Did I Write This Song?
Songwriting, loops, AI music, Taylor Swift, Vanilla Ice, TikTok, and other music stuff
I love songwriting. I like to call it magic. Real magic. Not the illusions that “magicians” use to impress their audiences. Great songs seem to appear out of nowhere—like magic. Paul McCartney woke up with the melody to Yesterday. Most great songwriters can’t fully explain how they write songs.
In my own experience, when I pick up a guitar and start playing without thinking, often something I have never played before comes out. How? I don’t know. Those flashes of inspiration can turn into songs. Or I play a chord progression, and a lyric phrase that fits comes to me out of nowhere. Those phrases are usually ideas for a song. It seems magical to me.
Then, the craft part begins (a whole other article). But the idea, the inspiration, and the initial music appearance are mysteries. Where do they come from?
TikTok
I livestream on TikTok most weeks. Regardless of your opinion of TikTok, if you are a musician, it is a great way to get your music heard. I post my original music on all the music services, but it is just a drop in an ocean of music. If you are not famous, your odds of getting heard are minuscule.
But you can quickly build a fan base on TikTok. My band, American Garage Band, has built a following of 75k in roughly two years. That would never have happened playing local venues. The three of us all write songs, and now, because of TikTok, people regularly request our original music during our livestreams.
My own TikTok page has over 3000 followers—not bad for a guy who only started singing (poorly) in his 60s and rarely posts videos.
Yes, that was a long buildup to the title topic, but here we go.
Fun With Loops
About two years ago, I switched to Logic Pro as my DAW (digital audio workstation—recording software.) It includes Apple Loops, which are MIDI and audio loops that you can use royalty-free in your music productions. Think of Vanilla Ice stealing; I mean “sampling” the bassline from Queen’s Under Pressure and using it in Ice Ice Baby. That bass part is a loop. It plays over and over. Apple loops are short instrumental parts that seamlessly loop.
I sometimes improvise over a backing track loop when I livestream, so I thought I would try making a backing track using the loops in Logic. I found a couple of disco loops that I thought were cool, so I added them to my backing track. I kept adding more loops and had so much fun that I ended up with around 35 different loops. It was no longer usable as a backing track; it was more of a song on its own, so I basically abandoned it for two years.
But recently, I thought I should finish it and release it. So I added a short rhythm guitar part, a simple lead synth melody, and spoke the song’s title three times.
When I was thinking of names for the song, Disco Here popped into my head, which naturally led to Datgo There. I liked the humor in it, so it stuck.
Here is the finished song:
Hmm?
Since the song is 90% loops, did I write the song? I arranged the loops in a specific order, which would be considered arranging, but I didn’t write or record them. The parts I added would hardly stand on their own as a song. Although, technically, all you need to copyright a song is a chord progression and a unique melody. So, I guess my little rhythm part and synth line count. I decided not to worry about whether I wrote it or not. I thought it was fun enough to release, so I did.
AI Music
Speaking of using loops to create music, like everything else, AI is invading music. AI can already make music. Some of it is scary in how close it sounds to real human-made music. And how catchy it is. A casual listener would probably not know it is AI-generated. How can software create something that is magic? Obviously, AI-generated music is a software-produced imitation of human-made music. It uses software code to produce music, not heart, mind, or soul. But it will eventually eliminate as many musician jobs as AI has eliminated illustration, photography, writing, and other creative jobs.
And, of course, people will always use technology to game the system. While Taylor Swift is the most streamed musician in the world, according to an interview I saw with Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, a man named Johan Röhr (one of his 656 different aliases) has 15 billion streams on Spotify. He is on 144 official Spotify playlists. He posts the same music repeatedly using different titles and artist accounts. Is the music AI generated? Who knows? It is possible.
Logic Pro now has AI-based virtual instruments (currently drums, keyboards, and bass) that will create music for you if you enter chord changes. The results are not great, but the direction is clear. Allow non-musicians to make music. No learning music, no years of practice, just type in some chords (and probably lyrics, eventually), and out pops a fully produced hit song.
Currently, Taylor Swift has to hire famous music producers to create the catchy backing music she writes her lyrics to. Soon, she might not need to. Logic or some other software will be able to do it for her. Watch out, famous music producers, AI is coming for you!
Real Music
I don’t know how Apple produced the loops it includes in Garage Band and Logic Pro. Someone at Apple probably knows. I do know most of them were around years before AI was common. I imagine Apple paid musicians to create the loops. But they will probably never get credit for their work.
Disco Here Datgo There was a fun experiment, but I would rather produce less polished music I wrote and played myself than put my name on software-generated music.
These are strange times we live in.
Thanks for reading and responding. You make it fun.
Mark
The disco song popped up on Spotify this morning. I like it!
Love it Mark,it’s a great song to clean your house to if you’re moving things around😁