What A Hit Songwriter Actually Does With Suno AI

[music] >> Hello and welcome to another video from Hit Songwriter Meet AI. You're very welcome. In this episode, what we're going to try and do is explain to you my writing technique as it was and my writing technique now.

Now, this is not a writing tutorial by any stretch of the imagination, but it's more about how I've applied my old writing technique and skills and then brought Suno into the room, into the discussion as another writer or producer or musician in the room with me. So, to explain how traditionally I would write a song, um, bit about me, I'm a guitar player by nature, been doing that a long time. I'm a vocalist, which is quite lucky to have as a skill, and a bit of a keyboard player.

I wouldn't call myself a keyboard player, but I I know enough to get my way around a keyboard to be able to talk to a digital audio workstation like Logic. I was lucky to always work with amazing keyboard players, but I can get stuff in and out, so that's kind of where we are with my musicianship, if you like. So, for me, and this is only the way I write songs, is I would always start with a great title.

It's just the way I like to begin. It then gives me a kind of format to go forward. Start with a great title and then maybe come up with an interesting chord sequence on the guitar or on the keyboard, and maybe a hook or a chorus line had come into my head, which I'd, you know, sing into a dictaphone.

And then almost write the song and make the production of the demo at the same time. Now, that's the way I've always worked because we would have to produce the demo to such a high standard that if you left it right till the end, then it ended up being an incredibly long process. So, while I was kind of getting on, concentrating on melody and lyrics, my partner, who was the programmer and keyboard player, would get on with the demo and we'd collaborate on both things and end up with what was a great song, hopefully, and then a great demo.

But that was like a, you know, a 3-day process from beginning with nothing on a blank sheet of paper to a demo that we could then happily send off to a label or a publisher or an artist or an artist manager. So, we were simultaneously making the demo alongside writing the song. That's the way I like to work.

So, now having Suno as the extra person in the room means that I can use Suno as that other creative person for production help and the odd songwriting idea help, maybe. But let's be incredibly clear about this. Very important.

I'm not remotely interested in getting Suno or any other AI generation program to write songs for me, okay? I write the melody, I write the lyrics, I write the chord, either on my own or with other human beings. That's what I do.

It's not going to be taken away by AI anytime soon. In fact, I'd be no more interested to to press a button and have Suno write me a lyric and a melody than I would to press a button and get Suno to write, I don't know, the eulogy for my own funeral. It's not going to happen.

Human beings need to be involved, right? But I would be more than happy to let AI of some description help me with the odd idea or maybe a spelling mistake or a whatever if I was doing my eulogy or a the odd the odd melody change or chord change if I'm using Suno musically. So, in other words, the songwriting process for me will always be led by human and assisted now by AI.

That's my new methodology of using it. And so, what we're going to do here in this video is take a very basic chord idea that I had one day and run it through Suno, and we're going to do the process from chord idea to finished demo with lyric, melody, and production. The process that I used to do, which took 3 days, right?

Sometimes even 4 days. And we're going to see how quickly we can progress that using AI to help us, not to take over. So, we're going to start in Logic.

I kind of flick between Logic and Pro Tools as workstations. I Pro Tools is my my main weapon of choice. I've used it for a long, long, long time.

But for music these days, you can't really beat Logic Pro, so that's where we'll start. We'll hop into Logic and we'll see you there. Okay, so what we are looking at here is a very simple Logic session.

In fact, there's one MIDI part. I mentioned I'm a guitar player, but in this particular case, I didn't pick up the guitar. I happened to be playing around with the keyboard and came up with what I thought sounded like quite an interesting chord sequence with a guitar sound in in Logic.

So, it's basically a contact instrument which sounds like an acoustic guitar. So, this is what I came up with. Let's have a quick listen to the rough idea.

>> [music] >> So, a kind of plucked guitar intro as if you were picking it. And we're going to use the same chord sequence for the verse, which comes in here. Very simple.

And then we switch from here into a slightly more strum sound for the pre-chorus. [music] >> [music] >> And then in we go to the chorus. >> [music] >> And that's our chorus and then back to the intro.

So, you get the idea, a very rough idea, and I had an idea in my head when I was putting that together that the song would be called Empty Rooms. And so, a little later on, we'll show how we incorporate lyrics and a melody idea into Suno. So, what I do is I bounce that out.

