Ask HN: Songwriters, what software do you use?
e.g. Word Processor, LLM, Rhymezone, Masterwriter, etc.?
I'm particularly interested in any AI assisted software. Assisted being the keyword; I'm not interested in AI generated slop, but something that makes intelligent suggestions as you write.
Currently working on an album.
Software I use for songwriting: mostly Logic, also Dorico. Voice memos. Rhymezone sometimes. Rhymezone seems less and less helpful as I go on. I hardly use text editors for lyrics, paper seems to work a lot better. I end up with a lot of scribbles all over the paper.
AI suggestions for songwriting seems a bit like turning on cheat codes in a game. Cheat codes will help me beat a game faster. The cost? The game is less fun, and the whole reason I play games is to have fun. Songwriting is an activity for me, like gardening or running or something like that. Or putting together a jigsaw puzzle. If you had an AI assistant that could help you put together a jigsaw puzzle, would you use it?
There are AI tools around and some work decently well:
- Logic has session players. I don’t think they’re AI, but they are decent at putting up the skeleton of a song.
- AI-powered stem-splitting tools help you pick apart songs you like and figure out how they work.
- AI-powered song mastering tools produce dubious output. I have gone through multiple iterations with AI-powered tools and ended up happier just mastering the song myself.
LLMs seem like the great failure here.
If you're not already aware of it, check out onelook.com
I don’t see how this would help me, sorry. It looks kind of like a more advanced thesaurus or something. I understand why some people might like this sort of thing but it’s kind of the opposite of what I want.
I’m not using RhymeZone less and less because RhymeZone could be better at what it does. I’m using RhymeZone less and less because the problem that RhymeZone solves is becoming less and less relevant to my process.
- Most time is spent in the iPhone's Notes & Voice Memo apps.
- I try Rhymezone, but it rarely helps me find a word I hadn't already though of.
- The Complete Rhyming Dictionary [1] as it also helps find great family rhymes - but is a very manual process.
- ChatGPT voice chat for object writing - mostly just because I'm more of a vocal processor - I forbid it from writing anything, and instruct it clearly to just listen and give me a list of the metaphors, imagery, and descriptive words that I tell it. I've always struggled with motivation to do object writing, but I quite enjoy doing it audibly like this.
- ChatGPT as a proof-reader. Eg "Review the following song for me. What would new listeners think the song is about and saying". You need to be careful though, because it will often tell you stupid stuff like "the melody is great" even though you haven't shared a melody.
- ChatGPT as a sounding board when I'm battling over a very specific phrase or wording. More as a sounding board though, as I usually don't use it's suggestions.
- Logic Pro - The latest version lets you add chords and have it auto play some basic AI session players - which is great for fleshing out the basic ideas, and having something I can play on repeat why I write lyrics. Once I'm happy with the song, I'll then start replacing the AI tracks with human created tracks.
[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Complete-Rhyming-Dictionary-Clemen...
I have been building my own app for this recently.
Its very early, but I have been shaping 3 songs with it already and am starting to get some friends to try it.
I am self taught with songwriting/music so I think it might reflect my own idiosyncratic songwriting process more than anything else at the moment.
Happy to open up a preview if anyone is interested though.
Shoot me an email if interested (in profile)
What does the app provide? I have long considered creating an app that combines Notes with Voice Memos with a way of tracking alternative ideas for each line or section.
Basic features:
Create projects Projects can contain notes and audio (uploaded or recorded in browser) Then theres an AI chat in the project where the docs/audio are available as context (multimodal models used)
Its definitely very early; AI and UX need a lot of work. But definitely has helped me get over some “humps” with writing songs.
For extra context: I write songs with acoustic guitar and vocals, but I would say they are pretty simple overall.
I use https://lazyjot.com. It has a lot of weirder imperfect rhymes than other rhyme dictionaries, which makes it a lot more useful for me. Makes me a bit more creative. No AI generated slop yet.
Hardware is better at this: notebook, pencil, baseball bat.
"AI art" is plagiarism and not an art at all.
> baseball bat
Could you expand on this? How does a baseball bat help you in songwriting?
I went to a Slipknot concert back in 2022. They had a "junk set", a bunch of trashcans and kegs that they hit with aluminum bats. Not completely the same, but it did have a dissonant sound!
Ah yes, I remember as a kid a common joke we would make when talking about easy jobs is that we wanted to be the guy from Slipknot whose job was simply to swing a baseball bat at a trash can. No need to rehearse for that!
Sure. With rock & roll, the pencil is sometimes not large enough to rage against the machine properly and a heftier implement is necessary.
I’m interested in the plagiarism perspective.
