01/01/2026
A genuinely intelligent comment from a professional writer/arranger on AI music.
Since you're intelligent enough to ask the philosophical and existential questions about where this is going, I'll throw in my two cents as a composer who plays three instruments, writes over a dozen genres, and studied orchestration. And who has been writing music for almost 40 years.
The biggest thing I've learned is no two pieces have the exact same workflow. If, its an orchestral score, it's working in Sibelius or Dorico or Notion, and basically writing stuff out in notation. That means having to know how to read and write music. It also means knowing the limitations of every single instrument in an orchestra.
If I want to write other genres; electric genres, I'm usually using Logic Pro these days, but for 20 years I used Digital Performer.
So now we got AI, where you can get a whole song in 10 seconds. I tried out SUNO, uploaded some riffs and concepts just to see what they could do with it. I was blown away with the variations it made on my themes. Alot of it was crap, but alot of it was mindblowingly good.
So, the question then becomes how would I work this into my personal workflows. Well, I definitely don't want AI to write my music for me. But I don't mind the inspiration or the break through a creative block. I've decided to write an album project using SUNO as an assistant. I won't use their studio per se, But I will download stems and slice and dice them and grab good sections to utilize in Logic Pro. Logic Pro is a DAW I'm comfortable with, I have all my plugins and VSTS at hand, and I don't mind scavenging a bunch of takes from SUNO for parts that can be used or modified or applied to other instruments or orchestration.
I could give you all some existential feedback in the sense that music is about to completely change. My advice for seasoned composers and producers is use it as a tool. DON'T let it use you. Who the hell wants to write dead music? The thing about writing music is the process itself. Not so much the finished product. How many times have a put a half finished composition on my phone to listen to while i walk to listen to it and decide what it needs, the direction it should go. It doesn't matter to me if it takes a composition a week or a month or YEARS to finish. It'll finish when it needs to be finished, unless of course it's client based and timelines are involved. But as far as personal projects, they can take all the time they need.
So my advice for younger people is learn the fundamentals. Learn theory. Learn composition and arranging. Learn orchestration. Learn production skills. Sure, it'll take years. But it's completely worth it. Write music because you want to write music. So I'm not gonna harp ppl who just want instant results and a machine to do everything, but you ARE denying yourself. In fact, by learning the fundamentals, your AI skills will vastly improve because you'll know how to tame the monster. And that's key. The more more musical and production knowledge you can bring to the table, the better servant AI will be to you.
No matter what, be the musician you are comfortable being: Whether its a guy with a guitar at a campfire or a violinist practicing in her bedroom, or a DJ mixing, or a hardcore composer writing symphonies, or a bedroom studio musician cranking out tunes with a half dozen software programs. Just find your niche and enjoy it. Cheers.
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