[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] Tuesday, September 08, 2026
Call It What You Will
[music, Suno, turd polishing, personal nostalgia]
When I was living on my own at 15 in a small apartment bicycling distance from UCSD, I used to torture my neighbors with attempts at song writing. (I didn't realize how well they could hear me until I mentioned my interest in it to a girl in one of my classes and she said "yeah... I know. I used to live next door to you.")
Occasionally in the years that followed, when stranded somewhere sufficiently far from others with a guitar or synth, I coughed up a few more semi-musical fur balls and tossed them in my (eventually digital) archives.
A couple days ago I discovered Suno has finally reached the point where you can just upload such a fur ball and ask it to make a "cover" and it will more or less respect as much detail as you give it (lyrics, vocal melody, chord progressions, rhythms, base line, and so on) and fill in whatever you don't. In terms of losing useful content (not a lot in my case), its worst offense is over-simplifying the vocal melodies. But whatever--buskers can't be choosers.
So... this is like having a studio artist recreate your childhood paintings. Terribly amusing to me, and probably just offensive to anyone else. Be advised. But if you have a similar archive of your own you might want to try it--it's really fun.
I always figured if I ever had a band it would be called No Talent, and our first album would be Call It What You Will, so here is Suno's six-fingered version of that:
Call It What You Will (No Talent)
It starts with the first song I ever wrote, with the truly inspired lyrics "Sitting on a sofa, playing guitar" and gets weirder from there. Most of these are just (a small subset of my too many) snippets/ideas with placeholder lyrics, not developed songs, though a couple are pushing full songness.
I gave them to suno with no instructions whatsoever, just let it pick a best fit genera/style for the song, and picked the first of 2-6 variations which was the most representative (not nec. the best) cover of my original source. They all register to me as some rando band playing my song (with reverb set to: uncanny valley), which is, again, terribly amusing to me in a way you won't get unless you try it yourself...
It's in chronological order except a couple further-afield variants at the end.
[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>]