Warts and all

It's been about a year sing I put anything on this blog. Life's been busy and we've been busy writing and recording new songs. But recently, I've been giving things a though especially with AI music now making inroads to platforms like Spotify, which uses AI to create songs licensed to Spotify so no royalties need to be paid out. But that's another story for another time, and as of this being written, Spotify apparently removed those AI generated songs. Here's why. What AI can't seem to do is be imperfect - and some of those imperfections make music great. A great example is the classic "Roxanne" by the Police, where in the first 10 seconds of the song, we hear Sting lose his balance and sit on the piano and laugh; aka "the butt chord".

Most professional modern music in the 2020's is recorded digitally and with that digital interface comes all the possibilities of "perfection" in the structure of a song.. Use a click - align every midi and analog signal to that click to remove any deviation of tempo. Use VST's or with Mac's, AUE's. These are software instruments - everything from a simple triangle to a sampled Oud, guitar and everything in between. They could be audio effects, midi effects, guitar pedal, or microphone or room emulator. Want the patch to exactly recreate SRV? No problem.

What's lost in translation between these digital recordings is the coloration of the mic preamps, the warble of the Studer A800 and Ampex 456 2" tapes. Even the translation of Boston's "Peace of Mind" into a digital recording - it still has some of the analog character even though it's been translated into 1's and 0's. The beat is not perfect to a click. There are imperfections in the transients, My point here isn't that "analog good" / "digital bad". It's never about the tools themselves, but what we as artists DO with those tools.

Top 40 artists on their recordings with their 14 producers, make everything perfect. (Also another discussion for another time). A vocal a little flat? Auto-tune it so the vocals are 100% in tune - no exceptions. The guitar bend just a little sharp? Corrected. Analog drums just 50ms ahead of the beat? Get a production assistant to change the waveform to always be right on the beat. No deviations!!

What music becomes in this type of environment is sterile. Sure, the production quality is great. It sounds exactly how the producers wants it to sound, and there are an infinite number of methods to get it just perfect. But what fun is that? To those of us who grew up on imperfect songs, the newer songs sound like their missing something - a soul perhaps?

Prior to 1993 and the widespread adoption of the DAW in studio's, everything was done on tape. (See History of the DAW). You recorded the song with the other members of the band or hired musicians all sitting in a large room, playing to what the drummer was laying down. Looking at each other. There was a push/pull - sometimes a song would start out at 105 beats per minute, but ends up at 120. These are shifts in tempo that aren't planned, but organic. For example, a common example of a planned tempo change is Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out". An organic push/pull in tempo is something like the Rolling Stones "Shelter" which goes between 116 to 120 beats per second depending on how Charlie Watt's was playing and how the parts came together.

When things are too perfect, we lose interest, unless of course future generations are conditioned to liking sterile perfection. That would be sad. In Karma Factory's songs, we nearly always use a click, yet we do not sync up every single part to that click. Sometimes where a part is rushed, I will nudge it backwards or forwards to help the overall songs' groove. I won't grid every single note. If there are vocals where there are a few notes which may be flat or sharp, if it's cringe-worthy, I will correct them. I won't however, correct every single note, slide or vibrato. The warts lets the listener know this song was recorded by REAL human beings - not an AI version of your voice sung perfectly. The warts are what makes songs REAL. Human even. If music becomes perfect, it becomes a better quality version of Udio AI created songs. Right now, those AI songs when compared to REAL human sung/played songs, they sound like garbage. That's going to change as the years progress. There will be songs created in the next 5 years where the most discerning listener, the best trained ears will not be able to tell the difference between AI and a real band.

Hey - have you heard the new AI created Nirvana song "Drowned in the Sun"?

It's not Kurt - it's AI. How about a new Zeppelin song (this one's old already) Mountain Man. This also is a whole different can of worms to maybe be addressed in the future.

We won't soon be able to tell the difference because some smart programmer will have AI created songs with a "Warts" effect. (Yes I'm © ® that term as I write this!) Meaning the AI will throw in some push/pull tempo's, some non-perfected timing, rhythms, guitar bends and notes - similar to the "humanize" function most every DAW has today. That's probably already part of the plan and implemented somewhere by someone pitching a new AI app. Isn't it great to be fully replaced as an artist by a computer who never sleeps, never eats, never dies, and never complains?

I can now sample my voice and have AI use my voice to sing "Revolution Calling" by Queensryche, perfectly, which I could never sing IRL. Yeah, there's literally an app for that. (For educational purposes only: https://easywithai.com/ai-audio-tools/musicfy/)

Sometimes the human warts, human mistakes and human tempo anomalies cause "happy accidents" which can change a song from good to great, from great to legendary.

Case in point: "Smells like Teen Spirit" (as the story goes - take it with a grain of salt) that this was part of a joke. A band Bikini Kills (Kathleen Hanna - you'll know her as the bratty girl in pigtails in the video for Sonic Youth's "Bulls in the Heather") about a deodorant called "Teen Spirit" which was marketed to young girls in the 1990's.

At some point during a bit of a party, Hanna wrote "Kurt smells like teen spirit" on a wall. That sorta stuck, and Kurt wrote the song, the rest is history. That's a happy accident - I would call it a message from the "muse" - a mythical version of inspiration, taken from the Greek mythos of Calliope, one of Zeus's 9 daughters called "The Muses" all of which had a specialization. Calliope was the muse of music, song, dance and poetry. When the inspiration hits, Calliope paid a visit.

Warts and happy accidents are so necessary in the creation of a song. We as artists shouldn't be so dismissive of mistakes, changes, challenges or inspection of the songs we create. While it's difficult to put aside ego, especially when something we create is so clearly obtainable through technology - we have to be open to the possibility that these anomalies whether they are in the form of mistakes or problems could ALSO be an inspiration. We need the warts and variations to validate music is created by a human being and not an algorithm with extended heuristics using the template of the past 100 top 10 songs of the last decade. That just sounds boring; just like AI.