This is a songwriting post about Suno. I have been writing songs since I was 12 and recording them since I was 19. That’s about 25 years, of which the last 17 have been recording a new song every day. When I started, it was on a Tascam 4 track, strumming my guitar and plucking my bass. In college we started on ADATs and then quickly things moved to Digital Performer, then Pro Tools etc. My friend Sam taught me about Reason, which was a standalone program (now also a plugin) for drum programming, synths, and sampling, including things like full sample packs of drums, guitars, bass, etc. Once I moved to Logic, I got really into using the built in sample library. Then around 2019, I started using Splice. So for many years now, a typical Song A Day when time was limited would look like this: I’d improvise a song. Then I’d quickly layer in a bunch of samples from Splice and/or Logic to fill out the sound. Digging through samples, changing the key and BPM of things to fit- that was all part of it. Lately, Suno has completely replaced the role of samples in this workflow. Still improvise a song, but instead of searching on splice for the right sounds, I feed the raw improvised guitar (or bass, banjo, uke, whenever) and vocals into Suno. I give Suno the style that I’m looking for, and generate 4 or 6 tracks (this takes like 2 min). I bring these tracks into Logic, line them up with the raw improvisation, remove the Suno generated vocals, then stitch together the resulting Suno instrumentals into what I want. Sometimes, I’ll even take the full instrumental that I’ve stitched together, then feed that BACK through Suno, to get rid of the artifacts left by the stem separation, and to get the exact dynamics that sound the best. This both takes far less time and sounds so, so much better than doing the same thing with samples. It genuinely feels like cheating. I really feel like I’m cheating! There has also been a marked difference in people’s opinions of these songs - every song is now a banger. I really don’t know how I feel about this. I wrote (improvised) the song, I put together the pieces. Functionally, there really is no difference between the Suno method of Song A Day and the sample method. But it feels like cheating! How can I take credit for something so heavily AI?! Suno is only getting better. They’re about to release v5. Genuinely, truly, it’s going to only get crazier from here. Recording music will never be the same. I wish someone would break into Suno’s servers and steal their model. They trained on all of our music without asking; I just wish it was open source