Dr. Dre Says He Uses AI To Produce Songs (gizmodo.com) 100
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Dr. Dre, the pioneering rapper and seven-time Grammy-winning producer behind hit songs like Tupac's "California Love" and Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady," is very much pro using artificial intelligence tools to make music. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Dre and Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine spoke about artificial intelligence's recent foray into music production, with the producer characterizing those who oppose AI song generation tools as "afraid of learning new things." "I don't see it as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating," Dr. Dre said. "I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago. They were against AI, and I'm like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right?"
[...] Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, for his part, says he doesn't "see the downside at all." "There will be some crappy music. There's crappy music now," Iovine told the NYT. "In the studio, when gifted people have AI, they're going to make better records." Dr. Dre said he uses AI in producing "as a tool to see what it would do with what I just did." The award-winning producer also said he is definitely not alone among his peers in his stance on AI either: many producers use AI but fear to admit it. Iovine calls them "closet AI producers," and says Timbaland, the four-time Grammy-winning singer-producer behind a long list of hits like "Promiscuous" with Nelly Furtado, is also one.
[...] Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, for his part, says he doesn't "see the downside at all." "There will be some crappy music. There's crappy music now," Iovine told the NYT. "In the studio, when gifted people have AI, they're going to make better records." Dr. Dre said he uses AI in producing "as a tool to see what it would do with what I just did." The award-winning producer also said he is definitely not alone among his peers in his stance on AI either: many producers use AI but fear to admit it. Iovine calls them "closet AI producers," and says Timbaland, the four-time Grammy-winning singer-producer behind a long list of hits like "Promiscuous" with Nelly Furtado, is also one.
I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score:3)
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More like he’s lazy and his talent was being at the right place at the right time
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More like he’s lazy and his talent was being at the right place at the right time
The record industry has always been about marketability first, talent second. Nothing new under the sun there. It's an industry that has always been about who you know, and every once in awhile they'll let somebody new in if they're exceedingly talented (but mostly because it benefits someone already inside who will get a cut of their earnings).
Re: I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score:2)
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I'm thinking "talent" may be a strong word here....
I mean, the words "rap" and "music" are mutually exclusive terms after all, eh?
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More like he’s lazy and his talent was being at the right place at the right time
Assuming for the sake of argument that what Dre does is creative and that he is talented, very little of making great music is about the mechanical process of executing on the generation and recording of sound. That's important, but there are a lot more people who can do that than create something that is new, and good.
Creation (in any medium) is about the ideas, and about the ability to recognize what works well and what doesn't. Given that, I could completely see AI being a useful tool for a creative,
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One doesn't get royalties without copyright first. Sure, the AI tools don't get any copyright, but he sure will. Or the tool training sources might try claiming from him.
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1) does not have to share royalties he uses for sampling 2) it is not copyrightable so it is public domain.
3) Never really worked with instrument players so sees no problem using computers to generate "the beats."
If he worked with a steady supply of actual instrumentalists, people that spend years developing their skills and produce music regularly, he'd understand why so many musicians dislike AI. Sure, a new band can put out 30 some albums in a month, but if they can't play the songs live, what's the point? In Hip-Hop, where samples rule, this isn't such an issue. In rock/metal/classical/country/even some of t
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In rock/metal/classical/country/even some of the subgenres of pop, it's a completely different story.
It mostly depends on if an artist is big enough to have arrangements specifically made for their live performances. A lot of pop music these days is produced using loop based tools, so there isn't any traditional notation that results from the initial studio production.
I'd have to admit, it would probably feel like a bit of a demeaning task to turn AI generated accompaniments into sheet music, but hey it's still a job for a human. For now, at least.
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Automated music transcription has been functional for years already, as long as you can feed it individual instrument tracks (aka "stems").
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If the AI outputs individual instrument tracks (called "stems"), then the tools to automatically convert that stem into MIDI have existed for years now. I haven't played with many of the music AIs, and it has probably been a year since I last did, but even then about half of them would output stems.
Also, we don't know where in the process Dre is using AI. If it's at the mastering stage (as an example), it shouldn't have any adverse effect on the musical value at all—unless the operator is too lazy to
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If he worked with a steady supply of actual instrumentalists, people that spend years developing their skills and produce music regularly, he'd understand why so many musicians dislike AI.
