AI Music Revolution

Why I'm Not Impressed by Your Prompt

• Josh

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Prompts matter. But somewhere along the way the AI music community turned them into the destination instead of the on-ramp. Threads with hundreds of upvotes sharing "the perfect Suno prompt" like it's the secret to the kingdom. Creators copying those prompts, generating something generic, and wondering why their music sounds like everyone else's.

The truth is simple: a great prompt is the equivalent of knowing how to write words. It's necessary. It's not sufficient.

In this episode:

The manifesto — why the prompt is a translation layer, not the creative work itself. And what actually separates a Director from someone who found a good template on Reddit.

The system — four things you need documented before you write a single word of your prompt. In order. This is what makes the prompt write itself.

Plus a clip from my conversation with William Harper — classically trained pianist, pastor, and Red Lab Access member who studied transformer architecture to figure out how to beat the machine. What he discovered about adjectives and attention will reframe how you think about prompting entirely.

The full William Harper interview is available now as Episode 2 of Red Lab Conversations. Link in the show notes.

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SPEAKER_00

Hello and welcome to the AI Music Revolution. I am your host, Josh Gavilvan, the founder of JG Beats Lab. I'm gonna tell you why I'm not impressed by your prompt. That's the whole episode. That's the whole argument. Prompts matter. I want to be very clear about that. But somewhere along the way, the AI music community turned them into the destination instead of the on-ramp. Threads with hundreds of upvotes sharing the perfect Suno prompt, like it's the secret to the kingdom or something. And then you have creators copying those prompts, generating something generic and wondering, why does their music sound like everybody else's? Today we talk about why that happens, what actually separates a director from someone who has found a good template on Reddit, and what a classically trained pianist from Guyana figured out about transformer architecture that reframes the entire prompting conversation. This is the AI music revolution. Let's get into it. First up, we are going to talk about why your prompt isn't the creative work, it's the translation of the creative work. And there's a very important difference between those two things. Let's get into it. Prompts matter. I want to be clear about that up front. But here's the problem with how the AI music community talks about prompts. They've turned them into the destination instead of the on-ramp. Every week I see threads with hundreds of upvotes sharing the perfect Suno prompt, like it's a secret to the kingdom. And every week I see creators copy those prompts, generate something generic, and wonder why their music sounds like everyone else's. Here's the honest truth. A great prompt is the equivalent of knowing how to write words. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. Knowing how to write words isn't the same as knowing how to write a compelling story. The most important work in AI music production happens before you even open Suno. Before you write a single prompt. Before you generate anything. You need to understand one question. Who is your artist? Not what genre do you want? Not what sounds cool today. No. Who is this artist? What do they always do? What would they never do? What does their sonic signature feel like? What is this EP trying to say? If you don't know who your artist is, your prompt is just a guess. A well-worded guess, maybe, but still a guess. The prompt is not where the creative work happens. The creative work happens before the prompt. The prompt is simply where you translate it. Think about what a prompt actually is. It's a bridge, a translation layer between the language of your creative vision and the language Suno understands. If you have a real, documented, thought-through artistic identity, the prompt is the tool that carries that vision into the machine. If you don't have a vision, the prompt is just noise dressed up in music terminology. A Rosetta Stone with nothing written on one side is just a rock. The people getting generic interchangeable outputs, the ones making music that sounds like everyone else's. They have prompts. Sometimes they have very good ones. The difference between them and a director isn't the quality of the prompt. It's everything that came before it and everything that came after it. The prompt gets you onto the pyramid. But it does not move you up it. Next up, we're going to talk about what you actually need to have documented before you write a single word of your prompt. There are four things. Do them in order. This is the system that makes the prompt write itself. Let's get into it. So if the prompt is a translation layer, what are you actually translating? Well, that's what this segment is all about. Before you write a single word of your prompt, there are four things you need to have documented. Not in your head, I mean actually written down. First, your artist identity, a name, a sonic signature, three to five constants that make every track feel like it belongs in the same world. Genre, subgenre, vocal character, primary instruments, production vibe. If you can't describe your artist in two sentences, you're not ready to prompt yet. Second, uh the emotional target. Not a mood word, an emotional target. Sad is a mood word. The feeling of driving away from something you're not coming back to is an emotional target. Suno responds to specificity. Give it an address, not a zip code. Third, the structural brief. How long is this track? What sections do you want? Where does it build? Where does it strip back? Explicit, accountable, ordered structure instructions are the most reliable lever you have on any version of Suno. Use them. Fourth, reference context. One track that lives in the same sonic neighborhood as what you're building. Not for Suno to copy, but for you to stay honest about what you're actually going for. When you have all four of those things documented, your prompt writes itself. You're not hoping the machine lands in the right zip code anymore. You are actually giving it an address. That's the system. Identity, emotional target, structure, reference. In that order before you even open Suno. The three song sprint is built entirely around this process. Five sessions that walk you through building all four of these foundations and coming out the other side with a Finnish master DP. It's $29 standalone or free inside of Red Lab Access at jgbeatslab.com. Finally, let's hear from William Harper. William is a classically trained pianist, a cruise ship band leader, turned pastor, and a Red Lab Access member who has been releasing AI-assisted music. He did something I don't see many creators do. He went and he studied how these models actually think at a technical level, specifically the transformer architecture that powers tools like Psuno and ChatGPT. And what he figured out completely reframed how he approaches prompting. This is a clip from his full interview that dropped this Tuesday as episode two of the Red Lab Conversations. If you want to hear the full conversation, the worship music background, the loopback system capture trick, and his closing words on why the ship is leaving the shore, go find that episode. Links in the show notes. But this part, this is the part that connects directly to everything we've been talking about today. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01

