Okay, so generative AI is this great gaping black hole at the edge of our pop-cultural universe and we’re just waiting for it to swallow us whole, taking down the creative industries, music, film, art, white-collar jobs and whatever else it can fit into its great digital maw. But there has to be something good about it, right?
And by something good we mean something good beyond helping to plan a dinner party menu with seasonal ingredients and calendar scheduling.
How about something for guitar players to get excited about? Maybe it could transcribe our favourite songs, delivering 100 per cent accurate tabs. That could be a valuable learning resource.
Well, it might do, but we are not there yet, as Mike G. of the online guitar lessons site The-Art-of-Guitar and its eponymous – and essential – YouTube channel has just found out.
He has thrown his curiosity into the digital gray matter to see if it could improve upon the contemporary canon of tab books and websites. If you’ve followed Mike G. on The-Art-of-Guitar channel, you might have caught one of his “Bad Tab” series, where he pores over the some of the errors in popular tab books.
His plan here is to get the AI to tab the songs, then he’ll use the tab to play along with the original. What could go wrong?
“When people started talking about AI taking over everything I thought about what if AI started transcribing songs, and doing it perfectly,” he says. Besides, could it be worse than some of the old books? “I learned so many things the wrong way out of the official books that it took me sometimes years, and maybe even decades, to get rid of old habits,” he adds.
When people started talking about AI taking over everything I thought about what if AI started transcribing songs, and doing it perfectly
Haven’t we all. And some of those errant transcriptions are so engrained in our mind that it feels like it could take successive rounds of therapy to expunge them from the memory.
Take Blackened, from Metallica’s …And Justice For All. That opening riff was infamously tabbed in the second position on the D string when it really should be played at the seventh on the A string. The Justice tab book has its fair share of wrong turns, so much so that Mike G. dedicated an entire video to it [see above], and the book was reportedly republished with an improved version of the tab. But even its first edition is not even close to being as bad as the AI.
Remarkably, a lot of the the instructions around the music are correct, the context – band names, etc. But the music is a mile off. “It’s not even the same song!” says G. “It sounds like some kind of Slayer riff or something.”
AI’s attempt at Blackened’s verse riff is no better. It’s just as weird. “It sounds like Testament, Disciples Of The Watch or something” says G. The chorus, again, is like an AI hallucination of late ‘80s thrash era.
Enter Sandman, a change of pace, a little easier, is another transcription from the back end of never never land. It's not even close. That said, the riffs the AI has transcribed should worry some of the rank-and-file of metal guitar. We have heard similarly rote material from real living humans.
“Now, don’t get me wrong,” says Mike G. “I don’t want to piss off the AI because some day it’ll come after me for sure, but some of these riffs would sound cool – like that Blackened riff – in a different song, if it was an original tune. But to say that that’s Blackened, and that’s Enter Sandman, is criminal.”
Sweet Child O' Mine and Smells Like Teen Spirit fare little better. Should we be surprised. These large language models are trained on data, and can only process what they have been fed. Garbage in, garbage out. This video makes an interesting case study in how today’s LLMs don’t yet have the training to produce tabs that are close to being accurate.
But then they could probably help you plan that dinner party, and we can think of at least 10 ways to use generative AI in your music production.
You can subscribe to The-Art-of-Guitar channel on YouTube and get lessons from an actual human – Mike G – at The-Art-of-Guitar.
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