TL;DR

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I am not going to pretend the genie is going back in the bottle.

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AI is here. It is useful. I use it every day in my professional life in information technology. My global teams build with it, test it, challenge it, and figure out where it belongs...shoot we even build custom agents to automate tasks we used to always use cron jobs and various other SRE methodology...but I digress.  It would be dishonest to act as though I leave all of that at the door when I step into the studio. It's a part of my life, and that's likely here to stay because...

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The machines are already in the room.

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The more important question to me is not whether AI is being used. It is how it is being used, what work still belongs to the human being, and where the line sits between assistance, authorship, direction, and creation.

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This is my attempt to answer that honestly.

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This page explores how I use AI across music ideation, songwriting, production, artwork, website development, promotion, organization, and the business surrounding independent creative work. It will also address where these tools fail, where the ethical questions remain unsettled, and why the final responsibility for everything I release or even ideate on still belongs to me.  Believe me...I've thought about this a lot...

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​Why Much of This Would Not Exist Without AI

The ideas were already there. The songs, stories, old recordings, abandoned drafts, half-built concepts, and years of musical and writing brain dumps were mine long before modern AI entered the picture. They existed in my mind and scattered throughout spectacularly organized OneDrive folders with labels like "Bad as Hades Metal Riffs", "Someday I'll Do Country Albums", "Bluesy Thoughts and Grooves", and "Novel Ideation", etc. etc. 

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The problem is never a lack of things to make.

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The problem is the distance between having an idea and carrying it all the way into the world.

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A song does not stop at the song. It needs arrangement, recording, editing, mixing, artwork, video, copy, a website, promotion, distribution, organization, and enough sustained attention to keep the entire thing moving. A book has its own version of that same mountain. So does every other creative project.

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For a person with a full-time career, a family, a farm, and more ideas than available hours, that mountain becomes a very effective graveyard.

Without AI, much of this work would still exist, but only in fragments. Some of it would be sitting on old drives. Some would remain in notebooks. Some would be trapped in rough recordings that were never good enough to release. Some would still be waiting for a free weekend that might never come. Shoot, I bet I have four or five more albums worth of riffs still in those folders, and that's after the 30 or so I've put together in the past 8 months...

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AI did not create the need to make any of it. I can tell you this, dang near every stitch of the music in Pulse of the New Machines exists in those aforementioned OneDrive folders in some fashion, written during sleepless nights...on road trips...whenever the time monster would allow. AI did not live the experiences behind the songs or decide which stories mattered. What it did was reduce the friction between intention and completion.

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It helped me explore arrangements faster, recover old material, organize sprawling projects, test visual ideas, write and revise supporting copy, troubleshoot websites, plan releases, and handle parts of the business that would otherwise compete directly with the creative work. I'm not going to lie to you either. Marketing/Website dev/SEO/Release Planning/all that stuff are my personal gremlins pushing back against creative release to the public. I get what I need just by laying the tracks down...getting them out of my head and into a physical medium...but there's always something nagging me when I think I've written something really good...and I despise all that business part. I mean...I hate doing it. Lol. 

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That does not mean everything became easy. AI can be inconsistent, confidently wrong, repetitive, generic, and occasionally spectacularly unhelpful. It still requires direction, revision, skepticism, and a willingness to throw away bad results.

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But it changed the scale of what one person could realistically attempt. That one person being me for the following examples.

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Virtually all of what you see in this site, or within the music began with me. AI helped keep it from ending there.

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AI as Leverage, Not Authorship

 

I do not think authorship disappears the moment a tool becomes intelligent.

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Shoot, musicians in my lifetime have always used technology to extend what they can do. Multitrack recording allowed one person to build an arrangement piece by piece...this is precisely the world I live in when it comes to solo song creation. Drum machines created rhythms without a drummer in the room. Digital editing made it possible to repair timing, pitch, noise, and performance problems that once would have required another take, and another, and another, and another, and another (sigh...I still live in this space a lot, especially when my voice decides it doesn't care to do what I'm asking it to do, lol) ...or...even harder...cutting tape, patching it back together, and turning it into something that doesn't sound like utter garbage. Software instruments placed entire orchestras inside a computer. I mean, music production is a gigantic beast, but what took an army and tens of thousands of work hours has slowly been getting chipped away for fifty years.

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AI is a more powerful tool, and it raises harder questions, but the underlying principle remains familiar: technology changes what is possible. It does not automatically determine who made the creative decisions.

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In my process, AI provides leverage. It can generate possibilities, suggest alternatives, organize information, test an arrangement, help recover old material, or turn a rough idea into something clear enough to evaluate. It can dramatically reduce the time between asking a creative question and hearing or seeing a possible answer.

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That does not make every answer good, not even close, but is that really all that different from creating with a band? I've done plenty of that, had plenty of arguments, gotten in fights... At least the AI has never tried to punch me (so far) when I told it it's idea sucked.

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AI has no reliable understanding of which version belongs to my history, which lyric carries the right emotional weight, which imperfection gives a performance its character, or when something technically impressive simply does not sound like me. It can imitate patterns and produce options. Taste still has to decide what survives.

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That distinction matters.

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I am not handing the machine an empty room and asking it to return with an identity. I bring the songs, memories, themes, influences, recordings, melodies, lyrics, performances, preferences, and intentions. I direct the process, reject the wrong turns, revise the useful material, and decide what is finished.

