A few years ago David had the idea of releasing a retrospective album of all of his songs. The idea was sparked by the 50th anniversary of finishing his first complete song, Christ is Born in 1975. There are too many songs to fit on one album so they will be released in different volumes, perhaps 3 or 4 in total. These are all new recordings made with the help of AI technology.
Here is the playlist for Volume 1:
1.Beyond the Rainbow Bridge
2.When the World Drops In to Town
3.They’ll Be on the Rock This Christmas
4.You Can’t Tell a Newfie a Thing He Should Do
5.Pickleball Mama
6.Christ is Born
7.Mary, Did You Know Him?
8. So Long Ago (Our God goes with us)
9.With Compassion (As a parent holds a child)
10.The World God Imagines (The lion and bear)
11.Do You Think You Can Dance and Worship?
12.We Are a Rainbow (2025)
13.The Fruit of the Spirit
All songs written by David Kai except for Mary, Did You Know Him? with words by Flora Litt and music by Wayne Irwin and David Kai.
To play the album on Spotify, click here.
To play the album on Apple Music, click here.
A FEW NOTES ABOUT THE RECORDING PROCESS
While the use of Artificial Intelligence/AI in music production can be quite controversial, I believe that I am using it in a fair and balanced way. Here are some of the steps involved in my music production:
produce a demo of the song using voices generated by Emvoice on the Ableton Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), home studio recordings of keyboard and guitar parts and free drum samples found online. These are mixed together using the Audacity DAW;
the demo is fed into the SUNO AI music app which generates the voices and background instruments. Great care must be taken in order for the app not to overly change the melody, rhythms and harmonies, and numerous iterations of songs are usually required;
once suitable versions are found, they are put through Stem Separation in SUNO so that the tracks (e.g. vocals, piano, bass, guitar, drums, synth) can be worked on separately;
the stems are fed into Audacity where mastering and corrections of each track are made. This may involve up to 30 tracks - tweaking the vocals to keep them in line with the original melody and rhythm is usually the most difficult part;
a master track is created in Audacity. This track is fed into into the eMastered app which uses AI to bring it as close as possible to studio quality. This track is fed back into Audacity to check for levels and timing, and a final WAV master and mp3 version are produced.
By using AI in this way I feel that it is allowing me to produce my original songs with good quality sound without the need and expense of a professional studio.