Ask HN: Songwriters, what software do you use?

[ArlenBales]

e.g. Word Processor, LLM, Rhymezone, Masterwriter, etc.?

I'm particularly interested in any AI assisted software. Assisted being the keyword; I'm not interested in AI generated slop, but something that makes intelligent suggestions as you write.

[dietrichepp]

Currently working on an album.

Software I use for songwriting: mostly Logic, also Dorico. Voice memos. Rhymezone sometimes. Rhymezone seems less and less helpful as I go on. I hardly use text editors for lyrics, paper seems to work a lot better. I end up with a lot of scribbles all over the paper.

AI suggestions for songwriting seems a bit like turning on cheat codes in a game. Cheat codes will help me beat a game faster. The cost? The game is less fun, and the whole reason I play games is to have fun. Songwriting is an activity for me, like gardening or running or something like that. Or putting together a jigsaw puzzle. If you had an AI assistant that could help you put together a jigsaw puzzle, would you use it?

There are AI tools around and some work decently well:

- Logic has session players. I don’t think they’re AI, but they are decent at putting up the skeleton of a song.

- AI-powered stem-splitting tools help you pick apart songs you like and figure out how they work.

- AI-powered song mastering tools produce dubious output. I have gone through multiple iterations with AI-powered tools and ended up happier just mastering the song myself.

LLMs seem like the great failure here.

[Ancapistani]

> If you had an AI assistant that could help you put together a jigsaw puzzle, would you use it?

It depends.

Is the puzzle a modern commercial jigsaw puzzle? Of course I wouldn't use it.

Is the puzzle a unique ancient Sumerian tablet that was just accidentally shattered and in pieces on the ground, but I need the information on it immediately? Absolutely.

[littlekey]

I'm not sure if this helps further the analogy or not, but I would use an AI if it could help with the annoying first part of the puzzle where you just have to spread out the pieces and flip them all over.

[kfrzcode]

If you're not already aware of it, check out onelook.com

[Humphrey]

- Most time is spent in the iPhone's Notes & Voice Memo apps.

- I try Rhymezone, but it rarely helps me find a word I hadn't already though of.

- The Complete Rhyming Dictionary [1] as it also helps find great family rhymes - but is a very manual process.

- ChatGPT voice chat for object writing - mostly just because I'm more of a vocal processor - I forbid it from writing anything, and instruct it clearly to just listen and give me a list of the metaphors, imagery, and descriptive words that I tell it. I've always struggled with motivation to do object writing, but I quite enjoy doing it audibly like this.

- ChatGPT as a proof-reader. Eg "Review the following song for me. What would new listeners think the song is about and saying". You need to be careful though, because it will often tell you stupid stuff like "the melody is great" even though you haven't shared a melody.

- ChatGPT as a sounding board when I'm battling over a very specific phrase or wording. More as a sounding board though, as I usually don't use it's suggestions.

- Logic Pro - The latest version lets you add chords and have it auto play some basic AI session players - which is great for fleshing out the basic ideas, and having something I can play on repeat why I write lyrics. Once I'm happy with the song, I'll then start replacing the AI tracks with human created tracks.

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Complete-Rhyming-Dictionary-Clemen...

[nprateem]

Chatgpt: "There's no such thing as a wonderwall. Listeners won't understand it or like it."

[obeats]

For lyrics, I currently use Google Keep and hugely resent myself for it.

What I want is to be able to write lyrics as easily as plaintext, but with manually assignment of meter, rhythm etc, while also being able to "fork" lyrics at a point and be able to work on different threads, keep track of alternative lyrics on a phrase level too. Being able to sync that up with some basic music notation (e.g. keys and percussion) would get me 90% of the way to where I want to be when it comes to writing at the computer. I think I have a coherent design for such a software in my head but am unsure if it really is what I need or is just a whimsical distraction from not writing good enough lyrics yet. Would be interested to hear if anyone's seen anything like this (can't say I've exhaustively looked).

