YouTube: youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/5zTrn3...

Less than 12 hours until Pride launches everywhere! 🏳️‍🌈💖😁🫶🏳️‍🌈

This miiiiight be the art I go with, I think?

And as my twin bro can attest, the next step when I think I have something I'm proud of, that's "good enough", is to link it to him to rate. If he loves it, I'm shipping it, and if he doesn't, I might still ship it 😂

And thanks to him, our tracks Drown In The Now and Tara's Tarot have real lyrics!

So as far as Suno is concerned at creation, these vocals are "instruments", and thus it's just probabilistically throwing consonants, vowels, and inflections at them as though they're acoustic features of the instrument, kinda like the sliding sounds from changing fingerings on guitar strings.

But also I use Suno as a tool to do something fairly unique to GenAI: the lyrical gibberish in my tracks comes from the guidance to make an "instrumental" track (binary setting in Suno) combined with prompting that includes a lot of things like "((fe)male) vocalist" or lyrics-heavy genres.

The key to the novelty and authenticity I have in my creative relationship with Suno is that it doesn't know what I think is "good": I have to try to communicate that, but then I find the parts it makes that I think ARE good and I feed that back into Suno to iterate further upon.

But I'd absolutely be lying if I didn't acknowledge just how much Suno does for me: every second of music can contain dozens of decisions, decisions Suno makes for me based on a relatively small amount of prompting and configuring three parameters (temperature, prompt weight, sample audio weight)

And that's really all there is to my production process: it takes an hour to curate a songburst, and we're talking about hours upon hours upon hours of JUST curating if I use all 10k of my Premier-tier credits, so it's still a LOT of work, to consciously focus on & evaluate each track.

But then Suno v4.5 started allowing for 1000 characters in prompts. So rather than try to compose entire new prompts at that size, I started combining my existing 200-character prompts in combinations of 2-5. VYMBR is pretty much just tracks made with some subset of those prompts in that order.

Producing can be just "ship it: this came out baked enough I'm not gonna fuss with it more because I'll lose too much magic in the process", or I pick out a larger SEED and cover that to keep more of the track the same, or I lock in the beginning part(s) and only work with (re)extending the track.

While I stumbled around for a bit, my production process is largely just a combination of:
1. Create a SEED: find a section of about 10-30 seconds that I find inspiring from something I already have
2. Songburst: Generate 20-30 covers of that SEED
3. Curate: Create more SEEDs, ID tracks to produce!

Because Suno v4 only allowed for 200-character prompts, I generated 10 prompts I classified with single characters (RYGCBMWKVF) and tried a few variations of them (oG vs nG) to tune them to things that were generating things I liked/found inspiring.

I completely ignore the Lyrics/Vocal engine, and my prompting is mostly just a combination of three classes of things:
1. Instruments and types of sounds (harps, chanting, harmonies)
2. Entire genres and musical mechanics (punk emo, call & response)
3. Emotions and themes (bravery, boss fight)

Plus you can't tell me those Simlish covers from The Sims don't slap, and Prisencolinensinainciusol definitely proved Adriano Celentano's point, so why not lean into it in my own music, and enjoy this incredibly fun byproduct of the particular way Suno generates music?

Lyrics have never been a crucial part of music for me, in that when you grow up listening to a lot of Eurobeat and JPop with only 1-2 years of Japanese under your belt, you enjoy the sounds of the words more than what they mean; besides, it's fun to fill things in with what you think they mean!

I've been a dancer my whole life, but my ability to create and share and innovate in that space has always been limited by my access to suitable music I knew I could freely use in the ways I needed to produce the things I wanted (eg instruction videos for choreography)

Suno lets me make that music!

VYMBR out now!

open.spotify.com/album/4WtNty...

The tracks are spread into three acts: 1-11, 12-24, 25-35. If you dare to give it a listen, I hope you'll let me know if you find anything you like! 🫶