Frequently Asked Questions

Who are you?

51 year old southerner, heavy metal fanatic, amateur tattoo artist, published author and dungeon master of my local table top roleplaying game.

Where do the song ideas come from?

The majority of lyrics when the concept was created were "poems" that go all the way back to 1990. I used to fill notebooks with my 'lyrics' while in high school. That is the bulk of the High Relief music I create and some of the other bands. Now, since my passion for this has been re-awoken, I write specifically for certain bands like Fat Hearse, Totem, Bent Starfish and some others.

I carry a small notebook with me everywhere I go now and will scribble ideas or lyric snippets when I'm stuck waiting on my wife inside of a doctor's appointment, grocery store or anything else where I choose to sit in my vehicle and wait.

How is the music made?

I have tried all the big AI platforms (Udio, Suno, Mureka), not a single one of them is perfectly flawless and I like to have more authorship and control over my final output. So whichever platform I end up using (some are better for specific genres) I will always break down the song into stems and mix the final output myself using Audacity.

I will double instruments, add effects, pitch shift, bpm, etc. I have a preferred method for each band I 'produce' and can usually knock out a song in their style in less than an hour from lyric creation to final mix since I have streamlined the process. Nothing ever makes it straight out of the AI without some hefty modifications.

Are you a 'real' musician?

I would consider what I do to be more in line with a producer or studio, I don't perform any instrumentation but I create mood, tone and story from my lyrics and compliment those with tempo, emotion and genre with my edited AI instrumentation.

Why do some songs appear by two different bands?

I try to keep that to a minimum so that each song can have it's own identity and live within the band it was created for, but it's also hard to resist seeing what a hard hitting High Relief song might sound like by Fat Hearse or Nahira.

It is very uncommon but sometimes I have and will revisit a favorite lyric and re-interpret it with a different band or just straight up do a cover song of one of my own.

Have you ever actually had a band?

I was gifted a cheap red electric guitar for Christmas when I was 13 years old and did my best to learn to play. I became... uh... let's say, adequate, but not very good. Likewise I had friends that were of differing skill levels and with different instruments. So yes, I have had bands; probably 4 or 5 before I turned 18 and to be honest we sucked!

Isn't AI bad/evil?

I don't buy into the sentiment that floats across the internet about how horrible AI is, whether its art, video, music, etc. Everything is a tool and as much as people like to cry foul of any new technology since the dawn of time that threatens their livelihood, it's not going anywhere.

My lyrics only ever existed as words on a page. This new ability to express them musically has become one of the greater pleasures of my life. I am sure there are countless people that are finally able to artistically express themselves like myself that feel the same way.

Do you really own the music you make?

While I can't copyright the instrumentation of any of the songs I have created, the lyrics are purely mine and protected by copyright law and as such the combined sum of instrumentation with lyrics is unique to me and my 'production' of said content; which, as of now, is considered copyrightable by the copyright office of the United States.

So yes, if I have generated the instrumentation using a service that allows commercialization and my lyrics are human created and combined with that instrumentation, then at this writing I do 'own' the music I make.

Isn't this soulless?

Is there really a guitar virtuoso leaning heavily on his strings as emotion and intent pour through his fingers into his playing? No... but I have certainly tweaked songs and created lyrics to evoke an emotion with each song, whether that be humor, horror, desire or a number of other emotions. Each song has a part of me in it, so it is not soulless.

How can I do this?

Well, there are numerous online platforms that allow you create music. The sad reality though is, unless you craft your own lyrics, prompts and do some editing magic it all tends to sound very similar in the end.

What about the lawsuits?

I am aware that the record labels are currently filing lawsuits against the AI platforms that generate music regarding their training data being lifted from copyrighted material. As a creator this is a powerful outlet for me and I will ride this wave as long as it lasts.

I don't believe the technology will go away; the cat is out of the bag. Will it change, morph into something entirely new or be co-opted by the big studios? I don't know

Isn't this the death of real music?

No more than streaming was the death of radio, or Napster was the end of mp3's. None of my bands can perform live, we can't tour and give an audience an authentic concert experience. There is definitely a deluge of crap out there, both real music and AI-generated. If something is good and people enjoy listening to it, I don't think it matters how it was created.

For a metal fan, what is more sacrosanct, getting blown away by a new song that kicks ass, even if it's AI, or experiencing a Gwar show, or if you were lucky seeing one of the last times Motorhead or Ozzy Osbourne performed live. For myself, I will always choose the latter no matter where this road takes me.