Last night I took #chatgpt4 for a spin to see if it could write a song. I did this when GPT3 was around and it was an utter failure. This time was a lot different…
— Love and Science (@LOVEandSC1ENCE) March 16, 2023
🧵 by Jesse
That’s the original tweet, but I thought I’d document the process here too.
My first prompt was simply: “You and I are a songwriting duo. You will tell me what to play and I’ll perform & record the music”. It returned the skeleton of a song with chord progressions, lyrics, and style.
That was a lot to work with so I fired up #LogicPro and got to work. I wanted more guidance so I asked it what the instrumentation and BPM should be. It said 110-130 is perfect for pop, so we went with 120BPM.
I wondered if Logic could tell me which loops and sounds to use. It kind of can, but when I looked for some of the sounds they didn’t exist, especially when it comes to loops.
To make this simple I used live loops to record each section of the song. Now I needed it to write some melodies for me. I went back and forth with it to craft something that felt better to my ear. Notice that I got upset with it about using solfege and it didn’t get butthurt.
Now I wanted an epic intro melody. So far I’ve interpreted the notes as quarters, but it gave me 5 notes in the 3rd measure so I wanted to see if it could give me rhythm. It worked, but then the ending was boring so I had to coax something better out of it.
I went through the rest of the melodies, but when I got to the pre-chorus I had to inform it that it was performed in halftime. Now to the bridge and where it started to all go wrong.
The bridge used 7 chords instead of 8. When reading charts if the last chord is repeated it isn’t always written and F is a great chord to end with so I went with that. The issue is that GPT4 changed the bridge chords on me and refused to acknowledge the error.
We’re back on track, but I’m miffed that it tried to gaslight me. Now is the time I tell it a secret
I run in to the issue of #GPT4getful again
I finally get it to be more precise about the lyrics
I have no intention of a vocal performance at 1am, but I see this as being viable with enough tweaks.
Thanks for sticking around. Here’s the demo of the #ChatGPT4getful pop song. Due to video time constraints this isn’t the full arrangement, but all parts are here.