I feel like LLMs are not too dissimilar to humans. We listen to a lifetime of music, read text, watch videos, etc. and when we come to create something all of that influences what we produce.
Like if you’ve listened largely to western music, and you look for a note to complete a provided two-note sequence, your choice is informed by that listening history. A non-western trained person is likely to pick a different note. Similar analogies can be made for eg English phrases, or even topics for songs.
There’s clearly a boundary between influenced by and copied. Is it the same for generative AI as it is for humans?
Art is about the human experience of the artist reflected in the art. LLMs have no human experience. They just try to statistically trick you into thinking they made art through mass plagiarism of art. It's an illusion, and also rather boring/lame/uncool.
You can do it, sure. But you'll probably also start to wonder why nobody really wants to listen to it, and you can count me out before I do.
I’m not disputing that human produced creative works have, at their best, qualities that computer generated works don’t, and maybe can’t.
I am however interested in the claim of plagiarism and how what generative AI does is different to what humans do. It’s not clear to me how it’s different.
For lyrics, I currently use Google Keep and hugely resent myself for it.
What I want is to be able to write lyrics as easily as plaintext, but with manually assignment of meter, rhythm etc, while also being able to "fork" lyrics at a point and be able to work on different threads, keep track of alternative lyrics on a phrase level too. Being able to sync that up with some basic music notation (e.g. keys and percussion) would get me 90% of the way to where I want to be when it comes to writing at the computer. I think I have a coherent design for such a software in my head but am unsure if it really is what I need or is just a whimsical distraction from not writing good enough lyrics yet. Would be interested to hear if anyone's seen anything like this (can't say I've exhaustively looked).
Allow me to plug a dictionary/thesaurus site I've been running for decades called OneLook (https://onelook.com). Although it's not specifically aimed at songwriters, it does attract many of them as users. Over the past thirty years, I've added all sorts of brainstorming features for creative writers—like the ability to search for words by description, to match words with a given meter, and more recently to discover which colors a word might evoke or vice versa.
(I’m also the creator of RhymeZone so I'll plug that too! I no longer operate it, but I can pass along any feature requests you might have to its new owners.)
Hey Doug, huge fan of yours. Thank you for everything.
Huge, huge fan of the entire Datamuse stack. You have done incredible work toward building a mega-useful cognitive exploration tool, ontology and super-power for word nerds. Software and data which I would love to pay for.
Also OP might like https://www.onelook.com/spruce/
Wow, thank you, that means a lot to me! And I'm stoked you found Spruce -- we added that 5 years ago, pre-LLM era, but it never got much traction.
I always like writing the first verse on paper, then typing it up and maybe writing the other verses/the chorus while trying to figure out the music at the same time... I usually just write lyrics in a very simple text editor.
I like Rhymezone too, and the MacOS dictionary's thesaurus, as they sometimes help me think of words I don't come up with otherwise. But I feel like with songs - the good stuff always comes when you let yourself listen to your unconscious, like all the really good material and images are buried in there somewhere and you just have to trick yourself into finding them.
Right now I write lots of EDM. I plug in something with lots of unquantized delay on it and just make noise. I listen back to it and hear songs in the rhythms from the delay trails. That gets me started. From there I finish up in Live adding kick, bass and whatever else comes to mind.
You could use AI generated music this way, generate some songs and sample snippets or find interesting rhythms.
I don’t use any software. Just notebook, pen, 4-track tape recorder, an SM-58, a cheap Beringer pre-amp, and some DT-770’s.
same. to me, it's the immediacy that matters; I want as little getting in the way of getting my idea in draft form quickly. A real paper notepad and just the voice record feature of my phone are my main go-tos.
One of the biggest dangers of software solutions is that everything is so easy that it's super easy to just start playing with things that don't matter instead of actually working on the music itself. Sometimes keeping the tools simple helps keep the focus on the real work.
"Three cords and the truth"
Nevada was Springsteen’s best album. Sgt Pepper’s was probably the best Beatles album (although the contention for that honour is quite high).
Sometimes less is more.
I was just asking a producer friend today about this — does anyone know of any tools that let you “clip” parts of songs with notes?
When I’m listening to music I’ll occasionally hear some element I really like and note it down via text for later
Eg “synth at 1:35, really cool — be great for a cyberpunk track”
I’d love to be able to hear these clips with one click (almost like Splice)
Considering building for myself if something doesn’t already exist
I've seen this on SoundCloud, but that was a while ago.
This is actually an area that I find a little frustrating.
Generally to produce music you need to use a DAW. Ableton, Logic Pro etc. What sucks is you can't easily just assign a lyric to a note. Like it's just not a feature they provide.
It's something you can do in MuseScore because it uses traditional notation, but it would be great to be able to do it in something like Ableton.
