Much has been said, written, and certainly moaned about AI and music, including in these pages! Let’s look at how to use AI in the service of creativity instead of laziness.
I will not be mentioning any music-gen tools, simply because those are not for musicians. Making «music» from prompts is not exactly exciting for a musician, and it sure doesn’t make you one. They are a fun tool, if you want to create, say, a birthday song for your grandma with a trap groove. Let’s focus on the AI tools that can actually help you be more productive, and perhaps even more creative. For every step of the creative process, there is an AI tool that can help push it along.
Composing with AI
AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist) is an AI composer that creates soundtracks and music in various genres like classical, electronic, and pop. It’s widely used by film, computer games, and commercial content creators to generate royalty-free music quickly.
The tool helps musicians and non-musicians alike create background scores and fully developed compositions in a fraction of the time.
Empress offers a versatile suite of tools for composing, arranging, and producing music. Advanced features include voice separation and style transfer. It fun scions as a creative assistant helping you get around creative roadblocks.
AI-assisted Lyrics
Claude AI can provide lines, verses, or entire songs based on your prompts. You can give it a theme, a style, or even a few keywords to get the ball rolling.
The tool can help you see your song idea from different angles, offering alternative phrasings or exploring different emotions. Claude can also suggest rhyming words or phrases, and even help you structure your lyrics to fit a specific meter or rhythm.
MasterWriter is a tool that is specifically designed for lyric writing. It has more limited «contextual understanding» than Claude, but with lyric writing in mind, it has an extensive rhyming library and song structure tools in its arsenal.
Recording with AI
LALAL.AI is an AI-powered stem splitter that can isolate vocals and instruments from any track with impressive accuracy. This is useful for creating remixes, samples, or isolating tracks to practice along with.
GOYO is a comprehensive tool that can be used for noise reduction, de-reverberation, and vocal isolation. It’s great for cleaning up recordings and improving audio quality.
Moises App: is similar to LaLal.ai and can separate song stems and also offers features like pitch shifting and tempo adjustment, making it a useful tool for music production.
Musairec: is a “songwriting-assistant app” for processing and enhancing ideas with AI features. Early access here.
AI-powered plugins
Many plugins now incorporate AI to offer intelligent effects, sound design tools, and even automatic mixing capabilities:
Focusrite Fast Bundle includes AI-powered EQ, compressor, reverb, limiter, and “Reveal” plugins that offer smart starting points and help you achieve a balanced mix quickly.
Zynaptiq Adaptiverb is an intelligent reverb plugin that analyzes your audio and adapts its decay time and other parameters to create a natural and immersive sound.
Orb Producer Suite 3 is a suite of MIDI generators (Chords, Melody, Bass, Arpeggio) that use AI to create unique patterns and progressions with extensive customization options.
AI can now create realistic vocal performances from text or even mimic the voices of existing singers, opening up new creative possibilities and potential new lawsuits!
Mastering with AI
The mastering industry has really taken off in the last few years, and AI is quickly raising the bar for eMastering solutions.
iZotope Ocean 11 is an industry-standard mastering software that now includes AI-powered features that can help you achieve a professional sound with less effort.
Landr is an online mastering service that uses AI to analyze your tracks and apply mastering settings automatically. It’s a quick and easy way to get your music sounding professional enough for public consumption.
eMastered possibly offers the best user experience. The ai-powered mastering tool is very easy to use and offers slightly more customization than Landr and other competitors.
I have used both Landr and Emastered recently, and I would say that Landr has the edge as regards the final master sound quality. However, the Emastered subscription model is more cost-efficient if you have many projects lined up.
How to Create Your Music Video with AI
For the vast majority of us, a music video is a luxury we cannot afford. Unless you want to take a low-cost approach using your phone and apps, which can be a great option, creating a full-scale music video is too resource-demanding. Fortunately, emerging AI video-making tools will make it much more accessible to create stunning visuals to go with your next hit song.
Runway is a comprehensive AI image and video generation tool. I used the app for a video experiment with one of my own songs. You can check it out here.
Human anatomy and movement turned out to be very challenging. It also seemed virtually (pun intended) impossible to have an AI-generated person play a string instrument realistically. With so much trial and error to get some basic movements to look decent, you quickly burn through credits and the cost could become quite high.
For some reason, they have removed the preview function in their Gen-3 version of the tool. This is a major lack, as previews are a great help in helping you waste credits on scenes that don’t match your prompt at all. As with any creative process, however, the glitches and mistakes sometimes add to the storyline, and can create some amazing surreal images.
In general, I found it to have a lot of potential, especially if movement, human anatomy, and prompt precision can be improved. For now, you can only generate 10 seconds at a time, but if they introduce a feature where you can create videos from full scripts, it’ll be fantastic.
LTX Studio
I did a quick test, using a script that I have also used in Runway, and conceptually the tool is very nice. It is built for creating «movies» or «short films», and it does have the script feature that I missed when using Runway. However, the visual output is far from being up to standard. It’s a nice «draft tool», however, testing out ideas for storylines etc. as it is easy to use and has a decent interface.
RESOLUTION
It has never been «easier» to create music, from the recording to the publishing. This state of affairs represents its challenges: how to develop and preserve your own creative identity? How to stand out from the crowd? And, how not to get sued for copyright infringement?
The latter «challenge» might sound flippant, but when generative AI tools are in your «tool-belt» when creating music, you might inadvertently land yourself in hot water. And, in this particular «ocean» where the currents of generative AI crash into copyright law and right holders’ interests, the water is boiling!
Personally, I like to focus on tools that solve productivity and not «creativity» as I feel that adding chord progressions, groove patterns, lyric suggestions etc. does take an artist away from the path of organic becoming that leads to a unique creative artistic identity.
Before the last note fades, there are as many songwriting approaches as there are songwriters, so each and everyone will find their own way through the interaction with Artificial Intelligence, and hopefully, creativity will flicker on and not burn out in the flame of AI-powered creation.
