PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Suno AI first experment

Like type in a few chord letters and click the export button?

Actually yes. It can be that simple. I've always considered BB to be kinda like Black Box Voodoo, just short of AI. Especially how it handles the real tracks.

However, You do have to spend more time and effort and thought as well as planning, to create the song in BB, especially if you're doing something more than a basic song. Breaks, pushes, pauses, modulations, tempo changes, selection of additional instruments, automation of solos and such things.... same with Synth V.... it takes more than a little bit of effort to dial in a good performance.

Unlike the prompt for an AI song: "Hard rock style with guitars and male singer about the girl that cheated on him. "

I agree with Herb.
I will add: learning about the structure of the song(s), experimenting with different chords, progressions, tracks, programming particular sections, partial regeneration, manual fusion of different styles, 3rd party instruments and elements, etc. etc.
To me BIAB was always more of a composing/learning tool, not a cover song generator, I only very recently started explore "Songs", just to learn how their structure is laid out in BIAB.

JJJ,
Stop lying to your aunt!
P.M. me, I will send you a Holiday card.

Why do we use BIAB to create songs? One, because it is fun. Two, it can provide instrumental tracks we can not play ourselves. Third, and most important is cost because we can not afford to pay live studio musicians to play for us. Which one of you would rather have Brent Masion on BIAB or Brent Masion live at your house?

When you post a song you made with BIAB, can you call it your song? When you go into the studio and create a song live with other musicians, can you call it your song?

I submit that the only way to say a song is your song is to play all the parts live and record it, including the vocal. Even then it is likely not very original because you based the song on what you learned from other people.

All you can truly say is this is a song that was created by the manipulation of a piece of software called BIAB which by the way took many hours to learn how to use. I was also embellished using several other computer software programs and generated through the collaboration of whatever other musicians or technicians you used both live and electronic.

Is there any "art" involved in computer software-generated music? Well, I say yes there is.

When and if AI gets to the point where you can tell it exactly what you want to hear track by track it will most likely supersede most human musicians for commercial music. Musicians may become like vintage cars. Greatly loved and super expensive.

I would not mind so much going back to horses and sailing ships but I'd be dammed if I would give up air conditioning...lol

I can say that I much preferred the days of not having all this computer stuff and having to play live and record in a studio on two-inch tape.

As far as typing two or three words and having a song come out and calling it my original work; let these genetically defective sub-humanoid lying, lazy "people" say whatever they want. They do the best they can. They just don't know any worse...lol

yes, I know, not a very politically correct statement. Anyway, I learned all this from Eddie, so it is you guys' fault for putting up with all his snide remarks.... I for one miss him!

Cheers,

Billy

I kind of agree with Mr Faulkner, Mr Stravinsky and Mr Jobs. However:
- Stealing something from a great musician (for example transcribing a Geoge Benson's solo to try to integrate some of his phrasing into you vocabulary as a musican) requires a lot of time, technique, effort and discipline.
- Even a trained monkey can steal anything from AI.

You make excellent points but you have to admit that using BIAB, even when you invest significant time and effort to customize the results, is still a LOT closer to AI generated music than it is to a group of musicians, engineers and producers executing their collective decades of experience in the studio, right? That group of musicians, engineers and producers almost certainly view us BIAB users much the same as we may be viewing those who simply use AI to generate everything.

Don't get me wrong, I love BIAB and it has enabled me to produce fully realized versions of my songs that would have never been possible without it but I also realize it has been a pretty big shortcut for me. I'm guessing AI is providing similar joy for others who cannot realize their music any other way.

My aunt was always mean to me. I'm gonna put toenails in her cake!

Ummm, toenails...
Crunchy!

Absolutely, yes. You wrote it, therefore it is your song no matter how, or who records the tracks. It's not a requirement for me to record everything myself to call a song that I wrote, completely, my song. Regardless of what I learned from other folks, my piano teacher as a child, the drum teacher in school, the musicians I have played with, and the music I listen to on the radio, unless I am copying something, if I thought it up on my own, it is fully my creation.

Well, those chaps from Liverpool got 99% of the credit, glory, fame, money, etc. even though Mr. Martin was the "AI" they used on most of those later albums! He was quite possibly my favorite Beatle!

Well Herb we can agree to disagree. Even if you write the entire score, the musicians you use in the studio will interpret it differently. That is the reason we may chose to use one studio musician over another.

