Remember late 2023 and 2024? You would type “sad indie song about rain” into Suno or Udio, click generate, and pull the lever 150 times hoping the RNG gods would give you a coherent melody.
Most people treated it like a casino slot machine.
Now in 2026, with open weights, stem deconstruction, lyric prosody planning, and real audio post-production, it feels like we’ve crossed a threshold. The generator isn’t the artist; the generator is just an extraordinary acoustic synthesizer.
How has your personal workflow changed over the past year? Are you spending more time in the prompt box or in your DAW?
I spend 80% of my time in REAPER now. The generation phase takes maybe an hour to get the raw harmonic bones; the next three days are spent editing vocal breaths, fixing EQ masking, re-tracking bass lines, and mastering. If you aren’t doing the work, it shows immediately.