For those who don't know what that means, basically, I end up with an audio track like that. So, we get just that guitar part and I end up with that in Suno. So, let's move from Logic to Suno and see where it takes us.

So, let's just move now. Okay, so here we are in a blank page in Suno. And what we're going to do here, this is not a Suno lesson, by the way.

We're going to do a lot more specific tutorials about Suno when we do our online courses, which you're all be welcome to attend. Go and look at the website and you can register at the bottom of the home page there, hitsongwritermeetai. com.

So, we're going to add the audio that we just did to Suno. So, we're going to hit plus audio. That means add some audio.

We're going to hit upload and we're going to go to our guitar rough idea and upload that into Suno. You'll see it says there uploading the clip. So, we end up with our guitar part in Suno.

And then what I want to do is to flesh that production out a little bit before I kind of decide on the actual specific melody of the song. It's really useful to have that inside Suno. So, we've added the audio to Suno.

And what we're going to do is we're going to cover it. So, here up here you'll see it says guitar idea rough. That's exactly correct.

And we're going to say to Suno we want to make a cover version, basically, of this. So, here's our guitar idea. Right, so that's what you heard already back in Logic.

It's come up with what it thinks is going on, and for the moment, I'm going to just leave that for now. All we want is an instrumental right now. And here it's had a guess in the styles what kind of arrangement that was.

So, this is what it thinks I already had, which is quite impressive from one acoustic guitar part there. We're going to kill this and I'm going to add a prompt. Now, a prompt for artificial intelligence is where you basically tell it how you want to treat the thing you're talking about.

So, in other words, I've got my rough guitar idea here and I want you to make a cover version out of it in a new style, okay? So, I'm going to put a prompt in that I have generated earlier. Now, the way I generate these prompts is using an app that I'm developing, and that again is something I'll be showing you how to do when we do our online courses.

But for now, I'm going to just paste it into here, into the styles box. And what that basically says is an early 2010s track, 4/4 pop, dance pop, influenced by pop country, country pop, synth pop, indie folk, glittery synth, bright electric guitars, synth bass, punchy drums, claps, hand percussion. Okay, so that's our kind of basic prompt, and we're going to generate an instrumental, as it says here.

We're going to leave these things in here just for now, just to just just for the purposes of this. And we're saying to Suno, what we'd like to do is take this rough guitar idea and turn it into this new prompt. So, in other words, do me a quick production.

So, this is going to be idea one, we'll call this. So, guitar idea version one. Okay, and then we'll these sliders will go through and explain as as we we get more and more involved into the specifics of Suno, but just for now, let me just move these around so that it doesn't get too weird and it sticks pretty much to what I want it to in terms of the style and the chords and melody.

We won't go too far into this. It's it's a bit of a black magic art until you learn it, but just take it from me, we don't want it to be too weird. We want it to follow our style prompt and we want it to stick to our guitar part chords as much as we can.

We hit create. And then Suno will generate two versions. It always generates two versions of our guitar idea up here.

So, you'll see it's doing that now. And what it should do is give us a fairly well produced version which uses that prompt, okay? There's the prompt.

You can see it popping up on the screen there. And I'm just going to let it do that. It's nearly ready to go, in fact.

It's quite a short guitar part. And we should, fingers crossed, he said theoretically, have what sounds like a pretty punchy, well produced version of that little part I gave it. Here's the original just to remind you.

[music] Okay, then gets the the middle and the chorus. That's what we started with. It sometimes gets a bit grumpy if you play it before it's finished.

That little circle there means that it's still working on it. It will play, but I found that it's actually best to wait till it's completely finished its job before you hit play. Believe me, compared to having session musicians in the studio and producing a track up, this is no time at all.

So, probably from pressing that button to finish track, depending it depends on a lot of things, depends on the length of the track, depends on the server load on the day, but you're talking about a couple of minutes at maximum. So, there we are, 2 minutes 08 has generated a track. Let's have a listen.

Nice. You [music] can see what's happened. It's kept the chords, kept the spirit, >> [music] >> and produced it beautifully.

Lovely. >> [music] >> Pre-chorus. Bit of a [music] weirdness there with the the minor.

Got it right that time. >> [music] >> Pretty good. That's pretty good.

And in fact, I've noticed that I don't know if you heard that there was some vocals in there. That's because in my prompt, I've left in the word vocals. So, it's added a kind of ooh in the chorus there.

