Since the advent of AI, I’ve become increasingly passionate about creating music in the most human way possible. Whilst AI is an exciting technology and will surely become a great additional tool for music makers, fully AI-generated music can only mimic what humans do intuitively: create great music in a room together, with all the happy accidents, imperfections and musical conversations which occur along the way.
My aim has been to drive our focus towards creating the best live recorded library albums we possibly can, as a way of celebrating human musicians. To do this, I — along with my fantastic team — have been inviting top session musicians from around the world to our beautiful in-house recording studio, The Crypt Studio, to write and record production music albums in the room together. Within loosely set parameters, their individual talents and sensibilities are allowed to shine.
Our five most recent releases are part of a new series called “Studio Classics” and were all created in this way; the genres include funk, soul, surf rock, nu jazz and grunge. The musicians involved include Ben Reed (Frank Ocean), Daniel See (Lianne La Havas), Sam Grimley (Ed Sheeran), Jim Watson (Sting), Matt Parks (The Vaccines), Karl Abel (Laura Mvula), Will Crewdson (Adam and the Ants) and Ross Stanley (Cory Henry).
We had a Brazilian band in last week to record an album of authentic Brazilian music for our Discoveries label. They improvised all the music on the spot and by the end of the second day we had 10 fantastic tracks. You can hear how much fun we were having in the recordings!
Whilst our in-house engineers focus on creatively and authentically recording the performances, I’ve been producing each recording session and offering musical suggestions as we go (on arrangement and structure, for example). From start to finish, the human contributions from everyone involved combine to create something rather special.
We have plans to make many other albums like these — not only because we love collaborating with real people in our lovely studio, but because it’s the only way to capture that very human “studio magic”. I’m eager to increase the diversity of musicians involved, too — otherwise we’re not capturing the entire story.
The arrival of AI has brought the importance and uniqueness of human composers and performers into sharp focus. As a composer myself, I feel a responsibility to make sure we’re championing real musicians at a time when things look so uncertain. I believe creating these sorts of live, semi-improvised, studio albums is about as human as you can get.
