4/1/24 The Stuff AI Can't Do

Every day I hear the sound of symphony orchestras on car commercials or pharmaceutical ads. They sound like something John Williams might have written if he didn’t have much time.

Dramatic, perfectly together, in tune and pleasantly predictable.

I think back to the years I spent doing sessions in the NY area with groups of string players, often taking hours to play multiple repetitions of parts to sound like a large orchestra.

We worked very hard to try to make it sound perfect.

And then, pretty soon, as sampling and synthesizers got better, any keyboard player could do the same thing—more perfectly, with one hand, in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost.

And now, you don’t even need a keyboard player!

You don’t even have to know anything about music. AI can create incredibly human sounding compositions of nearly any kind with just a good prompt.

There is every reason to believe that this is going to decimate the lower end of music scoring for TV, film and ads. Composers and session musicians who have already seen their work reduced to a small fraction of the work they used to do back in the 20th century, will undoubtedly be essentially written out of the picture--literally.

But you know who will remain standing?

The players who can play things AI can’t—the string players who can chop and groove and play the stuff they don’t teach everyone else at conservatories.

There is no sound library that can replicate what Darol Anger or Casey Driessen can do. If you want something that doesn’t sound cookie-cutter, you have to find a real-live player with real skills that most others don’t have.

And I would hazard a guess that, based on the way markets generally work, these more unique styles of playing will become increasingly valuable. If everyone can dial up a fake John Williams score for free with a few clicks of a mouse, those who have unique skills will stand out even more.

All the more reason to stray from the tunnel vision of western classical string pedagogy and train yourself in non-classical styles--the more contemporary popular sounds and grooves that resonate with the vast majority of the general public.

Just as we are better people when we know and love many different kinds of people, we are better musicians when we know and love many different kinds of music.

And we may be better employed musicians, too. Take that, AI.