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Sometimes the machine contributes very little. Sometimes its contribution is substantial...I guess. I do not believe honesty requires pretending those situations are identical. It requires being clear about what happened and accepting responsibility for the result. Disintegrate, from the forthcoming Pulse of the New Machines album (join TEAMWHEAT+ and you can hear it early right now months before its release...shameless plug) is a perfect example. According to my OneDrive folder I wrote that whole song including the riffs and lyrics in October of 2016, and I dug it, so was putting it together for this album. I have this tendency when writing drums to get too in the weeds. My brain really wants to plug all the holes. Anyway, I was stuck. I loved the riffage. I loved the lyrics and vocals. Bass line was straightforward enough. Those drums were giving me fits, though. I fought them for days. Then, for the first time, I popped it into Suno (more to come on AI tools like Suno later) and just told it what I was trying to do...and it did it. That simple. It dumbed the drums way way way way down and all of a sudden the song breathed. Again, is that really all that different from playing with a drummer? I mean, I know it is...it was way easier. Lol. What you hear on the album is not Suno. It's me painstakingly arranging and re-arranding, but I 100% followed its direction for drums on that one...b/c it was right. Whoa...the AI was right and I was wrong. I thought about that a lot. When working with a drummer or, like my current process for drums, I personally am just plain wrong and don't see the solution...that was something pretty new. I mean, I've been wrong before plenty of times or stuck with a human drummer, but all the frustration of getting to the answer disappeared. I certainly wrestle with that. I mean, I'm probably a better musician for having to battle through that in the past, but did I end up getting to the right spot before or did I get worn out and settle on something less than perfect? It was pretty wild.  

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Anyway, authorship, to me, is not measured only by who produced the first raw material. It also lives in direction, selection, arrangement, performance, revision, context, and judgment. A thousand generated possibilities do not become a finished work until someone decides what the work is. In the Disintegrate case, that was still me. Suno didn't faithfully recreate what I'd written. It sure isn't good for that. Hell, half those first few renderings were complete trash. What it did, though, was make me cock my head to the side and say "I hadn't thought of it that way. Hmmmmmm..."

 

AI can help me reach farther and move faster. It can give me leverage I did not have before.

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But leverage still requires a hand on the bar.

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Music Creation/Ideation

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I played with a host of AI tools over the course of the last year. From a creation/ideation standpoint I landed on Suno. Do I use it to create riffs? Nope. Don't need that. Got a zillion. Did I use it to write drums and bass? Tried to, and it can come up with some solid stuff, but the stem separator makes it almost impossible to get that stuff out...and the dang thing never ever ever ever ever faithfully recreates what I've put in or comes even close to what's in my head. 

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That's the beauty of it, though... I don't need it to create for me. I need it to give me a nudge, send me another direction when I'm stuck, force me to rethink what I think I know... So, do I use it for music creation? Not really. I'll tell you this, though. I run just about everything I do through it with a few different prompts just to see if anything jumps out at me, especially if the song isn't hitting me quite right, like the Disintegrate example from above. I'll discuss this more later when it comes to mixing music, but if you've ever tried to mix a separated or downloaded Suno track, whatever it is, you'll find a solid lesson in futility there. It does what it does, but its a one trick pony in those regards. All or nothing. Sooooo...

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Does that make me a traitor to the artform of making music? I don't think so. I've worked with producers before. It feels a lot like that. It gives ideas. Pushes. Pulls. Maybe you like what it has to say, maybe you don't. Best part about this producer...it doesn't cuss you out or throw a beer bottle at you. Until Skynet takes over we're still in pretty good shape. 

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Alright, here's where it gets interesting. I can play a lot of instruments, but in the last six years my career in IT and busy family life have dominated my time, and I'm very rusty on everything but my primaries, and even then...I can't sweep pick like I used to, and I hurt my left hand pretty bad a couple years ago... This is all to say, I had to do some pretty serious practice to do some of the riffage on Pulse. So, when I needed some violin on a song I got out my violin, and made horrible noises with it. I've never been great at the violin, but I at least used to be able to make pretty sounds come out of it. Same with the harmonica. Long story short... Load it into Suno. Hit the button. Iterate 12 times until it doesn't mess up my riff. Stem splitter. Put in Reaper. Double it. Layer it. Shoot...I could have just downloaded the Midi? Do that. Garbage. Sigh. Try to play it. Fight it. Resequence the midi...that's better. Load in Hyperion. Fix it b/c the DL was off a bit....again. OK. Game over. I wouldn't have hired a violinist anyway... I either would have practiced until I got it (no time these days) or just left em out...or sequenced every bit of it in midi, which takes forever. The song is better for it this way b/c...well...that dang time monster. 

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Let's get to the philosophical. AI generated music is going to allow people to put out a bunch of crap. Am I worried about that? Not really...I've never liked crap songs anyway, so I don't listen to them. What I find interesting is the person who is a songwriter deep down inside, but never learned to play anything. I wonder how well they can do? I wonder if you can still learn all the things you need to know in order to truly make a song, or will the AI shortcut start moving us in the direction of Ideocracy? I can tell you this. If I go into a Suno project with no plan except to try to make something cool, I make something cool...on any subject where I'm knowledgeable...in any genre I already know all about. Check this out. One pass. One throwaway (but awesome) riff I had sitting in my catalog that I didn't think I was going to match with anything else. Five minutes. Its about chicken nuggets. You can only hear it here.​​​​​​​​​​