You can say that you created the song but the creation part was general in nature and did not only involve you. The lyrics are certainly yours to claim if they are not too derivative. If you wrote all the parts out in standard notation and the musicians tried their best to play as written it still will not come out exactly as it was imagined by you. The production engineers and other studio people will change the sound.

You may have impregnated the woman but she created the baby.

People who know who they are and are ok with themselves generally give credit to all who were involved in the creation of a song. Most people get left out of the credit because of money.

If we are talking about a BIAB song or other similar types of software the "creation" part has already been done by others for the most part and we normally indicate this on this forum. But the moment you upload it to Soundcloud and do not indicate it was electronically created it is more or less impossible to tell who did what.

This is all about ethics and telling the exact truth. The legal implications have little or nothing to do with ethics or telling the truth.

Omitting the facts is just another form of evading the truth.

Well, this is my take and no one needs to agree with me. This is just my thinking on the matter and not a post to try to convince anyone to agree or disagree.

This whole AI discussion rapidly becomes about the concerns related to who owns what and who will get paid, plus the whining about all the years of work I put in to learn how to do what you can now do with zero effort.

I spent a huge amount of time, money, and effort learning how to use woodworking hand tools. I now do that work with computer numerically controlled electric tools. Not to say I never use hand tools or that I don't enjoy working with hand tools. The CNC machines produce much better results than I can do by hand.

As military pilots, we have spent zillions of dollars learning to fly and we love what we do, only to be replaced by computer pilots who are not subject to the g force with the latest aircraft. The latest discussion is around do we allow those "AI pilots" to have full independent control of who they kill.

If Ai takes your job there is not much that can be done about it. Get over it and go to number next. What other choice would you have? As we have seen of late violent action in an attempt to change things besides being stupid and barbaric simply will not change the state of the medical insurance system.

What people often fail to understand is that music creation software is not so much about creating music but about creating profit for the makers of the software.

Cheers,

Billy

I see a lot of difference.

First, there's the ethical dimension. With BiaB and SynthV, the people whose instruments and voices are used willingly entered into a contract to have their instruments and voices used for the creation of new works, and were compensated for their work.

At its core, BiaB is automated loops. I've got a number of bass and drum loop construction sets. Similarly, SynthV is based on concatenative synthesis. For both products, there's a direct correlation between the source material and the end result.

That's not the case with AI. There's no way to know where the guitar riff, the drum groove or the vocal came from. The people whose songs AI learned from never intended their music to be used as raw materials for someone else's song. AI classifies and reconstructs, but doesn't know where the source material for the songs came from, or how much might be infringing. The developers can only hope that the process of using lots of source material will end up hiding where AI took the ideas from.

AI has never sung, never held a drumstick, fretted a guitar, bowed a string, blown a horn or reed. AI has only seen the end result. Every sound that it's produced has been derived from someone else's work.

Second, I'm talking about what it means to take credit for the creation of something.

If I tell someone that I "wrote" a song, I mean that the words a melody were created by me.

If it was co-written by someone else, it would be dishonest to claim full credit. If I only suggested ideas for a song, but I didn't actually write the words, it would also be dishonest to claim credit for the creation of the song.

Just because AI won't tell others that we didn't do the work ourselves doesn't mean we should give ourselves any more credit than if that work hadn't been done by a person.

And that's their right. There's no requirement that someone learn to play drums or sing.

I can play drums and sing, but use BiaB and SynthV. If you check out my songs, you'll see that I credit BiaB for the backing tracks, and SynthV for the vocals.

I'm not saying that people can't use these tools.

I object to people taking credit for work done by others as if it were their own.

Thanks, David. That's all I have to say on this topic.

In my teen / college years I've done some sculpting. Instructor would bring a model and give us couple of hours to do a clay sketch. You would have to set up armature and work clay fast to grasp as much detail as you can. Then at your own time we finished work from memory. Instructor and model were paid, studio was paid for, clay and armature and knifes were bought in the store.
Who gets the credit? Instructor for arranging the model? Model - the subject? Studio space / art department? Clay manufacturer - because it was made "ready to use"? Armature maker because it defined size and motion limit of the wire? Can they all potentially be credited?