He has. For a long time. The problem is, apparently he doesn't like to pay them, and they're not aware of that before the fact.
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Dr Dre was always way ahead of his time when he started using AI 20 years ago.
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1) does not have to share royalties he uses for sampling 2) it is not copyrightable so it is public domain.
1) He knows how good AI is at playing many instruments 2) He knows most rap artists suck at playing instuments.
We don’t mind AI but it reveals itself with perfect vocal execution. A human rapper with background AI is poor man’s platinum from a budget perspective.
Or, like you said. He’s fucking cheap, and is gonna keep his bag that way.
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The drum machine and synthesizers did not replace drummers and real instruments.
In the long run, wavetable synthesis and MIDI did, but only to open the possible options because most instruments are difficult to make in the first place. If you can build a synthesis keyboard that can play every instrument correctly, albeit without the fine analog control of a human, that means "anyone" can play the same music that sounds the same every time. This is why orchestras still exist. Orchestras always sound better t
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and then look up pantera in the 80's, or that ministry was doing pop-new-wave in the 80's.
you can in fact change and evolve. good artists actually adapt to the environment
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Also, look up Trent Reznor's "Slam Bamboo" band before Nine Inch Nails.
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you really can stop acting like it's 1993
We're talking about a rap icon whose heyday was during that era, so those really were the subjects of most rap songs in those days. I was specifically saying that modern rap has kind of moved on from most of that - with some of it just being incomprehensible mumbling, repetitive gibberish, and dare I burn more karma by saying it, but if you head over to Reddit you know it's true: stuff that young white boys listen to because it's the genre du jour that pisses off their parents. Every generation has that.
M
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weird al made a parody of nirvana about how he couldnt understand the singing
"We're so loud and incoherent
boy this oughta
bug your parents!"
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Oh come on, you know the genre has two tropes it pulls heavily from:
1. I'm disadvantaged and life is hard.
2. I've beaten being disadvantaged through success in my music and life is good.
Does every once in awhile an artist come along and put out something that isn't that? Yeah, but what we're discussing here is the mainstream shit that the record industry churns out. Just like Hollywood, the industry is fearful that if they stray too far from the established formula in who they promote, they won't turn a p
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Did you know they have country rap now? It's actually pretty good.
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Blast Flying Lotus back at him. Don't shame someone for listening to what you think is crap, try to persuade them to listen to something better that is still likely to be within their comfort zone.
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The kid's father actually has pretty decent taste in music, because he sometimes has a Bluetooth speaker going while he sits outside to smoke. It's just a typical teenage rebellion thing. Probably be one of those things when he's middle aged that he'll look back on and think was actually cringey in hindsight, like Limp Bizkit was for a lot of Millennials.
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I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses
Can't define how I be dropping these mockeries
Lyrically perform armed robbery
Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me
Battle-scarred Shogun, explosion when my pen hits tremendous
Ultraviolet shine blind forensics
I inspect you through the future see millennium
Killa Beez sold fifty gold, sixty platinum
Shackling the masses with drastic rap tactics
Graphic displays melt the steel like blacksmiths
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That easy, yet you've made no money from rap?
Re: He's right about one thing (Score:2)
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Tell me you don't like 80s pop music without telling me you don't like 80s pop music.
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all those bands used synths at some point throughout their catalogs and plenty of new wave bands like the mentioned Depeche Mode and New Order used real instruments. i mean new order was just the remains of joy division, a "real instrument" band
i mean a band like sisters of mercy was a lot of real instruments but they had a drum machine named "Doktor Avalanche" as a member of the band.
it was the 80's. thats how you made a record back then, you did a line of cocaine off a Yamaha DX7 and started riffing
Re: He's right about one thing (Score:2)
All of those bands have keyboardists. Will Sergeant from Echo even had programming listed as one of his instruments on the Wikipedia page.
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'They were against AI, and I'm like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right?"'
Yup. I prefer music made by humans, preferably with analog instruments mostly made out of wood and metal.
