AI-Powered Jimi Hendrix Guitar Lessons: The Future of Music Education?
If you’re a guitar player, you’ve probably heard of the Ultimate Guitar app for Android and iOS, which helps you find chords and lyrics for thousands of popular songs. As someone who produces podcasts and records their own music, you might also be familiar with Audacity, the best open-source audio editor we named in our audio editor roundup. But what you might not know is that Muse Group, the creator of both these apps, is using AI to turn people into better guitarists.
As a keen amateur guitarist, I’ve often used the Ultimate Guitar website and app for its vast catalogue of song tabs. Tabs show you where to put your fingers on the strings in a visual way, without having to know how to read music. So, if you want to learn how to play “Wonderwall,” you can search for it on Ultimate Guitar and find the lyrics and chords, or the tab versions people have submitted.
Subscribers to Ultimate Guitar now have access to an AI-powered Practice Mode, which can detect if you’re hitting the right notes at the right time and give you feedback. It can even adjust the scrolling speed of the musical notation on screen as you play, using AI to determine where you are in the song. We spoke to Martin Keary, VP of Product at Muse Group, about how the company is using AI to help people learn instruments.
“At Muse Group, we’ve taken the approach that you can never really replace a guitar teacher with AI,” Martin told us. “But what you can do is get AI to help them teach. If you think about it, what a lot of a guitar teacher gives you as homework is scales, it’s playing chords, all those things the AI can help you get better at by telling you if you’re doing it right. But so much of playing guitar is physical, it’s fixing your hand position, it’s fixing your posture as you play. You’ll always need a teacher for that.”
But can AI really teach you how to play guitar if you’re tone-deaf? Martin thinks so. “I think with the help of Practice Mode you get such direct feedback on what you’re playing that over time you’d have to improve.”
Muse Group is also using AI in other products, like the popular Audacity audio editor. Audacity is much loved because it’s a great free option for recording audio on your Mac or PC. There’s a plug-in called OpenVINO that uses AI to take any recording and separate the different instruments out into different tracks, which you can turn on or off. So, if you want to jam along to something on the drums, you could remove the drum track from a song and then play along to it. The plug-in runs 100% on your local PC using your processor, rather than calling on servers from the cloud for help.
Martin is keen to stress the strong ethical position Muse Group is taking with AI. “One thing we’ve done is build our own AI technology ourselves, and make sure it’s only trained on music that has no copyright associated with it.”
As we’re seeing with the recent RIAA lawsuit against popular AI music creation software Suno, we’re in uncharted waters when it comes to the legality of AI and its use of copyrighted material for training purposes. ChatGPT is encountering similar issues.
Martin also thinks about the idea of getting guitar tips from an AI-generated Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain. “This is something we’ve discussed a bit,” he says. “It’s certainly possible, but it would have to be done with the complete agreement from the individual artists, or their estates. I’d imagine it would be incredible if somebody like Jimi Hendrix could demonstrate how he’d approach playing a given piece of music you’re trying to learn. I should mention at this point that we are not actively developing this idea right now.”
But if all the legal agreements were in place, I personally would love a guitar lesson from AI Jimi Hendrix. I can just imagine him saying, “Well, you could play it like that man, but I think this way is much more beautiful, here let me show you how…”