So, we'll maybe redo that with the the vocal thing left out. That's that's for for later on. I'll just kill that now, in fact.

So, we've given us two versions. Quick, listen to the second one. >> [music] >> And as you can hear, that's a great demo for us to sing against [music] and nail the melody and the lyric.

>> [music] [music] >> Got the chords right that time. [music] And into [music] the chorus. Lovely.

>> [music] >> Beautiful. >> [music] >> That's lovely. So, now we've got a rough demo and we can now export that demo and use it back in Logic to sing to.

So, we can download it. Over here, you'll see you can download as an MP3 or a WAV. I will download it as a WAV audio, which is better quality.

So, we're going to do a couple more generations of that. I'm not going to make you sit through them all and put the best one of those back into Logic and we'll see you back in Logic. So, here we are back in Logic and we've picked the best version of the track that we produced in Suno, the rough version of our guitar track.

And let's just play a bit of that for you. So, we've got a lovely track to sing against now and work out nail the melody and then work on the lyrics. The reason I'm doing this, we could quite simply use the original guitar part, but it's nice to have something more fleshed out in terms of production.

It makes it easier to to sing against. It makes it makes the whole thing just just sound better rather than just, you know, a rubbish guitar part which I played on a keyboard and trying to work out the melody against that. I'm quite happy with the chords.

I don't need to change the chords, so that's okay. So, I've got a melody in my head which I came up with when I was actually writing that guitar part. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to hum that melody without words into Logic and we're going to put that back in Suno.

Why would I do that? Well, occasionally Suno will interpret things slightly differently in terms of notes than the human did. And you can actually fiddle with the sliders in Suno.

We'll come to that at a later lesson, basically, but you can ask it to be a little more free with its expression. And occasionally it comes up with the odd line that's really quite cool. So, I quite like to go through this step.

It doesn't take long once you've got used to doing it. So, we're going to sing without words the melody that I think is pretty cool for this song. So, let's give that a go.

>> [music] [singing] [singing and music] [singing] [music] [music] [music and singing] [music] [music] >> That's kind of where I was with it. The chorus, I think I I think it's kind of the empty rooms bit would go here. So, let's drop in.

>> [music] [music and singing] [music] [singing] >> And I think that should be higher by an octave. So, but that's kind of hard to sing. I won't I won't put you through me trying to reach those notes which are in the dog scale.

So, I'm going to bounce this back out again now once I'm happy with the part and we're going to put that back into Suno. So, you can hear here we've got a a very rough vocal with no words, but we've got the track, which is important. Okay, so we'll see you back in Suno.

So, here we are back in Suno. We're going to upload the rough hummed vocal that we had there. Let's go upload.

Hummed vocal, there it is. We'll upload that clip. It'll try and work out the lyrics.

Of course, there were none. They were da da da da and all the rest of it. So, let's see what Suno comes up with.

It will it will say, I found some some lyrics. Do you want to keep these or not? And we will, actually.

Let's keep the lyrics. So, there's what it thinks are the lyrics. Ba da da da da da da da da da and it's called it MG rooms over here, which is interesting.

So, we're going to cover this as we did before. Going to cover our song. It'll put those lyrics over here.

I'm just going to change that to empty rooms, which you know is correct. Empty rooms, which you know is correct. Okay.

And now it's changed the brief here a little, so we don't want that. We're going to put our original prompt back in there. And we're going to just check that these options are all set.

So, down low with that one. Up high with that one. And up high with that one.

So, I'm just fascinated to know what Suno does now. It's an experimentation thing really, what it comes up with. So, we're going to This one's called hummed vocal.

So, it's going to make two versions of this. Let's see what it does. So, here we are.

First one has appeared. Let's have a listen. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Nice.

>> [music] [music] >> That's nice. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Interesting. Went a bit mad at the end there.

What about this one? >> [music] [music] >> Love the harmonies. >> [music] >> That's working.

>> [music] [music] >> Nice. >> [music] >> Something I did at the end there it doesn't like very much, but that's fascinating. So, you can hear that the point about this is if you're not a singer, okay, I'm quite lucky in that I can sing a little bit, right?

So, what I did wasn't that bad to start with. I can probably make do without this particular step to be honest. But if you're not a singer, if you can hum the approximate tune into Logic or whatever you use and get it back into Suno, it will then re-sing that for you, which is what it's done there with my nonsense lyrics.

