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Why I Don't Let AI Make My Music

I'm not afraid of AI. I use it every day. But I will never let it make my music, because the making is the whole point.




A songwriter found me on X this week. She puts out new songs almost every day, and it turns out she makes them with Suno. You type a few lines, pick a style, and a minute later you have a finished track, singer and all.

Fair enough. I just wrote that musicians shouldn't be terrified of AI, and I meant it. But it got me thinking about what I'd lose if I worked that way. The answer is: nearly everything I love about this.

It starts with a pencil

My songs start on scratch pads, in pencil. I write the words out by hand, cross out the lines that don't work, write them again in the margin, cross those out too. By the time a lyric is done the page looks like a battlefield. That mess is the song finding itself. I don't want a machine skipping that part for me.

The barn in Ware

The Quabbin Valley Folk rehearse in an old barn in Ware. It's drafty. In the colder months you keep your coat on between takes. It's also one of the coziest rooms I know, and I do most of my vocals there. Wood walls, old beams, friends nearby. You can hear the room on the recordings, and I wouldn't trade it for the cleanest booth in Nashville.

Brian's studio in Shutesbury

My friend Brian runs Face The Music, his studio in Shutesbury. He's got Pro Tools and gear I can only admire, and he knows klezmer inside and out. Brian and I went to Egypt together and played klezmer on stage in front of the Great Pyramids as Fiddle Hill. Try getting that out of a prompt box.

John on banjo

John Rough and I have been playing together since 1989. After that many years you stop talking about the music and just play it. He knows where I'm going before I get there, and I know when he's about to throw in something that'll make me grin. That kind of trust takes decades. No software has it.

The gear and the grind

I love the gear. Picking the right microphone for a voice or a room. Getting a pickup to sound like the instrument and not like a pickup. Laying down my own fiddle and mandolin tracks, then doing them again because the third take had something the first two didn't.

Then the back-and-forth. We pass tracks around on Dropbox, everybody adds their part, and the song grows. I clean everything up in Pro Tools and mix down in Audacity. It's slow. Sometimes it's tedious. It's mine.

What I'd miss

The draft in the barn. Brian's ears. John's banjo. The pencil and the crossed-out lines. The moment a take finally feels right. People, rooms, instruments, and time. That's what music is to me.

AI can help me with plenty: research, artwork, the business side. But if it took the making away from me, I'd rather be dead. I'm keeping the fiddle.

Adam Sweet, Verve Music, Granby, MA

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