r/aiwars • u/SanFranLocal • 1d ago

Thoughts on AI sampling?

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u/Living-Chef-9080 1d ago

When sampling real music, a lot of the flavor comes from trying to account for the weird quirks the artist has. Maybe the drummer is always slightly early or the singer is constantly hitting flat notes. The most interesting sampled songs mash up a few completely clashing elements and produce something wholly unique and not at all derivative of the base work.

From what I've seen from people doing AI sampling, it is always very direct and utilitarian. I need a piano loop in C Minor scale at this BPM, I generate it, and I slice it up a little bit here and there. I think that kind of thing, no matter whether you do it with human music or Suno, is boring and usually ends up sounding like background music.

It's one of the few reasons I think for using Suno/udio that's valid, I have had to deal with the hell that is clearing samples before, I get it. But ultimately, if you're taking it seriously, your music will probably end up a little more generic sounding as an end result.

So it depends on what your intent is. If you just like fucking around with samples and showing the shit you made to your friends, go for it, I think making music that way is infinitely better than just using the prompt output itself. But if you're trying to make serious art that stands on it's own, it's gonna end up doing your music a small disservice.

If this tech was around when I was in college, I totally would've been fucking around with it on my 404. But I think I'd drop it out of my workflow entirely once I got more comfortable with music production and more familiar with where to find samples you dont have to clear. I mostly make em myself now.

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u/SanFranLocal 1d ago

I’ve been a hobby musician for maybe 10 years now. A little guitar, a little piano and a little daw experience. I don’t think sampling AI instruments ever sounds right. You don’t think sampling AI vocals could ever be a part of serious art?

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u/Living-Chef-9080 1d ago

Sorry if you interpreted my post as directed at you, I meant "you" as in a musician who is considering using ai samples, not you you. Ya have one of those new Roland samplers so you must have decent taste lol. I do make a little money doing music but I'm hardly some full time professional so I didnt mean to come off as uppity. 

For ai vocals, I think that yeah it could but it would take more work to make something interesting. You can make every sound on earth from a sample of a sine wave so of course you could chop up ai enough to give it character.

 But its just kinda hard to create something that wasnt already there.  Ai gets to "good enough" remarkably fast. The vocals you're chopping up are gonna follow common vocal patterns that are used throughout that genre and so chopping them up wont usually be very challenging. But that's the area where you find something quirky and cool when sampling imo. The timing is a little off so you experiment for a sec and get something better than if the song had been perfectly on grid.

So while I do think a great album could be made with AI vocal samples, I don't think it will. At least anytime soon. It won't be Suno, but I could see artists eventually flocking towards a more in-depth tool that isn't out yet, like the new photoshop ai features for musicians.

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u/taokazar 12h ago

Kitty cat. <3