And so, that now sounds like it's getting to be a song. You see where I'm going with this? It's like having somebody in the room who can sing, which you may not have had before, and can also come up with a couple of weird ideas that because you weren't a singer, you would never have sung.

So, it's like having a second or third person in the room to give you a singing voice, which you maybe didn't have, and to give you some some more melodic ideas. If you're a singer, fiddly bits, I probably wouldn't use that step all the time. There are other prompts, in other words, these things here in Suno, you can tell it there's some clever tricks you can do with Suno that if you've absolutely no idea what the melody might be, you can get Suno to suggest stuff.

I'm not too keen on that as a concept. I I don't mind doing it as a as a little bit of an exercise to see what it comes up with, but I don't want it to write the song for me, right? That's just Suno writing the song.

I'm a songwriter. I'd quite like to write the melody, thank you very much. But I quite like to hear, you know, somebody else's ideas in the room, if you like.

And that again is how songwriting collaboration always did work in the old days. You would have more than one person in the room. These days, of course, it's like a million people in the room.

Back in my day, it was like two or three. But other people would come up with ideas. Well, it's great to have that ability now if you're working on your own at home on your computer.

All of this is possible in Suno. So, we started with a basic guitar track. We've started producing that guitar track into something which sounds amazing, I think, now.

That sounds great given our brief. We've got a a melody which we're reasonably happy with. We've got a title.

All I need to do now is go away and have a listen to all of those and nail the words. Once I've nailed those words, I can then go back into Logic and we can get me to sing those words back into Logic, and then get Suno to finish the version for us. So, let's go back into Logic, do a proper vocal with the nailed melody that I'm happy with, and then go from there.

See you back in Logic. Okay, here we are back in Logic. We have our track as we've been hearing, this one here.

[music] And what I've now done, I haven't bored you with watching me go over and over again with these vocals, is I've nailed the lyrics, and I have worked on the melody, and I've put a fairly decent guide vocal into Logic here. So, this is me singing against our Suno generated track, and we're going to take this in a moment and put it back into Suno to get it re-sung. Okay?

So, here's my vocal. >> [music] [singing] [music and singing] [music] [music and singing] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> There we go. Hope you like it.

So, that sounds pretty good to me. I'm happy with the lyric. I'm happy with the melody.

It's a bit high for me to sing. It's not the greatest vocal in the world, but it's good enough. But what I want to do is I want to hear what Suno makes of that.

So, we're going to bounce this back out again now, and put it back into Suno, and ask it to reinterpret the vocal. This is the part I love doing because what it tends to do is add a bunch of harmonies, some really interesting ad-libs. Let's see what Suno makes of this.

We'll bounce it out, and I'll see you back in Suno. So, here we are once again back in Suno. We're going to get rid of what we had before, and we're going to upload our new vocal.

We're going to kill these lyrics as well, because they're nonsense now. It'll try and work out the lyrics from the audio we upload. So, let's upload some here.

And good vocal is the one that we're now happy with. So, let's upload that into Suno and see what it does. Okay, so it's appeared now.

Good vocal, here it is at the top. And here is what it thinks the words are. I'm going to make sure that these are the words that I want.

So, we're going to go through and and and delete these. So, the way I'm going to do that is go to here. I'm going to go to song details, edit the displayed lyrics, and I'm going to get rid of all of this stuff, and paste my actual lyric in there.

That means Suno will now follow what I wanted it to. So, there's our verses, there's our pre-chorus, and there's our chorus. Okay?

So, we're going to save that. So, we now have our good vocal with our accurate lyrics. So, all I now have to do is put this back into here and recover it.

You already have a style. Do you want to overwrite the style? No, I want to keep what we were working with before.

So, that's our style. There's our lyric. Here's the vocal I just did.

>> [music] [singing] >> Right, so what we're doing now is we're getting Suno to cover this with my singing, with the similar prompt to what we had before, and we're going to make sure that these are set about here. I want the style to match this. I want the audio to be quite close.

I don't want it to wander off too much, and I'm not too much weirdness. So, let's see what Suno comes up with. Hit create and it will come up with two.

Change the title of that is and we'll call this one Suno vocal. Okay. So, let's wait for these to generate and we can have a listen to what happens.

