"Initially, I was uncertain. However, after seeing how my friend utilized it in his studio, everything became clear: House legends Alan Braxe and Fred Falke discuss their embrace of AI in music production."] - Guitar | Technique

Alan Braxe & Fred Falke on AI and the new music tech that excites them – YouTube

Everybody and their mother seems to have an opinion about AI right now, but it’s still interesting to hear how real musicians are incorporating the tech into their creative workflow.

We recently sat down for an interview with French house icons Alan Braxe and Fred Falke, and were perhaps a little surprised to hear both enthusiastically discussing how they use generative AI tool Suno as a part of their music making, albeit in slightly different ways.

“For me, Suno is really interesting,” Falke says. “I didn’t get it at first. I saw it as kind of like a replacement thing [for real musicians].

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“Then I visited one of my friends. He’s a great producer. He was working on his new project and he was like, ‘You know, I just did this whole thing with Suno.’ But the way he was using it opened my eyes.”

That breakthrough, for Falke, came from seeing generative AI used as a sample source, to create raw material that producers would previously have sampled from old records or drawn from a sample pack. As he explains, when he uses Suno now, he’ll approach it with the intention of creating a specific sound, such as a certain style of drum loop or melodic phrase.

“If you see [AI] like that as a tool, the power is immense,” Falke says. “Just recently there was an update, and you can throw in a wet vocal and it can really remove all the reverbs, all the delay, and you have a dry vocal that sounds just perfect. And that’s great.”

Braxe, on the other hand, explains how he also uses AI as a tool to inspire new arrangement ideas.

“I started to work with Suno like six months ago,” he tells us. “It’s very interesting most of the time. I’ll put my instrumental into it and then I’ll ask it to rearrange it. There is always something good coming from Suno.”

“It’s really amazing because [modern sampling] started, I don’t know, 40 years ago, and it was still tangible,” Braxe continues. “You were sampling an instrument, a sound, or a record, and you had to store it on [a floppy disc] or a hard drive. But now with Suno and all these artificial intelligence instruments, it’s coming from nowhere. It’s not even the notion of sampling or whatever. It’s one stage further.”

Alan Braxe & Fred Falke – Intro [2023 Remaster] (Official Video) – YouTube

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Braxe and Flake are particularly interesting voices when it comes to the intersection between sampling and AI, given how important samples are to the French house scene they both made their names in.

When we spoke to the pair recently, it was to mark the 25th anniversary reissue of their cult classic Intro, a track built around a sample of The Jets’ 1985 track Crush on You. Before that, Braxe had breakthrough success with Stardust’s Music Sounds Better with You, a track co-created with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter that makes heavy use of a sample from Chaka Khan’s song Fate.

Falke, meanwhile, first got started in electronic music as a session bassist, often recruited by artists to replay samples in order to avoid copyright issues.

In Falke’s eyes, the use of AI as a source for sample material is just a continuation of the way producers have been using session musicians for decades.

“If you go to [use AI] knowing exactly what you want, it’s just like being a producer in the ’60s,” he says. “[They] would go into a studio, they’ve written all the scores, they would give the charts to the musicians, and say ‘play this, play that, blah, blah, blah’. It’s the same, isn’t it?”

This does, it must be said, gloss over the somewhat murky issue of what these generative AI tools are being trained on.

Despite these interesting ways both musicians are embracing AI, it would be inaccurate to say that the technology is at the core of either’s music making. In our full interview, the pair explain how their music making setups have evolved over the years, and the vintage gear that still plays a pivotal role.

For Falke, any AI sits alongside a studio filled with classic hardware synths, and what he calls “all my 20 or 30 year old gear.” Braxe, who has spoken to us in the past about struggles with decision paralysis when working with music software, has also started working regularly with modular synthesizers in more recent years.

“I think it’s quite exciting to work with these [AI] tools as well, not all the time,” Braxe tells us. “But maybe 15% or 20% of the time I work with these tools.”