Organic vs AI

Testing Suno 4.5+'s new audio feature

One of the more useful features of Suno 4.5+ is the way it allows an audio upload of up to 8 minutes, which obviously is more than enough required to upload an entire song. However, for reasons of copyright, one can only upload audio to which one has either the rights.

In order to test this feature, I uploaded a song recorded by my cover band, Booster Patrol, a folk song previously recorded by many others, including Johnny Cash and Marilyn Manson. I may be biased, but I genuinely think ours is the best version, as the guitarists did an excellent job with both their guitar and organ solos, and the producer gave it a driving grind that really suits the song. The only real weakness is the vocalist.

So that’s the all-organic original cover. After uploading it into Suno, I then remixed it as a Cover utilizing one of the Personas that I use for my Soulsigma band. The results were… compelling. The vocals are much better, the audio quality is comparable, and the overall vibe is more powerful, but two of the three solos were lost, and the artistry of the one that remained is a pale shadow of its former self.

So this is the Midnight Rider mix of God’s Gonna Cut You Down.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. I don’t know if Suno is going back and forth on what it permits its Premier users to do or not, but I know that I was able to create a Persona from an upload of an old original from one of our bands from the late 1980s, in order to recreate it at much higher audio quality than the MP3 made from a cassette tape more than three decades old. This worked really well, by the way, startlingly well, which may be why the ability to make Personas from uploads apparently vanished the next day.

But regardless, creating Covers from audio uploads is an effective, if imperfect means of audio restoration.

I then Created a new song by putting the lyrics to God’s Gonna Cut You Down into the system and cranking up the Weirdness to around 50 percent, thus resulting in what may be the first and only authentically 80’s New Wave version of the old folksong. It does have one vocal infelicity due to the online lyrics that needs to be fixed, but it turned out much, much better than I ever would have imagined.

So I’m both amused and delighted to present the Dancing on Your Grave mix of God’s Gonna Cut You Down.

The upshot is that what one can already achieve with Suno 4.5+ is almost beyond what we know to have been the historical limits of human musical imagination, and it’s only going to continue getting better and better in terms of quality and possibilities.