If you’re a guitarist, you’ve probably heard of or used the Ultimate Guitar app. Android and iOS, to find chords and lyrics to thousands of popular songs. If you produce podcasts or record your own songs, you’ve probably also heard of Audacity, which we named the best open-source audio editor in our Best Audio Editors of 2024 poll. Muse Group, the maker of both apps, was an early adopter of AI technology and is now using it to turn people into better guitarists.
As an enthusiastic amateur guitarist I have the Ultimate Guitar Website and app for his catalog of tabs for popular songs. While not quite proper music notation, tabs are a step up from simple lyrics and chord lists. Tabs give you a visual way to see where to place your fingers on the strings without having to know how to read music. So if you want to know how to play Wonder Wallyou search for it in Ultimate Guitar and you’ll find the lyrics and chords, or the tab versions that people have submitted.
Usually it’s up to you to hammer out the song next, but Ultimate Guitar subscribers have access to an AI-powered practice mode that can detect if you’re hitting the right notes at the right times and give you feedback. It can also adjust the scrolling speed of the on-screen music notation as you play, using AI to determine where you are in the song. We asked Martin Keary, VP of Product at Muse Group, about how the company was using AI to help people learn instruments, and whether Listening Mode spelled the end for traditional guitar teachers.
“At Muse Group, we take the approach that you can never really replace a guitar teacher with AI,” Martin told us, “but what you can do is have AI help them teach. If you think about it, a lot of guitar teachers give you homework, it’s scales, it’s chords, all those things that the AI can make you better at by telling you if you’re doing it right. But so much of playing guitar is physical, it’s correcting your hand position, it’s correcting your posture as you’re playing. You’re always going to need a teacher for that.”
The AI tools in Ultimate Guitar require a subscription, which costs $39.99 / £39.99 / AU$59.99 per year. Can it, I wondered, teach a tone-deaf person to play guitar?
“Well, tone deaf, I’m not so sure, but I’ll say yes!” says Martin. “I think that with the help of Practice Mode you get such direct feedback on what you’re playing that you have to improve over time.”
Forgive me if I kiss the sky
AI has also been used in other Muse Group products, such as the popular Audacity audio editor. Audacity is very popular, as it has always been a great free option for recording audio on your Mac or PC. There is a plugin called OpenVINO that uses AI to take each recording and split the different instruments into different tracks, which you can toggle on and off. So if you wanted to jam along to something on the drums, you could remove the drum track from the song and then play along with it. The plugin runs 100% on your local PC using your processor, rather than calling on servers in the cloud for help.
Martin is keen to emphasise that Muse Group takes a strong ethical position on AI. “One thing we’ve done is build our own AI technology and make sure it’s only trained on music that’s not copyrighted.”
As the recent RIAA lawsuit over popular AI music creation software Suno has proven, we are in uncharted waters when it comes to the legality of AI and the use of copyrighted material for training purposes. ChatGPT faces similar issues.
Another thing AI is really good at is imitating famous people in the form of chatbots. What does Martin think of the idea of getting guitar tips from an AI-generated Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, for example?
“This is something we’ve talked about a little bit,” he says. “It’s certainly possible, but it would have to be done with the full consent of the individual artists, or their estates. I imagine it would be incredible if someone like Jimi Hendrix could show you how he would play a particular piece of music that you’re trying to learn. I should note that we’re not actively developing that idea at this point.”
If all the legalities 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 this, man, but I like it this way better, here I’ll show you how…”