Music

I have been involved in making music in many different ways since I was a teen. My main instrument is the drums, but in recent decades I have been more of a producer and composer, using technology to create the songs I want to hear.

I'm working on bringing some of my older stuff online, but my latest project is Mantis Audiogram. I'm proud of what I've made here and there's plenty more in my pipeline coming soon.

Here's a taste from Spotify, but it's available on all streaming platforms.

I want to be very up-front with the fact that AI is used in most of these recordings, because I think everyone should be open about this. However, I feel it's important to point out that there is still significant effort of my own behind them all - it does not mean I just did a prompt and songs came out.

My methods vary as I experiment, but my usual workflow has become:

1) I construct original recordings in Logic Pro, using my own playing (drums, bass, guitar, keys), lyrics and singing as well as samples from built-in sample packs and plugins. Compared to what you hear here they sound more rough, basically a demo.

2) I then use Suno to make "covers" of them. This analogous to paying a band of session musicians to play the songs.

3) I iteratively repeat the generation process changing the prompts every time, using a variety of tricks that I've developed in the past couple of years to evolve the song - introducing or increasing sounds and elements I like while I remove or decrease those I don't like as much. On average I'll do about 100 generations per song, but it may be as many as 300. It's so interesting to explore the "possibility space" around a song to search for something that is "best".

4) Finally, I use Mixea AI to remaster the tracks (to adjust EQ and balance) and basically "polish" the final sound.

(Many other workflows are possible and I'm experimenting with those too. It's an exciting time for technology in music production)

I have made sure to add AI into the song credits when distributing them (I use DistroKid), but I've noticed that the major streaming platforms just throw most of this information away!

Unlike liner notes from earlier distribution methods like LP records, there is no way to see who did what in any of the songs on these platforms, which I think is terrible and I'd like to join any initiative I can find that is putting pressure on these platforms to fix this. Listeners deserve to know what goes into any given song.