Fuck AI

I had this conversation in a music-focused group. A is the nascent slop-monger, B is a bystander, M is me. The only editing I've done is eliding names and pulling multiple messages from the same person into a single body each time.

A: i feel like ill never be a good guitarist

i practice every day but its getting harder and harder to convince myself its worth it cuz i play the same riff 1000 times and its still sloppy

i thought i was so much better than i was until i started trying to record covers and shit and now i feel like ill never even be able to record my own music i wrote to be easy

B: people learn at different paces but you will improve if you continue to do something and take advice from the right folk

being neurodivergent makes learning things annoying for me too cuz i have to have things explained to me multiple times in a meticulous way in order to understand it and that's something a lot of neurotypical people dont have the patience for

probably know this but comparing yourself to people that also had to take the time to learn their craft isnt the best motivator sometimes -w-

at least know they also probably were in your position at some point

A: were in the same hell it seems

trying to do anything feels like being sisyphus

most of my songs at this point are about how i want to kill god for trapping me in this pathetic existence

i dont have trouble understanding things when it comes to music but i sure as fuck have trouble doing them im covering easy songs tho

like the last one i tried was like you better dead by in flames and i kept fucking up right at the end

so i started doing dead end instead cuz i can record it in sections

but i play everything so sloppy

M: Get a book of fingering drills. Go through them one by one moving on from each when you've perfected it. If you backslide, literally go back to the one you've backslid into and restart from there.

Learning to play songs is a necessary part of learning music, but so is learning foundational skills.

A: exercises are so fucking boring and unfun to me

just fucking eating it if i backslide is the kind of thing that makes me consider switching to being an edm producer

M: They're boring and unfun to every one of your favourite guitarists too. I would bet a year's salary that every one of them does it, though.

A legendary riff (Thunderstruck) ... is a fingering exercise.

They literally wrote that song from the guitarist doing a fingering exercise that turned out to be fire.

The point of fingering drills is to make it automatic. Autonomous. You see/hear/think of a note and your fingers are already there, without you having to apply active thought.

Any guitarist you've seen who seems to use the guitar as an extension of their body? That's maybe 10% natural talent and 90% music foundations.

A: autism makes doing ANYTHING automatically and expecting it to go well near impossible

the only thing i can control automatically is hollow knight, a game famous for having an extremely simple and responsive control system that ive played for probably over 1000 hours at this point

my job has been moving boxes around for 3 years and i still drop them

regularly

Notice the pattern. Complaining that it's hard to get good. Rejecting the necessary task to improve (fingering drills) as "boring and unfun". "just fucking eating it" ~~if~~when they face the prospect of maybe having to go back and repeat things that didn't take. "consider switching to being an edm producer" in the face of not having instant gratification where "gratification" is defined, effectively, as instantaneously sounding like a top tier guitar player.

The arts are, obviously, arts. But they're also crafts. All of them, no exceptions. You need certain skills, not just an "expressive soul" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean!). I've been playing (as an amateur) woodwinds for 45 years now. I've gathered rather the impressive array of woodwind instruments I can play. Yet when I get a new one, it's right back to page one of my oldest fingering exercise books, doing the simplest, dumbest exercises imaginable as I learn the new one. Sure I now blaze through the easiest books, and since fingering is very similar across woodwinds, I have more time to spend concentrating on embouchure differences and techniques, but ... I still do them. Forty five years after I started.

And that's what the slop machines cut out. They give that instant high of instant "expertise" without the work of actually developing skill. The fact that the "expertise" isn't yours and that the product isn't yours escapes that desire to be "creative" without actually wanting it enough to actually learn.

I predict this guy is going to be a slop music generator by the end of 2026 if the AI bubble doesn't burst first.

(P.S. I reject that autism excuse. Some of the greatest musicians were clearly on the spectrum somewhere. You know, the ones that sit quietly in the background of the band and just do perfect music without the grandstanding and attention-calling.)