M.O. Free*Man

M.O.’s Workflow  also involves numerous plugins for Logic Pro that utilize AI processing.  Examples include plugins from Waves Audio and Universal Audio Digital.

OVERVIEW OF M.O. FREE*MAN'S MUSIC PRODUCTION WORKFLOW  

Stage 1. Work Flow for Drafting Lyrics

1. I pique my own interest with a thought, phrase, emotion, event, concept, discovery, annoyance, or conundrum.

2. I begin writing a song by literally starting a blank page with the statement “This song is about _____“, and start to fill in the blank with prose.

3. I start to turn that prose into lyrics that have meter and rhyme. Sometimes this occurs spontaneously while I am filling in the blank with prose, which morphs organically into lyrical writing. About 20% of the time I am satisfied with the lyrics at that point and skip the following two steps, steps 4 and 5. If not, I chop up the prose and begin to turn it into poetry.

4. If I choose to use Chat GPT and/or Claude Sonet as a writing partner, I take all of the material from step 3, including the prose introduction, and feed it to one of those AI's with a prompt to write a song from it. In that case I usually go through about three iterations of revisions with ChatGPT as part of shaping the lyrics.

5. I take the all the results, all the iterations of the drafts, from ChatGPT/Claude and slice it, dice it, mix it, and edit extensively. The amount of editing of the AI suggestions that is necessary to get a good song depends on how complete the draft lyrics were before I put them through the AI, generally speaking.

6. An alternative to steps 4 and 5 is to use Suno to draft lyrics for a song idea. The results from Suno are generally not as sophisticated and complete as ChatGPT or Claude produces. However, sometimes wrestling with the Suno draft leads to a better end result. Working the lyrical clay of Suno sometimes feeds the energy of songwriting in a unique and creative way.

Stage 2. Work Flow for Finalizing Lyrics

7. Take the lyrics from Stage 1 and feed them into the lyrics input slot of Suno.

8. Set the Suno parameters according to taste for this first iteration of a full song. Start with fairly simple prompts such as “blues rock ballad” or “funk jazz fusion”. Set the tempo (roughly) with the prompt. Utilize your preferred Persona so that you have a consistent lead vocalist. Smash the Create button about twice, which gives you 4 versions of the song.

(Try out a bunch of different vocalists until you find one that captures your vibe and feel. Save that one as a named Persona. It’s fine to have multiple Personas, have fun with it.)

9. Don’t worry about how these first songs sound overall… nothing from Step 8 is going to be used for anything, all these drafts will end up in the Trash bin!

10. Listen to the drafts with an ear for the vibe of the lyrics, how they sit within the tempo of the song. Where are the typos in the lyrics draft? What sucks? Where do the lyrics get out of sync with the music? Do you need to add Bridges, Pre-Choruses, Outros, parenthetical call-and-answer parts, and so forth.

11. Take the results from Step 10, rinse and repeat until you have your lyrics sounding lyrical and clearly understandable, compelling, and delivering the message of the song you want to write.

12. By now you should have burned through about 10-12 drafts, all of which are Trashed, to get the lyrics smoothed out. These drafts are not wasted effort – they are part of The Process.

Important! This process is a critical step in training your instantiation of Suno AI, that is, the specific piece of Suno that you are working with. Use the thumbs up on these songs whenever you like how it sounds generally, how it is manifesting the general sound you have in your head. If Suno is totally off-base, give it a thumbs down. This stage of the process is a valuable opportunity to train Suno concerning what you want to hear out of it. Use this stage of the Work Flow for that purpose, as well as for shaping the lyrical content.

Now you are ready to get serious about the music part of the song.

Stage 3. Get the Jam Going

13. The most important part of Stage 3 – have fun and enjoy yourself. This is the Sweet Spot of songwriting using Suno. You are going to hit the Create button in Suno and audition multiple versions of your song and pick the one(s) that give you the most Juice. It’s a little slice of heaven… getting to hear YOUR song come alive.