Yes, lyrics are usually part of a traditional notation "score". Of course, Ableton is too hip to provide traditional notation with a score editor, but quite a few other popular DAWs do, including Logic:
https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/add-lyrics-to-a-sco...
Logic has support for adding lyrics. Create a MIDI region, select it, and press N to open the score editor. Make sure the inspector is open on the left, press I to open it if necessary. There is a block which says “part box” and inside it, LYRIC. This lets you put lyrics in the score.
That said, it’s not one of the strengths of Logic to use it this way.
Not software, but I am a big fan of the boss 505 table top looper. It is a great tool for building up parts and I love not staring at a screen while making music. Several of my friends swear by loopy pro for similar purposes, but I like the hardware solution here better.
Just finishing an original full length musical- I wrote all the music and lyrics using my human brain and Reason software. The only AI tool I use is Audimee.com to convert my singing voice into 8-10 other singers for different roles + harmonies in the musical.
nvim. No distractions. AI classifies as a distraction from expression (to me).
Write my verses in google keep, record, produce, mix, and master in Studio One
Wrote a giant blog series with the entire process of my last album: https://bpev.me/notes/vx1
I think each song develops differently, so process varies depending. But tldr on software is:
Step 1. Whatever is easiest to write immediately on inspiration (which happens anytime anywhere): Voice Memos, Phone Notes app, Text Editor. I have a super long voice memo history, so my songs usually develop from 2-3+ voice memo ideas that may have been recorded years apart. I'll scroll through old ideas while songwriting to see if other cool ideas fit.
Step 2. Formalize using a combination of apps that depend on what I need to be specific about. Vibes? My DAW (Ableton or Reaper). Score? Musescore. Lyrics? Text editor + maybe recording a loop in my DAW.
Step 3. Usally by the end, I have a score .xml, lyrics .txt, and ableton live exports + stems.
Apple Notes, I used to use Microsoft Excel
GarageBand, voice memos
I only use the drummer as close to ai as it gets.
notes app and paper. ableton live for recording/running VSTs but for stuff that isn't MIDI based something like Reaper works really well.
logic.
for words: rhymezone, roget, oed, b-rhymes, fun python dictionary things :~)
Um, software? Worst of all, AI? No, please no. I confess to have used an online rhyming dictionary now and then, but prefer to avoid even that.
Google Keep, mostly. I write down words and fragments of songs - lines, rhymes, choruses - as they occur to me. When inspiration hits, I turn these into a song lyric, and then I sit down with my guitar or my keyboard and I come up with a chord progression and a melody, which I memorize through practice and repetition.
I learned this workflow from my mother, who is a singer-songwriter, and literally every songwriter in history, though most of them probably used notebooks instead of Keep, as I did until a few years ago. I've been using this workflow for does math 33 years now, since I was a teenager.
I think I've probably used rhyming dictionaries two or three times in that time. I would no more use any form of AI to write lyrics than I would build a robot to exercise for me. It would completely and totally miss the point of songwriting for me, which isn't producing "content" - it's a self-expressive art form.
If you find yourself wanting more than a pen and paper or a notes app for songwriting, I respectfully suggest - as someone who's been writing, performing and recording songs for the aforementioned 30+ years as well as growing up the child of a professional songwriter and also being myself a paid music critic and journalist for many years - you might not be understanding the assignment.
The most important tool you have as a songwriter - or any writer - is your ears. Listen to music. Listen to songwriters who are very good at it - there's this cat named Bob Dylan who's got a bit of a reputation for that, or Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell or Nick Cave or Paul Simon or Jason Isbell. Listen to what they do and figure out what they're doing.
And unless you're a born storyteller, you often need to have an interesting life to write interesting songs about. I suggest falling in love with lots of people and travelling and paying attention when you're doing these things, not just to how you feel but everything around you. Pay attention to people and write about them.
An example lyric: I rang the New Year in / In a field out in the suburbs / Somewhere outside East Berlin / I watched the fireworks burn the night / And I wondered where you were / And if you were alright
See, that lyric exists because I actually spent New Year's Eve in a field outside Berlin. Go do that. Or get good at convincing people you have.
This isn't about software, but all the software on earth won't help you if you can't write a good song with a pen and paper. It's not enterprise software, it's not labor intensive, one person can do it sitting in a diner with a college ruled notebook and, indeed, many of the best songs have been written that way.
Or you can let an AI write it for you and dink around with the settings and call yourself a songwriter, but regardless of what you or the world tell you, you won't be. You'll actually be doing less work than most celebrity record producers and what comes out will be soulless product.
If that's what you want, great, I guess, but you certainly don't need anyone's help to make shite pseudoart. People are filling the world with it right now.