Nothing wrong with music made by machines if you like that sort of thing, and if you're trancing out on the dance floor it might be perfect. But that's the problem for me, it's too perfect.
Humans on analog instruments make tiny variations in rhythm, pitch, timbre, etc., that usually correspond to the emotion or intent behind the music. This creates music that breathes, that hits you on more levels than just the beat and the melody.
Yes, you can imitate that with programming or AI, but a real musician gives you a sense of the personality and mood of the performer. To me that's the good stuff.
That's interesting but drum machines and synths are still instruments in a human's hands. Think about some of Pink Floyd's early works where they used tape loops and whatnot. The automation became an instrument to incredibly ground-breaking effect. Think about the entirety of Depeche Mode's discography. Huge amounts of artificial instruments but the arrangement can be very good, and they have made new arrangements throughout the decades when touring, just like purely accoustic bands. Then there's Micha
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That's interesting but drum machines and synths are still instruments in a human's hands. ...
The difference in my mind is that AI isn't any of those things. It's recombinant, not creative. It will never invent... until true AI in the sense we used to use the term exists.
Yes but a song made out of one drum machine loop is very akin to a song made by AI,
while a song made by a person out of many drum machine loops is akin to a song made by a person out of many smaller AI recombinant clips.
The only difference between the two is how much creative input the person uses.
When it's a lot, calling AI a tool makes a lot more sense.
When it is little to none, it's no more a tool than a drum stick being randomly banged on a wall is.
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You're absolutely right with that! (sorry could not resist)
AI has a alignment problem. Most models go though a phase to align with human preferences using techniques like humans deciding which of two works is better. This can be used to get the model to create more good outputs than bad ones. The problem is, it streamlines the outputs to a more narrow range and it aligns them with a general consensus of "good". You say it sounds too perfect, but good/perfect is not even the enemy, but less deviation from th
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I've told people generating same-ish AI images that are of decent technical quality, "if your prompt isn't a whole paragraph long, then chances are that someone has made the exact same request by now. If you want your images to look different, you have to provide those differences." Sometimes just repeating yourself with paraphrasing can be enough subtle information to get either the LLM front end (CLIP) or the diffusion model out of its rut, whichever one happens to be doing the railroading.
Re: He's right about one thing (Score:2)
Re: He's right about one thing (Score:2)
It's a different story... (Score:2)
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It's very meritocratic.
I would not go *that* far. Sure an artist can flop out of the industry, and new artists have to come from *somewhere*, but the music industry has more and more successfully "manufactured" the performers rather than "discovered" them.
Also, lots of working it from other angles, the music is a relatively small part of the picture for the biggest musicians. Other media or just a celebrity for the sake of celebrity type things. Co-hosting some reality show that has nothing to do with music, for example.
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but the music industry has more and more successfully "manufactured" the performers rather than "discovered" them.
This is true but it's also heavily weighted towards pop music while other genres are far more resistant to that type of thing. That's why most other genres have the concept of "selling out" but you really wouldn't accuse a pop-star of such a thing, they are sold-out by the nature of what it is, that's kindof the idea of pop music for the past 70 years (that's also not a dig at pop music as far as music is concerned, there are obviously countless examples of great pop-music).
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Pop music is just what the record industry thinks will give them the most return on their investments in promoting it. It's like any other business where you've got people sitting on big piles of cash that they're trying to make into gargantuan piles of cash. If they can sell AI slop, they'll push AI slop.
Re: It's a different story... (Score:2)
I'd still call that discovering, even though I think it's mostly trying to react, always
Copyright shmopyright, right? (Score:2)
Just don't expect me to pay for it.
autotune on steroids (Score:2)
Was autotune a net positive or net negative? I guess some artists really leaned into it trying to use autotune as a new instrument - I don't get the appeal.
On the other hand, AI already brought us Girly Girl productions https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Autotune is a crime against humanity.
Hollywood already had an older trick they'd use: dubbing over someone else for the singing parts when an actor wasn't a very good vocalist.
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808s and Heartbreak is the best album since Bing Crosby.
