DJ and producer John Dahlbäck has explained why he’s adopted AI into his work, favouring AI vocal tools in particular.

Dahlbäck has worked with artists such as Kaskade, Benny Benassi, and also collaborated with Avicii during his early career on track Don’t Hold Back under the name of Jovicii. In a new interview, he’s shared how he looks to use AI like “an instrument”, and why he feels excited by it, rather than scared.

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Dahlbäck tells MusicRadar, “I tend to turn to AI for inspiration mainly. I use it more of an instrument – just as I would Splice or a synthesiser. Just as you’re tweaking things on a synth that eventually leads to something, I do the same with AI. I can feed [it] that beat that I’m doing, and it gives me ideas of where to develop it.

“[When I was younger] I was heavily into sampling. The way I would use samples is that I would try to re-create it rather than just include it in the final product. The same goes for AI in my case. I’m also a firm believer in voice-changing tools with AI. I sing something in the microphone with my horrible singing voice, and I change that into a beautiful singing voice.”

He goes on to explain, “I’m very excited by AI if the person using it is also creative and not just lazy. My brother is a very old-school music producer, he records a lot of bands traditionally.

“I used to be scared of AI in music, and he told me it was fantastic, he’d tell me that he had a singer who came in to do a full vocal, but then she left the studio, and he realised he didn’t have backing vocals. So, he just loads in her acapella, and he gets great stems and just backing vocals by using AI. It made the vocals more full. I just thought that was a brilliant use of it.”

Dahlbäck also says he recently spoke to the producer of “quite a famous Swedish singer” who he can’t name, and says that she had discovered tapes from when she was singing at five years of age. Plans are now in motion to train AI on her singing voice at that age, “so that she can duet herself”.

“It’s kind of incredible,” he says. “I’m all for that, and like I said, I don’t like when it’s just anyone sloppy using AI to just [generate] a pop song, then export and then upload Spotify. That doesn’t make any sense.”

The post Producer John Dahlbäck was “scared of AI”, now he’s a “firm believer” in some tools – here’s why appeared first on MusicTech.