Ask HN: Songwriters, what software do you use?
e.g. Word Processor, LLM, Rhymezone, Masterwriter, etc.?
I'm particularly interested in any AI assisted software. Assisted being the keyword; I'm not interested in AI generated slop, but something that makes intelligent suggestions as you write.
Currently working on an album.
Software I use for songwriting: mostly Logic, also Dorico. Voice memos. Rhymezone sometimes. Rhymezone seems less and less helpful as I go on. I hardly use text editors for lyrics, paper seems to work a lot better. I end up with a lot of scribbles all over the paper.
AI suggestions for songwriting seems a bit like turning on cheat codes in a game. Cheat codes will help me beat a game faster. The cost? The game is less fun, and the whole reason I play games is to have fun. Songwriting is an activity for me, like gardening or running or something like that. Or putting together a jigsaw puzzle. If you had an AI assistant that could help you put together a jigsaw puzzle, would you use it?
There are AI tools around and some work decently well:
- Logic has session players. I don’t think they’re AI, but they are decent at putting up the skeleton of a song.
- AI-powered stem-splitting tools help you pick apart songs you like and figure out how they work.
- AI-powered song mastering tools produce dubious output. I have gone through multiple iterations with AI-powered tools and ended up happier just mastering the song myself.
LLMs seem like the great failure here.
- Most time is spent in the iPhone's Notes & Voice Memo apps.
- I try Rhymezone, but it rarely helps me find a word I hadn't already though of.
- The Complete Rhyming Dictionary [1] as it also helps find great family rhymes - but is a very manual process.
- ChatGPT voice chat for object writing - mostly just because I'm more of a vocal processor - I forbid it from writing anything, and instruct it clearly to just listen and give me a list of the metaphors, imagery, and descriptive words that I tell it. I've always struggled with motivation to do object writing, but I quite enjoy doing it audibly like this.
- ChatGPT as a proof-reader. Eg "Review the following song for me. What would new listeners think the song is about and saying". You need to be careful though, because it will often tell you stupid stuff like "the melody is great" even though you haven't shared a melody.
- ChatGPT as a sounding board when I'm battling over a very specific phrase or wording. More as a sounding board though, as I usually don't use it's suggestions.
- Logic Pro - The latest version lets you add chords and have it auto play some basic AI session players - which is great for fleshing out the basic ideas, and having something I can play on repeat why I write lyrics. Once I'm happy with the song, I'll then start replacing the AI tracks with human created tracks.
[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Complete-Rhyming-Dictionary-Clemen...
Wrote a giant blog series with the entire process of my last album: https://bpev.me/notes/vx1
I think each song develops differently, so process varies depending. But tldr on software is:
Step 1. Whatever is easiest to write immediately on inspiration (which happens anytime anywhere): Voice Memos, Phone Notes app, Text Editor. I have a super long voice memo history, so my songs usually develop from 2-3+ voice memo ideas that may have been recorded years apart. I'll scroll through old ideas while songwriting to see if other cool ideas fit.
Step 2. Formalize using a combination of apps that depend on what I need to be specific about. Vibes? My DAW (Ableton or Reaper). Score? Musescore. Lyrics? Text editor + maybe recording a loop in my DAW.
Step 3. Usally by the end, I have a score .xml, lyrics .txt, and ableton live exports + stems.
I have been building my own app for this recently.
Its very early, but I have been shaping 3 songs with it already and am starting to get some friends to try it.
I am self taught with songwriting/music so I think it might reflect my own idiosyncratic songwriting process more than anything else at the moment.
Happy to open up a preview if anyone is interested though.
Shoot me an email if interested (in profile)
Hardware is better at this: notebook, pencil, baseball bat.
"AI art" is plagiarism and not an art at all.
I’m interested in the plagiarism perspective.
I feel like LLMs are not too dissimilar to humans. We listen to a lifetime of music, read text, watch videos, etc. and when we come to create something all of that influences what we produce.
Like if you’ve listened largely to western music, and you look for a note to complete a provided two-note sequence, your choice is informed by that listening history. A non-western trained person is likely to pick a different note. Similar analogies can be made for eg English phrases, or even topics for songs.
There’s clearly a boundary between influenced by and copied. Is it the same for generative AI as it is for humans?
Art is about the human experience of the artist reflected in the art. LLMs have no human experience. They just try to statistically trick you into thinking they made art through mass plagiarism of art. It's an illusion, and also rather boring/lame/uncool.
> baseball bat
Could you expand on this? How does a baseball bat help you in songwriting?
I went to a Slipknot concert back in 2022. They had a "junk set", a bunch of trashcans and kegs that they hit with aluminum bats. Not completely the same, but it did have a dissonant sound!
Sure. With rock & roll, the pencil is sometimes not large enough to rage against the machine properly and a heftier implement is necessary.
I was just asking a producer friend today about this — does anyone know of any tools that let you “clip” parts of songs with notes?
When I’m listening to music I’ll occasionally hear some element I really like and note it down via text for later
Eg “synth at 1:35, really cool — be great for a cyberpunk track”
I’d love to be able to hear these clips with one click (almost like Splice)
Considering building for myself if something doesn’t already exist
Allow me to plug a dictionary/thesaurus site I've been running for decades called OneLook (https://onelook.com). Although it's not specifically aimed at songwriters, it does attract many of them as users. Over the past thirty years, I've added all sorts of brainstorming features for creative writers—like the ability to search for words by description, to match words with a given meter, and more recently to discover which colors a word might evoke or vice versa.
(I’m also the creator of RhymeZone so I'll plug that too! I no longer operate it, but I can pass along any feature requests you might have to its new owners.)
I always like writing the first verse on paper, then typing it up and maybe writing the other verses/the chorus while trying to figure out the music at the same time... I usually just write lyrics in a very simple text editor.
I like Rhymezone too, and the MacOS dictionary's thesaurus, as they sometimes help me think of words I don't come up with otherwise. But I feel like with songs - the good stuff always comes when you let yourself listen to your unconscious, like all the really good material and images are buried in there somewhere and you just have to trick yourself into finding them.
nvim. No distractions. AI classifies as a distraction from expression (to me).
Write my verses in google keep, record, produce, mix, and master in Studio One
notes app and paper. ableton live for recording/running VSTs but for stuff that isn't MIDI based something like Reaper works really well.
GarageBand, voice memos
I only use the drummer as close to ai as it gets.
Um, software? Worst of all, AI? No, please no. I confess to have used an online rhyming dictionary now and then, but prefer to avoid even that.