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Is net positive and net negative the right category? Looking at the net result implies one would discuss that nobody would be allowed to use autotune/everyone should use autotune because it leads to a certain net value. This is a individual decision, just like your decision if you listen to autotune music.
Re: autotune on steroids (Score:2)
If you don't want AI music... (Score:2)
Check out J.D. Beck & Domi, or Ren, or for something a little more out there, Angine de Poitrine. Unbelievable raw talent is there in abundance for all three. Angine in particular give a first reaction as WTF? then it grows on you and you wonder why everyone else has too few frets on their instruments :-)
Re: If you don't want AI music... (Score:3)
I feel like Angine is being forced upon me, like they're being sponsored.
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The moral of the story is: you don't get big by playing to the click track, you get big by playing to the Klek track.
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They're very tik-tok-able if that's a term yet.
I think it's just been so many years since a straight up rock band has gone this viral across so many demographics so peoples whose algorithms would filter out most popular music now have it added in.
Reality check (Score:1)
At this point, there are two kinds of successful artists.
Those that tell you that they use AI to assist with their craft, and those that lie about it.
Because the amount of extra work that needs to be done to without AI is ridiculous at this point. Add to this the part where AI provides several unique services that humans cannot deliver in time frames that aren't thousands to tens of thousands of times longer, allowing for rapid iteration on concepts that would be impossible otherwise, and today you no longe
Re: Reality check (Score:2)
1. Pick up a an instrument.
2. Play it.
Some of the best music doesn't involve more than that.
Of course, people without any skills are going to have a hard time, at first. They can either put in the practice, or otherwise they can just get the heck out of music because they're clearly not interested in it for any of the right reasons.
It's easier than ever to get your stuff recorded and published. That used to be a
Re: Reality check (Score:2)
I still don't think it's generally true. What distinguished the major pop artist from the indie artist is mostly stuff unrelated to the artistic side, I think. Meaning, maybe their managers, promoters, copywriters, cover designers... feel like they have to use LLMs, but not the artists or producers, in the studio.
This is maybe again biased by my preferred genres, but I don't see how an artist using AI in their songwriting or production would even appear on my radar. T
I for one... (Score:1)
Now get off my decks, sonny.
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They do FYI
Dr Dre says... (Score:1)
Nothing you idiots, he's locked up in my basement.
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It's undeniable that Will Smith knows how to make his creations slap.
Sire. Why not? (Score:2)
The past 40 years have failed to catch up to the level of musical quality from before the 80s. Why not throw another log on that fire? :D
Calm down, I'm leaving (Score:1)
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Even our canes were better.
lane keep (Score:2)
Dr. Dre should stick to his forte, medicine. Or maybe pharmacology.
Finally! (Score:2)
Finally, an actual use for a slop machine.
Intellectual sharecropping (Score:2)
The economic problem with having an AI produce music for you is, you never get the opportunity to learn how to produce it for yourself. At the end of the day, you're paying them $200/month for the privilege of remaining unskilled, and you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box. You can't make money that way, because the moment you do, the AI companies (who own all of the talent and all of the production machinery) can simply appropriate you
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you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box.
Almost everybody has everything they need to make hamburgers at home. By that logic, McDonald's shouldn't exist.
What the record industry has, is a massive promotional network for the content they churn out. Without that, you'll just be rocking out to your own AI creations in your car.
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Almost everybody has everything they need to make hamburgers at home. By that logic, McDonald's shouldn't exist.
Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.
No throw stone (Score:2)
Re: No throw stone (Score:2)
To give just one example among thousands: Daptone Records is one of the most consistently brilliant record labels, and they don't even allow computers on the studio floor.
Re: No throw stone (Score:2)
Spot on with "against drum machine" (Score:2)
"Mawp..." (Score:2)
...Yeah, thought so.
Sony MDR-V6 forever, dudes...
They weren't creating anyway (Score:3)
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That is a low-IQ take of the music industry. Sampling != copying / stealing. In fact almost no artists "stole" anything, they pay a fair share of royalties for sampling even a small snippet of music. But to claim that they aren't creating anything is just utter rubbish. Sampling a track underneath your own contributions is still creating, they aren't fucking cover bands.
And I defend them as someone who actively hates that music.
So? (Score:2)