I started to do some work and I found out what the um the originators of AI, these AI machines, these generators, what is it about? There was a paper introduced on what you call transformers. It's a breakthrough AI model that powers modern tools like ChatGPT by using what you call attention to smart focus on key parts of data instead of processing everything step by step. That was very transformative for me because I get to know how this thing is thinking. So the core idea, imagine you so let me show you how soon all things. Imagine you mixing a track in your day, like Pro Tools or whatever. Um the old AI methods, um, they listen to audio sequentially, like playing a song from start to finish, which was slow, and it that was weird, and we operate like that on a human level. The transformer now pays attention to every element at once, and it decides what's important, like how a kick drum sinks with the eyelids on a regular track, making it yeah, that's how it's thinking. So the reason I became obsessed with that because I really want to beat the machine. So what what this what this machine does, it it deals with attention. So your prompts are very critical because you tell it where to put attention to, but it already sees everything there. That little information will change everybody. This thing, when you send a reference track to it, it analyzes everything. Your prompts actually tell it where to focus, it works on attention. A prompt is what tells this machine is not learning, that's not what it is doing. It is quick, it is advanced, it is not trying to get better. You cannot get better than that. It knows everything. So as you put that thing up there, it analyzes everything. What your prompt does is to say, This is what I want you to pay attention to. So you have to see prompt as attention. In the world of AI, there is only one part of English that you need to understand. It is adjectives. Because adjectives describe. So I'm gonna give a secret away that will never go vague, will never become outdated, even a million years from now. The more you know how to describe what you do, the machine will be a slave to you. Your greatest weakness would is in not understanding the language of the music you're trying to create. So so the next great, I believe, the next great reservoir of um protected data will be what you call things. People are going to have codes. Like, like the next the next reservoir, the next world of secrecy will be what I call that drum, what I call that thing, because the reason you will not be able to get what I get out of Suno, you do not know what I call what I do. You do not know what you you have not found what to tell it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Because you're thinking, oh, let me say a piano chap. Maybe it doesn't hear, it doesn't hear what you want it to hear when you say chap. It might respond to what you want when it hears chopper chap. And there is where I beat you every time because I understand that it hears chopper chop. So I'm going to say this for all of the naysayers, those who think that AI is cheating. I actually want to say that AI will make a lot of people not be able to play. Because what is going to happen? Those of us who can command the machine will become gods in the earth. So let me tell you why you are important to me. Because I believe that the mind has very addictive nature. It is it, it's it, our minds as creatives, we become junkies to the last innovation in our space. We are junkies. We need to go to reap. Let me tell you what I mean by that. If you only knew how to play drums with sticks, and somebody told you you can play your drums with your slippers, you're gonna have a problem. Because your mind will not permit you to be comfortable playing drums with your slippers. We don't do that. You have to have enough reinforcing of the mind. So this is what is happening, and this is where we musicians, people like yourself, is important. What makes you a god amongst us? You have rewritten or you have content on the next library or reservoir of mindsets that we need around this piece of this tool. So what people have to do is to take what you have written and keep reading it so that our mindsets can shift from seeing AI or Suno as this piece of thing that is cheating us. But you gotta get past the noise of like, oh, AI is this, oh uh copyright law and all of the foolishness, all that is noise. That that's that's all of the things that's trying to get you not to plunge into the game. So when I when I when I when I bought your book first on, I bought one of your books on Amazon. I'm like, this dude, let me tell you the first thing I learned from you. Yeah, you reading your book, you made me realize that my music has money, like like music, um publishing is investment. So you know that I read your stuff. Yeah, I don't even think the music industry wants this guy to become popular because he's going to frick up the whole game.

SPEAKER_00

That was William Harper, classically trained pianist, pastor, and one of the most technically curious minds I've encountered in this space. And that adjectives point is the one I keep coming back to. The machine already sees everything. Your prompt tells it where to look. The more precisely you can describe what you hear in your head, the more control you actually have. That is not a prompting tip, that's a philosophy. And it's exactly what this episode has been about from the beginning. The prompt isn't where the creative work happens. The creative work happens before the prompt. The prompt is where you translate it. If today landed for you, if you're starting to see the difference between generating and directing, Red Lab Access is where that system lives in full. The books, the research, the blueprints, the community of directors doing this work every single day. One price, lifetime access, everything included now, and everything we add in the future. jgbeatslab.com slash red access. Links in the show notes. Red Lab Conversations drop every Tuesday. AI Music Revolution drops every Friday. Subscribe so you don't miss either one. The prompt gets you into the pyramid. Everything else moves you up it. See you next time.