Music without the musician, whereby AI takes my soul

This is it. I took the full mastered version of my song You're A Star, the version that's you know on Spotify and YouTube Music (where it has a beautiful 37 views), and plugged it into fucking Suno. I watched as my creative life of the past 20+ years melted into a puddle before my eyes. I knew it would come to this, I knew this was the final test, the final boss as it were. I actually did this a few days ago and resisted posting it.

In a sense, this version is just as much a demo as my version. Does the Suno version sound better? I would say it just sounds more polished in a way, maybe more exaggerated? More full? I don't know. I don't know anything. I certainly don't know what to do.

This is the first one I'm actually disapointed with. I got ambitious and tried to write a song with a varied and ridiculous description of the "style". This is because I saw Suno extracting things like this from my previous samples, like "percussive beatboxing followed by bass melody", etc. I actually wrote the following from scratch:

Album oriented classic rock song, pomp rock, prog rock. D minor, 118 BPM. Intracate fingerstyle guitar part opening, swells into percussive distortion isolated with no other instruments, orchestral strings and hammond organ are added and swell to conclude in an a cappella intro hook, intro hook in 4 part male harmony, no instruments. Distorted guitar re-enters along with 2nd guitar playing bluesy hooks. Verse 1. Double time chorus with big band horns for Chorus 1. Fingerstyle guitar reprises. Immediate Chorus 2 at double time. Hook heavy bridge/instrumental interlude in 7/4 time, promiintent bass line. Complete style change for verse 2, lo fi electronic breakbeat drums, multiple build ups. Chorus 3, normal time, same instrumentation as previous choruses. Guitar solo. Chorus 4, same as Chorus 3. Outro, same chord progression as Chorus 3 and 4, with fingerstyle guitar slowly re-entering, becoming the only instrument, then the whole thing fading out.

And to be even more ambitious, I wrote the lyrics that follow from this too, before I ever clicked generate. I went through about 12 iterations on this 5 minute monstrosity, before I just called it good enough. (I actually took it into Ableton to try and save it, but nothing that I couldn't have ended up doing in the Suno editor).

I'm also starting to notice that the engine really likes to embellish and just plain noodle a lot. You're not going to get a "tight three minutes" from Suno.

I.....I'm sorry.

Same "stuck in my head just hum into the mic" process here. I think the workflow I'm coming around to is successive iterations.

• Don't bother writing lyrics until the style prompt results in a genre/feel that fits your vision for the song.
• Don't write too many lyrics if the singing is off, try to rectify it.
• Listen to the songs, immediately disqualify ones that start wrong or have awkard melodies.
• Don't listen too much though, because your ear goes dead to the subtleties. I've even done some "palate cleansing" and listened to completely different genres in between checking versions.

Then it's just putting on finishing touches like adding bridges and repeating choruses the right number of times. Violin!

He was on my lap. I started singing into the mic on my desk. I corrected the auto detected lyric ("Shuck-a-muck itty that"). Then for the styles I typed....."salsa". Just that.

This was the workflow. I started humming a simple rap-rock beatbox to myself. Then I thought, wait, Suno has in browser recording of samples. Why the fuck not? .…I literally ended up spending as much time uploading and writing this description as I did "making" the tracks. Actually I spent about 10 minutes just listening to this shit, and refining, and it getting better and better. I think I might look back at this as my "Wow, I hope other people don't find out about this!" moment.

In 2022, my friend Richard asked me to make him a motivational song that he could play when lifting weights. I did it. I doubt he ever used it but I did it. I uploaded it to Suno and asked for a remix, using a lot of the extracted prompt, and adding '80s aerobics" and "over the top".

My very first experiment with this workflow and it's just insane. I literally uploaded a nine second clip of a basic-ish arp pattern with a little drum pattern I programmed in. Click the "Suno" tab to see what I got out! Also I named the song Sample because that's what I named the original....sample. And the name stuck 🙃

So soon after I made "Skin", I was just listening to some actual human folk music. And an alternate/similar lyric to something they sang popped into my head. Of course I headed right to Suno. I typed in the lyrics that were on my mind, and then just kind of went with it. Gave it a triple cheeseburger with bacon level list of genres and instruments and this is what we got.

I wrote all the lyrics, but mostly I wanted to hear what Suno would come up with for a future electro blues glitchy thing. I am very impressed with this, I think it's extremely unique and interesting. Yes, for anyone who has done text to song, there's kind of a magic about it, that your idea became real. It's especially potent when you wrote the lyrics yourself though.