[setsewerd]

Late response here that might not be useful to you, but I mostly use Google docs for lyrics (on both my phone and laptop) and tend to rely on bullets for alternative lines.

This is fine for 1-2 alternate versions of a given line, but would get clunky beyond that. I imagine if I wanted to fork a song further than just a few alternate lines, I could insert a 2-column table and continue the song in each column.

It's rudimentary, but if you're worried that making your own software for it is just a form of advanced procrastination, something like Docs might be more manageable than Keep.

[jareklupinski]

> What I want is to be able to write lyrics as easily as plaintext, ... while also being able to "fork" lyrics at a point and be able to work on different threads, keep track of alternative lyrics on a phrase level too.

made me think of how sometimes i use ide "code folding" features to see just the first lines of a series of easily collapsable lists of text blocks

[sbpayne]

I have been building my own app for this recently.

Its very early, but I have been shaping 3 songs with it already and am starting to get some friends to try it.

I am self taught with songwriting/music so I think it might reflect my own idiosyncratic songwriting process more than anything else at the moment.

Happy to open up a preview if anyone is interested though.

Shoot me an email if interested (in profile)

[Humphrey]

What does the app provide? I have long considered creating an app that combines Notes with Voice Memos with a way of tracking alternative ideas for each line or section.

[dwnw]

Hardware is better at this: notebook, pencil, baseball bat.

"AI art" is plagiarism and not an art at all.

[__d]

I’m interested in the plagiarism perspective.

I feel like LLMs are not too dissimilar to humans. We listen to a lifetime of music, read text, watch videos, etc. and when we come to create something all of that influences what we produce.

Like if you’ve listened largely to western music, and you look for a note to complete a provided two-note sequence, your choice is informed by that listening history. A non-western trained person is likely to pick a different note. Similar analogies can be made for eg English phrases, or even topics for songs.

There’s clearly a boundary between influenced by and copied. Is it the same for generative AI as it is for humans?

[latexr]

> baseball bat

Could you expand on this? How does a baseball bat help you in songwriting?

[dougb5]

Allow me to plug a dictionary/thesaurus site I've been running for decades called OneLook (https://onelook.com). Although it's not specifically aimed at songwriters, it does attract many of them as users. Over the past thirty years, I've added all sorts of brainstorming features for creative writers—like the ability to search for words by description, to match words with a given meter, and more recently to discover which colors a word might evoke or vice versa.

(I’m also the creator of RhymeZone so I'll plug that too! I no longer operate it, but I can pass along any feature requests you might have to its new owners.)

[kfrzcode]

Huge, huge fan of the entire Datamuse stack. You have done incredible work toward building a mega-useful cognitive exploration tool, ontology and super-power for word nerds. Software and data which I would love to pay for.

Also OP might like https://www.onelook.com/spruce/

[ArlenBales]

Wow, OneLook and the rest of your Datamuse collection will help me a lot. Thanks!

[fluxic]

Hey Doug, huge fan of yours. Thank you for everything.

[elseleigh]

I wrote my own; Lyricist, to integrate rhymes, synonyms and antonyms without having to switch applications or browser tabs. It's a small, not very fancy, web page you can run anywhere, even from your own hard drive. You have to sign up to a third party to use the rhymes, synonyms etc, but it's easy and free.

https://www.else.co.nz/code/creating-lyricist

[shw1n]

I was just asking a producer friend today about this — does anyone know of any tools that let you “clip” parts of songs with notes?

When I’m listening to music I’ll occasionally hear some element I really like and note it down via text for later

Eg “synth at 1:35, really cool — be great for a cyberpunk track”

I’d love to be able to hear these clips with one click (almost like Splice)

Considering building for myself if something doesn’t already exist

[dwnw]

I've seen this on SoundCloud, but that was a while ago.

[paulmakl]

Right now I write lots of EDM. I plug in something with lots of unquantized delay on it and just make noise. I listen back to it and hear songs in the rhythms from the delay trails. That gets me started. From there I finish up in Live adding kick, bass and whatever else comes to mind.

