I’ve noticed there are two kinds of people using AI. You’ve got to work out which one you are as it will make big differences to your life in the long term.
A couple of months ago I found myself standing on a stage, blinded by lights. I plugged in my new Takamine guitar and positioned myself in front of a mic about to sing in front of strangers at a local pub for only the 5th time in my adult life. I was nervous but excited at testing something new.
Little did the audience know, but I’d rigged up a 2 channel recording system to help me isolate the vocals and guitar. This was so I could go over every word with my music teacher the next day but also to allow me to remix the two channels in Garage Band and upload an “unplugged” version to Instagram to share with friends. You see, the previous week I’d got someone to record my last performance but the on-device mic had picked up the audience singing along instead. This time I was prepared…
My recording system was an elaborate setup of audio transformers, direct input boxes, audio interfaces all shoved into a briefcase while an old MacBook sat on top running custom recording software I’d built in a spare hour before the gig. Yes an hour!
The setup was piggy-backed onto the input cables that were going back to the mixing desk so I had tapped in at the source transparently and the open-mic guy could mix freely just as he did before. It worked fantastically!
Let me be honest with you… ChatGPT helped me so much. I’ve got years of coding experience but I’ve never captured 2 audio interface channels in 24-bit simultaneously as separate time-stamped wav file before.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t just type in one magic prompt and boom it was there. the first time the app wouldn’t work… there were issues with file padding, USB device names, timestamps, file locations etc but my point is I used it to help me learn. It was like having a teacher give me a crash course in audio recording. If I knew what to ask it, it would tell me anything I needed to know. I still had to join the dots but someone was laying them out for me. In the age of AI you need to become a generalist that’s good at “joining it all up”.
It was the same with the hardware. From previous posts, I’m sure you know I’ve done quite a lot of electronics before but music was a completely new… I didn’t even know what an XLR connector was (it is like the musical equivalent of a USB connector FYI 😳). ChatGPT helped me get up to speed very quickly. I soon knew everything about audio transformers, guitar impedance, even the budget-friendly hardware I needed. It’s interesting because I think if I hadn’t had my electrical knowledge, I would have struggled. It would have been a stretch too far.
In summary, I think you need to use AI to help you grow into new knowledge areas that you had no idea you could reach before, rather than just letting it build you stuff. Those are the two polarities and it reminds me of a Tony Robbins saying I heard in a Diary of a CEO podcast… “if you’re not growing, you’re dying”.