Before BIAB partial regeneration, in my head, I imagined RT's as "snakes", because like a snake it would swirl if you try to pinch it modify (chords, etc) at any place. It was driving me nuts as it would generate material that didn't fit my song idea well enough. When PGM rolled out partial regeneration, it somewhat reminded me of clay, as you can almost literally "sculpt" the track piece by piece to shape it pretty close to your liking.

I am wondering, how many of participants of this thread use BIAB's partial regeneration? Raise your hand.

P.S. If you do, thank JJJ as he was one of leading voices to promote & lobby for it. If you don't use it... you really should give it a try.

I use it for every song! I wish they would take it further...instead of having to click regen a bunch of times just have a popup with all possible options available to preview.

"I use it for every song!"
That's FANTASTIC, Sherlock! You fought hard for it.

"I wish they would take it further...instead of having to click regen a bunch of times just have a popup with all possible options available to preview."

Lets wait till the dust from 2025 settle and discuss it in wishwell. I have a couple of suggestions too on the subject. I like the fact that PGM took the feature seriously and done several ways you can do this, but I agree, it still needs a few improvements.

I've used it on occasion - really useful.

It's one of those things that in retrospect seems so obvious you sort of wonder why it wasn't there from the beginning.

I have to tell an AI related story. I was demoing LyricLab at an AI expo a while back and 99% of the people there were not musicians and not interested in creating music until I learned a trick.

I would ask them a few questions like their name and the name of a loved one, the nature of the relationship etc. I would then type in “give me a love song about Craig the brave (or kind or loving or whatever) and Belinda his beautiful wife” (daughter, etc).

The AI would spit out some personalised lyrics (to which of course they said “that’s us”, no matter how corny or generalised the actual lyrics were). To really blow them away I would paste the lyrics into a suno like tool and play them an actual song.

Before AI, if a person like even thought of creating a personalised song like this he would have to go to a lot of trouble and expense.

AI (and BIAB for that matter) is democratising the process of music creation. Just like Canva has democratised design , Shopify e-commerce, Amazon publishing , Robinhood investing, etc.

But that person isn't creating a personalized song.

They are having a personalized song created for them.

In the past, it would have had to be created by a person, who would have some set of expenses. With AI, the expenses are entirely different, and far less.

AI has made personalized songs accessible to everyone by removing the traditional costs. Music can now be created by AI cheaply, and on a mass scale.

AI music differs significantly from Canva, Shopify, Amazon publishing, Robinhood investing, etc. These are all web-based applications that have leveraged the UI, making it possible for ordinary users to interact with the applications in a way that doesn't require them to be experts. Cost reduction has come about by generalizing a process, and then spreading those costs over many users.

With Shopify and Canva, the tools like templates and widgets have been created by the company. Users choose templates and then customize them. You can't just tell Shopify that you want a website that looks like some other website you've seen on the internet. They are basically iterations of similar layout applications that have been available for decades. This is also true for Amazon publishing, Robinhood investing, and so on.

In contrast, cost-reducing democratization in AI has come about because AI has mined millions of songs on the internet without regard to ownership. It has played, analyzed, deconstructed, and stored that analysis in a format that allows reconstruction of the material in a new configuration. The sounds that AI generates aren't an imitation of the instruments and voices, they are a literal amalgamation of those instruments and voices, down to fret noises and vocal tics.

The people whose music is used as raw material for AI have paid the cost of purchasing, learning, and recording instruments. AI bears none of these costs, because it doesn't compensate the people who paid those costs. While there are licensing agreements, they reflect the clout of the licensed artists, not the percentage to which those artists contributed to the AI's training.

So while these are all tools that have reduced barriers to entry, the means by which they've done this are entirely different.

AI..... it's already killing some aspects of original music.

I was, for a period of time, one of the writers for the biggest of the custom song companies. It was income that was much better than streaming income, and faster than my BMI income. They would send me jobs for writing a custom song for a client. The client would include the details.... their story, and I had a couple of days to write, record, and submit the song. It was fun. I had to write quickly and meet that deadline. Early on, a couple of years ago, I was getting quite a few jobs. Then, as AI started to be a thing, I noticed the jobs dropping off to nothing. This drop-off was noticeable this year.

Why would someone pay $100 or more for a song, wait a week, and then get the song which may not be exactly what you want, when you can get a free, or low cost AI account for a month, input the prompt info, and have a really good quality song that includes the information you want, and get it in 20 seconds?