You could use AI generated music this way, generate some songs and sample snippets or find interesting rhythms.

[agentultra]

I don’t use any software. Just notebook, pen, 4-track tape recorder, an SM-58, a cheap Beringer pre-amp, and some DT-770’s.

[scelerat]

same. to me, it's the immediacy that matters; I want as little getting in the way of getting my idea in draft form quickly. A real paper notepad and just the voice record feature of my phone are my main go-tos.

One of the biggest dangers of software solutions is that everything is so easy that it's super easy to just start playing with things that don't matter instead of actually working on the music itself. Sometimes keeping the tools simple helps keep the focus on the real work.

[davidw]

"Three cords and the truth"

[tylernigrofr]

I always test new LLMs to see how they expand on lyrics that I've started to see how well they expand on them - and what they generate is just lame and cringe. The only thing I've found that seems to have AI trained in a sort of artistic way is Suno's ReMi lyrics model - but it's purely for generative purposes with no real way of interacting with existing lyrics. It would be nice if Suno implemented a lyrics editor that uses their ReMi model. I'd really have a use for an AI assisted songwriting tool - like Cursor, but for artistic songwriting that doesn't totally suck.

[ansc]

I use https://lazyjot.com. It has a lot of weirder imperfect rhymes than other rhyme dictionaries, which makes it a lot more useful for me. Makes me a bit more creative. No AI generated slop yet.

[kypro]

> I'm not interested in AI generated slop, but something that makes intelligent suggestions as you write.

I used to find Hooktheory was good for this. It can suggest chords and explore popular chord progressions. You can also export melodies of popular songs which can be useful for creating your own that are structurally similar. I used to create something I'd like the vibe of there, then export it to MIDI and into Ableton to build on it.

[decasia]

I always like writing the first verse on paper, then typing it up and maybe writing the other verses/the chorus while trying to figure out the music at the same time... I usually just write lyrics in a very simple text editor.

I like Rhymezone too, and the MacOS dictionary's thesaurus, as they sometimes help me think of words I don't come up with otherwise. But I feel like with songs - the good stuff always comes when you let yourself listen to your unconscious, like all the really good material and images are buried in there somewhere and you just have to trick yourself into finding them.

[dottjt]

This is actually an area that I find a little frustrating.

Generally to produce music you need to use a DAW. Ableton, Logic Pro etc. What sucks is you can't easily just assign a lyric to a note. Like it's just not a feature they provide.

It's something you can do in MuseScore because it uses traditional notation, but it would be great to be able to do it in something like Ableton.

[dwnw]

Yes, lyrics are usually part of a traditional notation "score". Of course, Ableton is too hip to provide traditional notation with a score editor, but quite a few other popular DAWs do, including Logic:

https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/add-lyrics-to-a-sco...

[dietrichepp]

Logic has support for adding lyrics. Create a MIDI region, select it, and press N to open the score editor. Make sure the inspector is open on the left, press I to open it if necessary. There is a block which says “part box” and inside it, LYRIC. This lets you put lyrics in the score.

That said, it’s not one of the strengths of Logic to use it this way.

[agarv]

Studio One has a lyrics track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_XPEXE1HHQ

[KloneKilla]

For music, typically Bitwig or Renoise for sketching out the song's structure, export to audio files, then mix + master in Bitwig. For lyrics it's usually vocal chops with Splice + Renoise or using ChatGPT for a rough version that's tweaked by hand.

[norir]

Not software, but I am a big fan of the boss 505 table top looper. It is a great tool for building up parts and I love not staring at a screen while making music. Several of my friends swear by loopy pro for similar purposes, but I like the hardware solution here better.

[imaginationra]

Just finishing an original full length musical- I wrote all the music and lyrics using my human brain and Reason software. The only AI tool I use is Audimee.com to convert my singing voice into 8-10 other singers for different roles + harmonies in the musical.

[mattpope]

nvim. No distractions. AI classifies as a distraction from expression (to me).

[meezyman216]

Write my verses in google keep, record, produce, mix, and master in Studio One