Song Belongs to Room

Supercharged Mega Steroid Karaoke: a sound engineer mixed with a lo-fi Prince and a lifelong music obsessive spending a few months producing 43+ cover songs spanning multiple genres.

This is mainly a vocal performance study with a deep dive into arrangement, production, and reinterpretation. Some songs stay close to the original performances. Others wander far off the map, with new arrangements, extended and wild harmonies, added solos, genre shifts, reverbed out theremin, unexpected instrumentation, and plenty of creative detours. Lots of wall of sound approach.

The project also serves as an exploration into tasteful human-AI collaboration. The AI often provided a surprisingly dynamic framework, occasionally delivering musical parts that genuinely blew me away and inspired me to raise my own performances to match. I also added 5-10 tracks of original instrumentation to each. All vocals are performed by Brice Frillici, and every track was rebuilt by importing stems, turning lots of knobage, cutting and pasting arrangements, adding effects, doubling tracks, recording new parts, bridges, and transitions, and generally tricking out the songs into new forms.

If I had to put a number on it, I'd call the project roughly 65/35 human-created. Nothing here would sound remotely like these cover songs without the vocal performances and corrected arrangements. So often, the AI spits out a basic chord structure and then sometimes adds a few crazy-cool licks. Rare though. Mostly,, it just makes an excellent click track to build on and add production decisions, and countless hours of editing in Logic.. The job took place 90% in Logic, so the full effect felt exactly like when I make my own fully original human music. Same tracks and sound gear applied. AI proved to be the best backup band I've ever had the privilege to play with—it did exactly what it was told, and occasionally much more.

Mostly, though, this was a chance to spend time with some of my favorite songs of all time, playing with the greats in intimate ways and having an absurd amount of fun making music. In ways, a learning tool as well. As I practice their jives and morph and play with mine to fit.