Made With · The editor's own album
Silver Bullet Soundtrack
In late 2023 or early 2024, I planned to attend an event hosted by On Set Cinema. If you've never been, the premise is that you watch a movie in a location where it was filmed. There's more to it, but that's not the focus here, and frankly, you should look it up. They are INCREDIBLE. The one I was going to was for Silver Bullet.
To get ready for the trip, I figured this is an '80s movie, so there's probably a soundtrack. There was a score album from Jay Chattaway, but a score isn't a soundtrack, and there was no album of songs. This surprised me. Ghostbusters. Footloose. The Lost Boys. Top Gun. Back to the Future. How many awesome soundtracks came out of the '80s? And Silver Bullet didn't get one?
Before this moment, I had only played around with AI music. I found it interesting and fun, but limited. But what if I could make an era-appropriate soundtrack for a movie that, by all rights, should've had one? I started using Suno and Udio in a more focused way after that. I wanted a tone and a feeling.
It needed to be a variety album, with more than one "artist," but familiar sounding. Then I remembered Love Fist, the fake '80s hair metal band from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. What if these "bands" were fictional bands from various IPs? That could be fun.
And so, through a series of "well, what if..." moments and song-prompting experiments on Udio and Suno, I eventually arrived at the Silver Bullet Soundtrack. The songs come from Suno v3 and v4, and from Udio (whatever version was current around April 2024, when I was on the trip). I had a few songs done before I left. I generated most of them on my phone between stops while looking at different filming locations, then listened to the results while driving to the next location and picked my favorite version. A few I generated after I got back, to round out the album. Later, I think I went back and remade some of the songs on Suno v4 to get cleaner versions, which is where the v4 tracks come from.
I still REALLY enjoy listening to the album. Some of it does stretch outside the '80s a little, like Sex Bob-Omb's "Death on the Tracks." But it was so fun, I let it be.
This really opened my eyes to what AI music could be. From this, I started having all kinds of ideas, and thousands of songs later, I can't imagine a world without AI-created music. There are so many awesome use cases for it. This is just one. And, maybe better than anything else, I don't have to think about the people who make it. Are they good or bad people? What kind of message do they have? Are they a bad role model for kids? All the negatives that come with people who have poor moral judgment and become wealthy stop being an issue with AI music. I don't have to "relate" to a song, because the song is literally about me. Music, à la carte. Gifts for friends to remember that one October we played the shit out of the Zombies mode in Marvel Rivals.
I was a musician before all this. I played guitar. But one of my best friends, who I was in a band with, died. After that, I lost all desire to play guitar or write music, because it all reminded me of him. AI gave me a new set of tools, and a new outlook on how to apply that music knowledge. So I fully understand people's concerns about AI-generated music, but I dismiss all of it. I have a soundtrack now that never existed, and it's in regular rotation for me years later because the songs are actually just good. They have their blemishes, but I treat them like the mistakes professional musicians leave on recordings.
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