In my musical journey, I have always done most things myself. From writing, through arranging, recording, mixing and mastering, I have always felt that you should understand the various processes involved in creating and producing music. It didn’t help that my three attempts at collaboration didn’t end particularly well.

My first attempt was with a lyricist on SongU who sent me a lyric to work on. Although I wasn’t particularly impressed with the lyric, I made an attempt to write a melody which I felt was quite good. When I didn’t hear back from her, I contacted SongU who informed me that she had left. I ended up writing my own lyric to the melody, which I must add was nothing like her lyric, and “Rainbow’s End” was the result.

My second attempt was with another lyricist from SongU. The lyric he sent to me was better than the first and I wrote a melody to it. I then took it to the mentors on SongU who suggested so many changes to the lyric that my lyricist gave up.

My third attempt was with my wife, Roberta, who composed a lyric which she suggested should be a rap. I turned the lyric into a novelty song – I don’t really write raps – and “Jukebox in My Head” was the result. Roberta felt that this would be her only attempt at writing a lyric, so that particular collaboration died as well.

Fast forward to two weeks ago. I put my latest Trance track on a Trance Discord group and asked for comments. A top professional American Trance DJ said that it had promise but needed a fair amount of work and asked if I could send her the unmastered and mastered WAV files. I duly responded. A few days later a long email came back explaining how it could be improved. Of course, I had heard of mixing issues like aliasing, phase cancellation, and stereo field issues but have never seen such a clear description of how to test for them and fix them. Normally, I use a plugin called Expose 2 which highlights issues like these but I tend to take its word as gospel. I also have a few books on mixing but have never heard of some of the techniques she uses. I have just sent her the corrected files and await her response.

Around the same time, I received an email from SongU saying that another member lyricist wanted to collaborate with me. She was a winner in the Lyrics category in the UK Songwriting Contest and lived less that thirty miles from me, so I thought I might give it a go. We had a quick Zoom meeting and decided that I would write music to one of her lyrics and she would write lyrics to one of my instrumentals. As neither of us were great singers, we would use Suno AI for the demo. I looked at the lyric that she recommended and came up with music within a day. It seemed very easy to write music to the type of lyrics she wrote. Although I say it myself, the result is a power ballad which I think is pretty good and we are investigating ways of taking it forward. She has produced lyrics to “Music of the Fjords” and we are now looking at what Suno AI makes of that. I am no expert on Suno AI, but the logic is that if you write the melody, chords and lyrics and use AI software only for the demo, you can pitch the song to artists without infringing copyright. Also, I am finding Suno quite a lot of fun to learn.

The moral of it all, is that you should never say never to anything. I might even get around to eventually writing a rap.