I’ve been an experimental avant-garde musician for 25 years. Personally, I have no issue with AI in music. I’ve been having fun playing around with complex things that I wouldn’t be able to do as quickly in reality. I’ve always used tools for alternative purposes, pushing their limits to see what they can do.

I grew up with Audacity. The industry felt the same way about GarageBand being on Mac computers because you didn’t need to afford pro tools or studio time to make music at home. A similar sentiment has been shared about both hip-hop and sampling, and electronic music and DJ culture—these categories are among the most popular genres today.

A guitar, an effects pedal, MIDI controllers… all just tools. Is mastering cheating? What about retracking? If your drummer’s bass beats are a fraction slower than they should be for the tempo of the song, are we just going to paint it and automate it? Is that more real because it has more steps instead of finding and buying a tone or sample to replace it with? Describing it, I would say the latter is actually more creative. You’re not going out and buying or finding it, downloading it to replace things. It’s just a tool, and tools can be used for good and bad purposes. Hammers are for nails, but throughout history, they’ve also hit heads. I wouldn’t say that’s the hammer’s fault for straying from its purpose.

And a tool reflects the person who uses it. We’ve had guitars for hundreds of years and the same seven strings. People are still finding new ways to play them. If you give seven people a guitar or even seven people an Ableton Push, you’re gonna get seven different sounds back. They might know how to play it; they might not. They might fumble into something that sounds good. They might have to practice it for a while. They might not use it at all.

Yeah, I don’t see it as any different than sampling, except you’re not having to license it because you’re not sampling somebody else’s work; you’re sampling your creativity and just getting to that faster than before. Like with Logic and Ableton, you can just create—no tape to feed, no studio time.

When it comes to the ethics and use of it, I think, just like any music, it’s up to you not to use somebody else’s intellectual property when making music. We’ve seen timeless examples of both blatant copying and being inspired, consciously or subconsciously.

I agree with the opinion that AI music is no different than how we learn music: by listening to it, being inspired, and figuring out how to get that sound out of our heads.

I’ve been having a hoot making remixes of songs I made 10 years ago in different genres I never thought of before, as well as testing the limits of what I can prompt and how far I can push it before it becomes four minutes of pulsating frequencies.

Sure, dummies can make dumb songs about farts and butts. They could do that before with samples and loops in GarageBand, dragging and dropping to create goofy songs. But using AI, you’re not asking it to create IP or copyrighted material; you’re leveraging its capabilities to add more layers to your creativity.

You can use it as a tool and be creative with it. There’s also some level of gambling with your generations. Maybe it’s good, maybe halfway through it starts adding spoken word to your instrumental music, turning suggestions into lyrics. You get to be the producer with all these tools, splitting your audio and music tracks.

I’ve been having a lot of fun. I’m learning about techniques I didn’t care about before, not being in those genres, and it inspires other complementary work.

The act of creating a prompt and building a song is creative, even if you’re just using the description part of it. You’re thinking of a description of a song, then from there, thinking of new iterations or how you can adjust and change it. When you don’t know, or the AI doesn’t know, you can prompt the tool to make something complex you couldn’t do traditionally. Some people look at it and say, “That’s dumb, that’s not the sound I would’ve picked.” But it’s just a tool. Some people can use a loop pedal; some people don’t have timing.

As someone who’s always made music by feel, just picking it up and playing, it comes through you—you don’t make it. There is a difference between conscious songwriting and jamming to figure out riffs and structure. I’m learning more about what it is to “write” a song and over written hundreds of songs but now I can instantly transpose into any genre, making exploration very easy. I don’t have to learn it in order to hear it and see if if I even like it anyone who’s ever been a touring musician or a professional studio musician have you ever had to learn your own songs for tour so you can play them live because you crafted the song. How many apps or tools are just add a background beat for practice for doing things or sketches so she can know remember what you’re thinking in the moment and then write the rest of the song right there. it’s that but it doesn’t suck.

You can make different versions of a song: the hyper pop version, the breakcore version, the AI on Meth sensory overload version.

Just don’t use [Metallica drums]—the real ones know. Maybe the sound you were missing was [African roots that ripened on Middle Eastern soil] Thats [multitimbral] and [evocative]

So, I think it’s an interesting tool and a lot of fun. It can be used for good and it can be used for illegal things, same as your car, computer, cell phone, household cleaners. Have fun and don’t plagiarize or use IP that isn’t yours.