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. |
I learned this workflow from my mother, who is a singer-songwriter, and literally every songwriter in history, though most of them probably used notebooks instead of Keep, as I did until a few years ago. I've been using this workflow for does math 33 years now, since I was a teenager.
I think I've probably used rhyming dictionaries two or three times in that time. I would no more use any form of AI to write lyrics than I would build a robot to exercise for me. It would completely and totally miss the point of songwriting for me, which isn't producing "content" - it's a self-expressive art form.
If you find yourself wanting more than a pen and paper or a notes app for songwriting, I respectfully suggest - as someone who's been writing, performing and recording songs for the aforementioned 30+ years as well as growing up the child of a professional songwriter and also being myself a paid music critic and journalist for many years - you might not be understanding the assignment.
The most important tool you have as a songwriter - or any writer - is your ears. Listen to music. Listen to songwriters who are very good at it - there's this cat named Bob Dylan who's got a bit of a reputation for that, or Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell or Nick Cave or Paul Simon or Jason Isbell. Listen to what they do and figure out what they're doing.
And unless you're a born storyteller, you often need to have an interesting life to write interesting songs about. I suggest falling in love with lots of people and travelling and paying attention when you're doing these things, not just to how you feel but everything around you. Pay attention to people and write about them.
An example lyric: I rang the New Year in / In a field out in the suburbs / Somewhere outside East Berlin / I watched the fireworks burn the night / And I wondered where you were / And if you were alright
See, that lyric exists because I actually spent New Year's Eve in a field outside Berlin. Go do that. Or get good at convincing people you have.
This isn't about software, but all the software on earth won't help you if you can't write a good song with a pen and paper. It's not enterprise software, it's not labor intensive, one person can do it sitting in a diner with a college ruled notebook and, indeed, many of the best songs have been written that way.
Or you can let an AI write it for you and dink around with the settings and call yourself a songwriter, but regardless of what you or the world tell you, you won't be. You'll actually be doing less work than most celebrity record producers and what comes out will be soulless product.
If that's what you want, great, I guess, but you certainly don't need anyone's help to make shite pseudoart. People are filling the world with it right now.
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.
It depends.
Is the puzzle a modern commercial jigsaw puzzle? Of course I wouldn't use it.
Is the puzzle a unique ancient Sumerian tablet that was just accidentally shattered and in pieces on the ground, but I need the information on it immediately? Absolutely.
I’m not using RhymeZone less and less because RhymeZone could be better at what it does. I’m using RhymeZone less and less because the problem that RhymeZone solves is becoming less and less relevant to my process.
- 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...
What I want is to be able to write lyrics as easily as plaintext, but with manually assignment of meter, rhythm etc, while also being able to "fork" lyrics at a point and be able to work on different threads, keep track of alternative lyrics on a phrase level too. Being able to sync that up with some basic music notation (e.g. keys and percussion) would get me 90% of the way to where I want to be when it comes to writing at the computer. I think I have a coherent design for such a software in my head but am unsure if it really is what I need or is just a whimsical distraction from not writing good enough lyrics yet. Would be interested to hear if anyone's seen anything like this (can't say I've exhaustively looked).
This is fine for 1-2 alternate versions of a given line, but would get clunky beyond that. I imagine if I wanted to fork a song further than just a few alternate lines, I could insert a 2-column table and continue the song in each column.
It's rudimentary, but if you're worried that making your own software for it is just a form of advanced procrastination, something like Docs might be more manageable than Keep.
made me think of how sometimes i use ide "code folding" features to see just the first lines of a series of easily collapsable lists of text blocks
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)
Create projects Projects can contain notes and audio (uploaded or recorded in browser) Then theres an AI chat in the project where the docs/audio are available as context (multimodal models used)
Its definitely very early; AI and UX need a lot of work. But definitely has helped me get over some “humps” with writing songs.
For extra context: I write songs with acoustic guitar and vocals, but I would say they are pretty simple overall.
"AI art" is plagiarism and not an art at all.
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?
You can do it, sure. But you'll probably also start to wonder why nobody really wants to listen to it, and you can count me out before I do.
Could you expand on this? How does a baseball bat help you in songwriting?
(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.)
Also OP might like https://www.onelook.com/spruce/
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
You could use AI generated music this way, generate some songs and sample snippets or find interesting rhythms.
One of the biggest dangers of software solutions is that everything is so easy that it's super easy to just start playing with things that don't matter instead of actually working on the music itself. Sometimes keeping the tools simple helps keep the focus on the real work.
Sometimes less is more.
I used to find Hooktheory was good for this. It can suggest chords and explore popular chord progressions. You can also export melodies of popular songs which can be useful for creating your own that are structurally similar. I used to create something I'd like the vibe of there, then export it to MIDI and into Ableton to build on it.
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.
Generally to produce music you need to use a DAW. Ableton, Logic Pro etc. What sucks is you can't easily just assign a lyric to a note. Like it's just not a feature they provide.
It's something you can do in MuseScore because it uses traditional notation, but it would be great to be able to do it in something like Ableton.
https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/add-lyrics-to-a-sco...
That said, it’s not one of the strengths of Logic to use it this way.
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 only use the drummer as close to ai as it gets.
for words: rhymezone, roget, oed, b-rhymes, fun python dictionary things :~)
I am however interested in the claim of plagiarism and how what generative AI does is different to what humans do. It’s not clear to me how it’s different.
Will it fill up 60mins for one album? Yes. Will you sell out the MSG when your audience finds out that it was all ChatGPT (or some other LLM)? No. Never.
Another metaphor/analogy is like the Friends episode "The One With Phoebe's Cookies" where the magic disappears because the 'grandma's cookies' end up being Nestle cookies. And the magic is gone, and your audience will be gone.
Good for you. Enjoy your AI generated art. By yourself. You've missed the whole point of art.