Missed Deadline

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Ray

OK. I had promised a few people I’d have the Songs area populated with the first EP by last night. Unfortunately, earlier in the day I made a last minute change to the song list. I decided to replace one of the songs with another: Je Suis l’Amour. I decided to “polish” my version first. But, since it was recorded back in 2016, my systems had changed significantly since then (see previous post). It took more work than I had planned on. But, I got it done.

It was then I realized this puppy was aver 5 minutes long. OK, I’d go with that. Then, late into the night (around 11pm), I started the SUNO “polish.” Well, that first SUNO run took almost 10 minutes. But, OMG, I was sobbing listening to that first result. However, it had a hard time getting the pronunciations right on a few french words (not that I’m so great at it myself). So, time to fix those words with phonetic equivalents.

After midnight, I decided to call it a day … considering the day had ended several minutes ago. So, I’m back at it this morning, trying to get SUNO to spin some more magic into the song before I push everything up, hopefully by the end of this day.

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Why SUNO?

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Ray

While preparing the first group of songs to showcase, I got thinking about why I’m using SUNO. SUNO has the ability to create a song from a simple prompt. But, as I’ve said before, I do not consider that “creating music.” So, why then?

If you listen to all of the songs I produced, you will get a range from just barely a demo to a not too bad production. This is because my songs were, most likely, recorded and produced over several decades, and for different purposes. Some of the songs were simply recorded for use in evaluating the lyrics in online classes. For others, I used different DAW software or virtual instruments. Hence, there can be a lot of inconsistencies, with some older songs being very difficult to modify with my present system.

On the other hand, SUNO is capable of taking the worst produced song, as long as the words and melody are discernible, and polish it. This, then, can level the production field regardless of how long ago the song was recorded.

So, in using SUNO, I simply regard it as being sent out to be arranged and produced by professionals. Problem is, I can’t sell the result. Why? Because AI was used in the production. So, that’s why I’m putting them up here.

So, why not hire professionals? Frankly, I would, if I had the money. But, I don’t. That simple.

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Site Updates: 3/27

Posted on March 27, 2026 by Ray

So, today I updated some of my music journey in the History pages, as well as making a few corrections based on thinking back on what I wrote vs what I remember.

Also, I’m in the process of evaluating a better way to manage the listings of my songs. I liked the way my Published page showed EP1, my first published work, because it allowed me to tell a little bit about each song. I already have a tentative list of “future” EPs. So, I could present the songs in the same way, grouped under categories. The interesting thing would be that a few EPs would only be partially populated with songs while I process them for upload. But, I think that would be a minor issue.

As usual, stay tuned … more to come.

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Painful Edit

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Ray

Yes, I had to do it, but it was/is/will be painful. I have this song I had recorded 6 years ago and was working (another painful thing) at running it through SUNO to get a “pro” version. I had finally found a few I liked, one I really liked because it was so “not me” and really good. But, I was bothered by one word. The song is “Cheshire Moon.” The word is “Cheshire.” So, I did some digging, and sure enough, I was mispronouncing it! DANG! It was wrong on my version, hence wrong on the SUNO version. I couldn’t push this out just to be ridiculed over my lack of understanding how to pronounce an English word.

Now, the painful part. I tried to just patch in the one word correction into the song. But my present voice simply could not match my voice of 6 years ago. Sooooo … re-record the whole vocal section just for one word. I did limit it to 3 takes rather than the 4 I did last time. Now comes the audio tuning and comping to get the best of the 3. It’s gonna be awhile before I get this one pushed up. *sigh*

I might not have to redo the SUNO version because I might just be able to tweak the lyrics to force SUNO to say it correctly …. like “CHE-sher”.

And all because of one word (spoken 4 times in the song). Double-Dang!

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Page update

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Ray

Today I added information to the “Published” page under the My Songs group. It details the EP I self-published called “of Crawdads and other things.” The 5 songs on the EP were listed as well as a short story about each song.

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Too Late?

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Ray

OK. At lunch today we needed new bread. There was a loaf in the freezer that I was supposed to bring up last night, but forgot. So, it was said, “It’s too late to bring it up now.” I thought about that. It’s been “too late” for several days.

I went down and got the loaf out of the freezer anyway.

So, even if it’s “too late” for today, maybe you should do it anyway. Tomorrow you’ll be glad you did.

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About SUNO

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Ray

I thought it might be good to talk a bit about SUNO for those who don’t know about it. SUNO.com is an AI song generation site and is one of many such sites using AI to create music. And it can generate more than just songs, such as images to go with a song, and more. It is driven by prompts and can either take input from a song and lyrics or generate whole songs just from a situation description in the prompts. In it’s latest form, the PRO version almost looks like a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), where you can modify the results to better suit your desired outcome. I’m not there, yet. It’s going to be awhile before I get to that point. So, I can”t talk in detail about it.

The problem is that it is an AI package. “So what?” you might say. Well, many music sites are clamping down, removing, or rejecting submissions that have been created using AI in whole or in part. This is because of people creating hundreds of songs a day and posting them to streaming sites. The problem is that the songs are purposely geared to popular music, music that most people want to listen to, which is something AI does very well. As a result, content created by hardworking artists gets drowned-out in the flood of AI music.

Now, from my perspective, I have no intention of having SUNO create music for me. But, it does create excellent accompaniment/background parts, which is something I am a bit weak at providing. Also, it can create a very pleasant vocal(s), something else I’m a bit weak at. As such, it can take an original song from “ho-hum” to “WOW” in 30 seconds flat.

I had created a male vocal “Personna” that I was going to use in my projects. Then, I read about all this controversy and deleted all my work there. Now, I’m rethinking it all and most likely will be going back to creating a “voice” personna that I’ll use in the SUNO versions of my songs. I would attempt to have it sound similar to the 2nd SUNO example on the My Songs page. We will see.

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Updated SL Info

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Ray

Last night I updated the Second Life page to tell of my performances and to include a link to my only music video, created in Second Life (SL). Of course, my SL experience includes much more than just performing. But, not sure how much of that I’ll include here.

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Additions 3/21/26

Posted on March 21, 2026 by Ray

Today I added info to the Songs page. I posted 3 songs to illustrate the difference between one produced by myself in my home studio and two that were run through SUNO.com, an AI music generation platform.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at my published songs, polishing them, running them through SUNO, and posting them on each of the two song pages: Mine and SUNO’s. From there, you can hear my idea of my music vs. what a “pro” version would sound like (I hope).

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