When I was a working musician, I was pretty much like a lot of guys are about sports when it came to looking at playing skills and I sometimes hung out in a pack of Chicago working drummers that were similarly minded. If a drummer couldn’t play well, they were brutal. Then, as I became more experienced and joined a somewhat popular Chicago rock band — I had to play with backing tracks. I hated it, and it seemed dishonest. In fact, my last show — which was at the University my son now attends — the band leader didn’t spring it on me but the entire show was pre-recorded, except for his vocals (the harmonies were pre-recorded). I quit and one of our sound guys pretended to play drums that night — which I enjoyed watching, because he had the time of his life being a rock star.

So yeah, I’m in love with real music that a human being wrote. I’m love with the craftsmanship and result of songwriting — by humans. I’m in love with the beauty or even the raw rage of what a talented musician can do with an instrument, including his or her voice. AI music like this wouldn’t exist if it couldn’t rip off what a human being worked on.

I realize that some of us here use AI to help write songs or to sing. To each his own. But to me, the joy of music is found in it being organic. It’s like the difference between painting what’s in your head and heart on a canvas compared to using paint by numbers. It removes the art and the humanity from what is produced. This site is a testimony to my love of music. In many ways, I see it as a tribute to my mother, my siblings, and the music teachers and musicians who poured their talent and abilities into helping me become a real musician (okay, there’s no sign of it now with my tendinitis, but I once was a talented musician; unfortunately, I never had any real talent at signiging).

I did buy a plugin to do background vocals using AI — that takes your voice and has ain AI singer replace it (SonarWorks VoiceID). When I recently showed my son a version of Dear Prudence I was working on and knew my vocal was lousy, after listening, I asked him if he thought I should use AI to do harmonies. His reaction was strong. “Just keep working on it. Don’t use AI. Keep practicing until you can do a better job.” I went and sang it all the way through once more after that, and used that as the final take. In the end, even with my flawed abilities from 20+ years of not practicing and tendinitis making playing difficult and painful at times, the end product is still me, not technology. It also struck me that there are super talented artists out there — like Reid Jamieson (part of this community; he’s a singer/songwriter that I’ve been a huge fan of for two decades) that deserves to get a million times more streams than this AI band, but the AI band gets the attention. That’s f’ed up. I hope society can get to a point where it values artistry like it once did. I couldn’t imagine the next Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, Yes, or Radiohead getting signed in this age. It’s all about pretty young faces and pro songwriters behind the scenes.