer of art.