Exactly. Even if just for Chuck and I, this was something both of us needed. It brought a lot of positivity to each of our lives for a lot of different reasons.
Yes, that's exactly what we did here. We fed the originals to AI, but we did give it wiggle room to make a cover version and not follow the original exactly. I think I will play around with running a few tracks through and telling it to follow as close as possible to the original and see how it sounds!
Completely agree. We tried feeding his voice in and using that as a voice model and it actually sounded even further away from his actual voice so we nixed it. We uploaded our original tracks as a reference, so there were some notes that left me feeling like "that sounds like Chuck", but for the most part, yeah, it's pretty far off.
I get it. Recorded music is a lot of fun to play and listen to. This still was a fun project for us to work on together after 25-years and with both of us living on opposite ends of the country. Hopefully our next release will be an in-person recording!
I gotta brag on Chuck a bit more though. I do love the depth to his lyrics and the way he puts them to melodies. I think his stuff, at the core, is excellent. Can't wait to work on some new stuff!
Totally agree. I guess that's what comes with the AI/robot stuff. Hopefully we'll be able to create an in-person album again, but with a little higher production quality than our dorm room versions.
I'd love that. We hope to. We live on opposite sides of the country now. The AI stuff was a great, nostalgic kick-off for us. We don't plan on using AI like this as our only way of making music, but it was a great project to work on. We'd love to write some new stuff and play live again. Hopefully soon!
That's great. AI is a tricky beast. It can be used for good or evil. I had a lot of convictions while working on this project and my soul is resting easy with how we navigated things!
25 years ago, I was approached to join a college band called Fading Maize. We did what we could with what we had. We recorded 3 albums over the next 3 years and played at as many bars and coffee shops as we could. Since then, we all went our separate ways, got married, had kids, focused on other things. Earlier this year I had the idea to approach the lead singer who wrote all of the lyrics and melodies to the stuff we played back then and wanted to "reimagine" everything in 2026 using AI. AI gets a bad rap and I can totally see why, but our case was different. We wrote the lyrics, we created the melodies, we played the parts, it just didn't sound as good as we heard it in our own heads. Being fully transparent about our use of AI and sticking tightly to our original lyrics and melodies was the key. I'm super proud of how it turned out and the transparency we've used along the way in terms of how we did and didn't use AI.