While his status as one of metal’s pioneering musicians might lead some to think he’s against the concept, Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler has admitted that AI has become a useful tool with his latest musical focuses.
Currently recording his forthcoming solo album, Butler sat down for an interview at the Steel City Con in Philadelphia early last month where he discussed his formative days in the world of music, his journey with Black Sabbath, and his current musical plans.
As Blabbermouth noted, Butler discussed the material he’s using for his new album, explaining that while some of it goes back a while, parts of it also see him embracing new technologies.
“I've got tons of stuff,” he admitted. “Since we finished the last Sabbath show, I've just been going through all the stuff that I've written since the '80s onwards and updating everything. And what held me back before, I didn't have a singer when I'm at home, but AI came along.
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“So all my songs now, I've updated them all and I'm using an AI singer to bring all the lyrics out. So now I can take it to singers that I'm gonna be working with and go, 'This is what I want on the album,' so they've got a better idea. Before I was just, like, playing them a bass riff or something, going, 'Can you sing to this?' And they'd be going, 'Yeah.'
“But it's so much better now, 'cause you can sit in your studio and do everything on AI and then take it to proper musicians and let them take over,” he added. “It's really helped me. A lot of people think it's cheating.”
At the same time that Butler took part in this conversation, Harvey Mason Jr. – the boss of The Recording Academy and the Grammys – took part in his own interview in which he explained how he has seen AI be used by the wider musical community, with Butler’s comments tracking with Mason’s own.
“It runs the gamut of people texting lyrics or ideas or how they feel when they wake up and generating an entire track, lyrics and melody from it,” Mason said of the technology’s use.
“That’s the far end of the spectrum. The other side of the spectrum is somebody who has just produced an entire song, but they can’t figure out the bridge section, or they can’t figure out one line, or they can’t figure out a melody to finish the chorus, and they ask one of the platforms to create that as a way to supplement what they’ve already done. That’s the other end of the spectrum. Everything in between is what I’m seeing in the studio.
“I’ve seen people having one of the platforms writing lyrics after they’ve already played all the chords, or taking lyrics that have been generated and building songs around that, or having AI vocals on a song that you wrote because you can’t sing,” he continues.
“I know one person who writes on acoustic guitar and whistles the melodies and puts that into one of the models, and the model spits out songs. I know another person who’s a poet and they put that into the model, and it spits out a fully produced demo. It’s all over the map.”
While the usage of AI is indeed “all over the map currently,” it remains to be seen how Butler’s finished product will sound. However, it undoubtedly pales in comparison to how Black Sabbath used to create.
“With Sabbath — Sabbath, we’d sit down in a room together and just jam and jam and jam until somebody came up with something that we could work with,” he explained.
“Once we had a good riff to write to, we’d finish the music part of it. Ozzy [Osbourne] would sing his vocal line, then I’d write the lyrics. So it mainly came from jamming.”
Black Sabbath made their final live appearance last year as part of the Back To The Beginning concert on July 5th. The show was also Osbourne’s final performance, with the iconic vocalist passing away just days later on July 22nd at the age of 76.
