Right, so I thought I would dig in to this whole AI wasps nest and see where things are at.
I know this is an extremely polarizing topic, so bear with me :-)
Spoiler, here is what I came up with.
[PIXELATED SHADOWS] https://youtu.be/Qip6eUbD8zs?si=RVnHMER0a4VSUswf
[Neon Dreams] https://youtu.be/DZSpi6ySe-g?si=OIFjQ19g2QGwbMuM
My thoughts are that it is better than I imagined it was, but as with everything else, what you get back is a reflection of what you put in.
It turned out to be quite a lot of work and quite different to my normal workflow.
Usually, when I set out to make a track, I start with some small motif, a sound, a sample, a technique, a melody. You know the drill.
With this, I had to put a lot more effort into conceptualization. You could say, well, you should do that anyway, and probably you would be right, and sometimes I do, but most of the time I'm used to just going with the flow.
So yeah, it turns out you have to really think about the end result and how that translates into prompts from the beginning, especially if you want to do video to go with it.
I feel it is much closer to writing a story than writing music fwiw. Not that this is a bad thing.
As far as the process. For conceptualization I had to think of the genre and feel of the target, then immerse myself in that thought painting a mental picture of 'being there'. From that, kind of write down in words what it is all about.
Then I created a few generations to see if the prompts are translating, adjusting and iterating until they are.
This is the same for both the audio and video.
With this AI stuff you also have to consider that it is going to require multiple generations to create the final piece, and they have to hang together. Making sure they flow from one generation to the next I definitely had to think about.
After the sound generations were done I separated the stems and took them into Bitwig.
Having the separate stems gave me the opportunity to remaster the track and apply regular mixing/mastering techniques.
(Things will be 1000% better if the generators create stems in the first place)
I think this step is critical at the moment because the raw output quality still leaves a lot to be desired. I'm sure that will change, but just FYI.
The PIXELATED SHADOWS track was particularly tough because the original content was massively overcompressed.
I did my best to rescue some headroom out of it, but it isn't perfect. Also, due to the spectrum in that track, the stem splitting ends up with a lot of crosstalk. Also a problem when trying to remaster in context.
I applied a lot of EQs and multiband processing in general. Did some work with the vocals to pop them out, reinforced the bass and improved the dynamics in the drums.
As far as my general feelings with AI. Well it is here to stay, there is no getting away from it.
I'm pretty impressed and it is better than I thought. There is an incredible amount of junk being produced right now and AI makes it easy to do that.
On some level I guess the flipside to that is, for people willing to put the effort in, there is some potential.
The result is okay I think. I'm curious what people think.
Okay, that is the end of my trip report. Hope this has been of some use for anyone looking into this stuff and this post is taken in good faith.
PS. It's critical if you are doing lyrics to write them yourself. Probably that goes without saying, but worth spelling it out.