About To Explode
About To Explode

About To Explode

And so it starts. I have published a concept album to Spotify, Apple Music Store and a host of other platforms. Its the first of 12 albums that are going to be out over the course of 2025, each one in a different genre. This one is pretty much symphonic metal, a style I love playing and listening to for its often complicated patterns and speed.

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Production

2025 is also the year of AI for me. I have a need to understand it deeply besides content creation, but the options available to content creators to produce content more easily can not be ignored. Text, ideas, visuals, music and video are now at the fingertips of those willing to prompt an AI in helping creating splash screens, ideas for a YouTube gaming video or background music for stream. As a programmer and musician the possiblities music generators like Suno.com promise are intruiging.

The question,”Can I produces 12 reasonably good albums in a year if I use AI ?”, can only be answered by doing it. It is also a learning path as I hone in on how to instruct Suno, possibly with the use of other AI’s to produce the soundscapes, instruments etc that I want to hear appear in the music coming out of Suno.

Producing ‘About To Explode’

The album can be found on Spotify, but you can also see the original Suno’s for each song at this playlist

I had already had a dose of experience making tunes with Suno. Simple songs where I let Suno make lyrics and tried to set a musical style to my taste. For this first album I did want to focus on a soundscape I like; “High Powered Symphonic Metal with Electronic Beeps”. If I had to name artists that describe that feel, I might go with a Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Pain kind of intensity.

Muddling my way to a soundscape

To get that intended sound out of suno I generated alot of stuff that wasn’t it. Less is more seemed to be a lesson, but i felt the need to want to cram in as much information as possible. Eventually, I found a combo for a music style description that seemed to generate that same feel I had in my head, and did it over and over again, most times.

Symphonic American Nu Metal, grunge, Electroneuro beats, melodic, double guitars, electronic pulses, synthesizers, pained male voice, emo

To illustrate this, here is a song based on the above, and the lyrics are “Setting an example! This is just a sample!” – It displays the grungy feel, heavy guitar riffs and the electronic beeps I am fond of, as well as synth layers.

Getting a story line and lyrics

The intention was to produce an album, that had a ‘logical’ musical structure from beginning to end of the album, split over a number of songs that would tell a (any) story. I settled on the story of a man having a nervous breakdown, and recovering. I decided to brainstorm this with an AI, and opened up ChatGPT. Here the AI had a conversation with me about the overall story arc, which turning points we should have, what the reason was for the nervous breakdown and which subject we could have as basis for each song.

There are a few songs on the album that have full lyrics. Most of these are the result of ChatGPT and I generating lyrics based on an idea from the story, then giving instructions on how to improve the lyrics and seeing a next version appear on the screen. Sometimes I would instruct to create longer sentences, other times to remove tropes that ChatGPT likes to generate (‘The sky is blue, I love you’ kind of stuff). More often tho, the instructions would refer to improving the sentiment in the text.

In parallel, I would sit and generate version after version of a set of lyrics and the musical instruction, that I was still trying to perfect. If you visit the playlist for this album on suno, and peek at the song descriptions, you will see a variety of musical style instructions being tested out.

This resulted in 19 pieces, of which eventually 12 end up on the album. I used getimg.ai to generate images for each song, and those are the cover images on the suno playlist for the album

In all, this album was relatively easy to make, tho time consuming. My biggest problem was finding the right instructions to give to Suno to get the sound I wanted. I have largely solved this issue at time of writing this, but I will get into that in the next post.

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