And what I'm hoping is going to happen here is it's going to um produce the track with a good vocal, hopefully add some backing vocals, and it may change the odd note here and there, which is quite cool. Um but it should keep my words and it should stick fairly close to my melody. Although, it has to be said, in the new version 5.

5, which is the brand new Suno, it's not doing that as accurately as it used to do. That's something that I think they'll need to work on. It's kind of straying a little bit from the melody occasionally, but not too bad.

Anyway, they're ready. So, let's have a listen to what it came up with. >> [music] >> Nice.

>> [music] [music] >> Good singing. Love it. >> [music] [music] >> Beautiful.

[music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Well, there's not much wrong with that. That sounds fabulous, actually. It's kept my melody pretty much, did a couple of nice bits of uh of vocal interpretation there, kept the melody as I wanted it, kept the lyric exactly as I asked it to, and sang a blinder, frankly.

Let's listen to the second one. >> [music] [music] [music] [singing] >> Like it. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Love it.

So, it's come up with two great versions there. Uh normally, you have to give it four or five goes before you get what you really want. I'm going to have a play with this now and generate a few more just to see what it comes up with.

And when we come back, we should have the finished demo that uh I'm happy with and that we can go forward with. So, see you in just a moment. So, we're back in Logic as we come to the conclusion of this little demo of using Suno for real songwriting ideas.

Uh you may remember I mentioned earlier on that you could get Suno to generate um a kind of um almost uh a made-up nonsense words and melody. Uh we'll be uh detailing exactly how you do that kind of thing in our course, which I'd love you to go and uh express an interest in on our website, hitsongwritermeetsai. com.

The web address is on the screen right now. At the bottom of the front page, you'll see there where you can express an interest in our courses. We'll be teaching you to do much more advanced Suno techniques like this one.

So, for example, I told Suno to come up with complete gobbledygook lyrics and just make up nonsense, but come up with some good melodic ideas. And this is the kind of thing you can do if you prompt it correctly. >> [music] [music] >> See, that's nonsense.

>> [music] [music] >> So, it's making up stuff which which is fascinating. It's like somebody else in the room, as I mentioned earlier on, and you're just basically saying to them, "Have you got any ideas? " You know, and you don't have to use those ideas, but it's always nice to have other things thrown at you.

And as we always keep saying on this channel, it's human-led, AI-assisted. This is no different to the way I used to write songs, where other people would come up with stuff and we would make a collective decision what was the best melody, the best lyric, uh the best titles. That's collaboration.

>> [clears throat] >> But we are in charge of this collaboration now, and that's absolutely a brilliant place to be. So, if you're a real songwriter who writes real melodies and real lyrics, but just needs a bit of help with the production, bit of help with a couple of suggestions maybe here or there, it's you that makes the final decision. And the arbiter of a great songwriter, in my view, is somebody who's able to make the best decisions.

Not everybody can. That's something that you learn. Maybe you're born a bit with it, but it's certainly something you learn to be good at.

And hopefully, um in the past, that's something that I proved myself with four number ones and a Nine No Never Award to be quite good at coming up with these things time and time again. So, it just gives you options, and that's really how we should be using this as a songwriting tool. So, what did we end up with?

Well, let's finish off by playing you the final track uh that I decided. It's not a finished song. Um we didn't write endless verses and we didn't do a middle or anything like that.

But let's listen to what Suno finally gave us while working with us with our melody. Remember that. It was our melody, it was our chord sequence, and it was our lyric.

This is what we started with. Do you remember that? Simple as that.

Just that guitar part. And then [music] this little section here. And then the little chorus [music] section.

That's where we began this whole journey. I had a title, it was called Empty Rooms. I had a really quite good idea of the kind of melodic ideas that I wanted.

And once we got a got this kind of nailed, I worked out a lyric that I was happy with. So, it's our lyric, our melody, our chord sequence, and some help from the production side with Suno. What a great place to be.

What exciting times we live in. If you've enjoyed this, then please do subscribe to the channel. Let's listen to what we ended up with.

>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Well, I hope you enjoyed that, and I hope you like the song. I'm very, very happy with that. And it gave you a little bit of an insight into how we [music] can use Suno to make our workflow better as real songwriters.

Don't forget to subscribe, hitsongwritermeetsai. com. Human-led, AI-assisted.

See you next time. >> [music] [music] >> Mhm.