Key takeaways
- Chat GPT specializes in creating diverse and creative guitar riffs, while also offering tips on playing techniques.
- Gemini is slower than ChatGPT, providing less interesting and precise guitar riffs.
- The bass lines produced by ChatGPT are solid, showing the potential for creative interpretation and improvisation in music creation.
I recently started playing electric guitar and quickly discovered that creating new songs is difficult, especially if you don't know music theory or scales. So, I thought, why not ask the one person who knows music theory better than anyone — AI?
Stopping it with ChatGPT
Let's start things off with something simple, like a rock guitar riff.
Right off the bat, I think it's all right. This is a very simple riff that only consists of power chords, which are very common in rock and metal. Even though it's very short and simple, ChatGPT still managed to squeeze in four different power chords, and I know several popular songs that use less than that.
ChatGPT also made a great suggestion to play it with downstrokes, which I did, but he didn't leave any instructions regarding tempo or time signature, so I just followed it by calling it tabs. How was I placed?
For the next riff, I just asked ChatGPT to make the previous one more complicated, which he did, but he didn't keep anything from the original riff except the scale.
This riff has no power chords to speak of, but does have a sharp hammer followed by a pull-off, making for a smooth riff. It was a lot harder to play than the first riff, and you can probably hear that I made some small mistakes even after practicing the riff several times.
As for the music and quality of the riff, I think it's excellent. I'm surprised that a generic chatbot can make a creative riff because I tried making riffs with ChatGPT last year, and they seemed robotic. They just went up and down the scale.
Let's now shift from rock to blues with riff #3, my favorite by far. It's easy to play, as it uses the popular pentatonic scale, which is the basis of blues, jazz, rock, metal and pop music.
One odd anomaly is that ChatGPT said the Ruff has slides and turns, but there are no indicators in the tabs to operate them. Slides are usually indicated by a slash or the letter “s” and turns are indicated by a “b”. They are missing from the tabs, so I chose to skip them as well.
Does Gemini do it better?
While it's a fine riff, it doesn't even come close to what we got with ChatGPT, at least in my opinion. Maybe it could work in the context of a song with other instruments where the riff isn't the driving force, but in isolation, it's kind of boring.
The second riff wasn't much better, but at least I got proper tabs now. However, the description below the tabs says we're using E and A power chords, but the tabs show the fifth and seventh frets on the G string, which are the notes C and D, respectively, and not that way. is shown. Power chords, either.
Considering that these two riffs were the best I could come up with after fighting with Gemini for half an hour, I think ChatGPT is the best musician.
Let's try a few bass lines.
Since Bass is my favorite instrument, I had to add a few baselines to see how ChatGPT did.
That's a pretty solid baseline. While it's not particularly creative, it's perfectly serviceable. The bass guitar usually sits in the background in most genres and drives the song by supporting the melody, so I can see why this bass line would work well in the song.
The second bass line is for a rock song, and I think it's great. This is a little repetitive, but can be easily remedied by alternating between the low and high strings while maintaining the same intervals.
Interpretation and correction are best.
There's a lot of room for creativity in these riffs and basslines. If you sit down with your guitar with the intention of creating an original song but don't feel inspired, there's no shame in asking ChatGPT to get you started with a unique riff. Figuring out rhythm alone is a big part of the music creation process. Let your emotions dictate how the tabs should be run, as I did today.
To make it more interesting, limit yourself to one of the first three riffs that ChatGPT gives you and build on top of it. You don't even need to know any music theory because you can just play around until you find a groove you like and then ask ChatGPT to check if the notes fit musically. Or not. Have fun making new music!