AI isn’t a new thing. We’ve been using it in our daily lives for years now, however, the emergence of new and powerful tools has brought the topic of AI to the forefront of the cultural dialogue, and kickstarted heated discussions all over the globe. Whether you’re in the camp that is super excited about the applications of such technologies, or whether you’re a little more pessimistic in your views on the subject, we hope to give you some insights into this emerging world, what it means for musicians, and how you can leverage these new powerful tools as a musician.

What types of tools exist and how can I use them?

Recently we’ve seen the emergence and huge popularity of Open AI’s Chat GPT. This particular tool has created a whirlwind of people signing up, logging in and attempting to make sense of the tool, from attempting to boost their productivity, leveraging it for business related goals and even using it for more creative outlets.

At it’s core, Chat GPT is a ‘Large Language Model‘ – Which is a probability distribution over sequences of words. To put it in layman’s terms – it’s an AI chatbot that’s been trained with incredibly huge amounts of language data, which can answer questions, assist with daily tasks such as writing emails & code, and can even assist in more creative tasks such as outlining and writing novels. Cool, right?!

Analytics firm UBS reported that in January 2023, ChatGPT was on track to hit 100 million monthly active users after being open to the general public for only two months. To compare, it took social media phenomenon, TikTok, nine whole months to reach the grand 100 million MAU number!!! There must be something to this AI technology stuff then, eh?!

“How can I use this incredible tool in a musical context?” you might ask.

Here are 3 ways to use ChatGPT in your music right now.

  1. Ask Chat GPT to generate a series of album titles and track titles based on something you like, or in the style of something/someone else.
  2. Ask Chat GPT to generate lyrical content.
  3. Ask Chat GPT to generate a marketing plan for your next release.

This leads us on nicely to DALL-E…

DALL-E, another AI tool developed by OpenAI, is tool that turns text-input into incredible pieces of artwork. By entering a sequence of words into this nifty tool, it will go away, analyse your input, and try to build an image for you.

“Why does this matter to me as a muscian?” I hear you say.

Here are 3 ways to use DALL-E as a musician right now.

  1. Get DALL-E to generate your next release artwork.
  2. Get DALL-E to generate marketing materials/images for your next release.
  3. Get DALL-E to create new assets for your social media pages.

LALAL.AI is a Stem Separation tool that uses the power of AI to break down a track into its constituent parts! You can extract everything from vocals, instrumentals, drums, bass, guitar, synth, string and wind instruments!

You might be thinking “What could I possibly use this for?”

Here are 3 ways to use LALAL.AI as a musician right now.

  1. Obtain the stems to a track so you can study and reverse engineer a part for your own music.
  2. Use the stems to create edits of your favorite tracks to use in your DJ sets.
  3. Extract the stems so you can easily extract grooves, melodies and chord progressions to use as inspiration in your own tracks.

The future

These are just a handful of ways you could use todays AI tools to your advantage in the current music landscsape. There are plenty more out there to discover and explore. From actual music generators to compositional generation tools!

I don’t know about you, but we’re super excited about that the future holds in the world of AI tools, and what they’ll enable us to achieve! I’m sure this won’t be the last post we do on this subject!