14. Pro Tip - If your head is not banging along with the song draft you are listening to by 30 seconds into the song, Trash it. Trust your feel. But before you trash it, consider whether it’s basically solid, but just not perfectly on target. If so, give it a thumbs up before getting rid of it. If it’s horribly off base, give it a thumbs down. Always look for opportunities to train your AI!

15. Pro Tip - If it’s a softer ballad or something, if the lyrics have not engaged your attention by the end of the first 4 lines, go back to Stage 1. That means that the story your lyrics are telling are not engaging to the listener, not even the person who wrote it! Sadly, this will happen more often than you wish.

16. For Stage 3, you are hitting the Create button repeatedly (like 10-20 times over the course of an hour) in order to audition versions of your song, so that you can find the ones that really come together. Is the version you are listening to jamming? Does it make you want to cry, if that’s what you are looking for? Does it represent your emotion, feel, groove, musical style, complexity, simplicity? Look at all the parts of the song: lyrics, musical performance, melody, singer, voicing and timing of the lyrics. Are all the words pronounced correctly?

17. After auditioning multiple songs, pick 3 or 4 that are keepers. Download the .wav files for them, so that you can process them further in Stages 4 and 5. Do that immediately after reviewing the songs, so that you don’t lose track of them.

18. After you have your finalists, which you can think of as basically remixes of your song, take a day or two off and come back and listen to the keepers (the entire song!), and pick the one that matches your artistic vision. You will take that song to Stage 4 for further refinement and processing.

19. Thus far the description of this stage has not dealt much with technical issues, it has focused on the vibe of the song and the overall process. However, there are a number of technical issues to keep in mind for this Stage.

20. First, the M.O. Free*Man approach does not use any spot-editing of the song: corrections of lyrics, changing the overall composition by adding a new chorus, re-arranging the song in general. That all happens in Stage 2, or through Trashing takes of the song that don’t fit the desired arrangement. Spot editing and after-the-fact rearrangement of the song is an alternative approach that is completely legitimate, but I rarely use that approach for the M.O. Free*Man work flow.

21. Song prompts are where the magic happens in Stage 3… the prompts that you use to generate the song stylistically. Song prompts are the Secret Sauce for how you make your song your own, the verbal description that captures your artistic vision.

22. Therefore, craft your Stage 3 song “style” prompts very carefully, every single word matters.

23. Be very consistent in how you use your song prompts. This is how you train Suno to deliver what you want. Suno will learn how to respond to a specifically worded style prompt from you, if you consistently use the same wording and “thumbs up” a song that gave you what you want. But you have to give Suno a consistent target to shoot for, based on your song prompts and whether you give the song a thumbs up or thumbs down.

24. Professional (or aspiring-to-be) musicians: you should treat your song prompts as proprietary information. You can’t copyright your prompts, you can’t patent them. All you can do is treat them as proprietary information, and not share them. They’re like the secret recipe for Coca-Cola… if you are a professional musician, treat them as such. Just sayin’.

Stage 4. Sound Engineering

25. After you have picked your final best version of your song, it is time to move that version forward in the engineering/mixing/producing/mastering process.

26. Pro Tip - Keep the alternative versions of the song! Sometimes in the process of sound engineering you discover an un-fixable problem with a particular version of a song. In that case, go back to an alternate version from Stage 3.

27. At the end of Stages 4+5 you are going to have a mixed/mastered song that you will send to DistroKid, etc. for release, or a “Demo” version of a song that you can send around as a song-writer. Every single step of this process is important if you are making a song for release, or for distribution as a Demo. Having said that, if your goal is simply to send your song to friends, family, post it on social media, have it as background for your influencer posts, etc., you can probably dispense with Stages 4+5 of the process. Stage 4 requires time and money to be invested, and it may not be worth it depending on what your goals are for your song.

28. If you are an aspiring sound engineer, producer, or mixing artist, the situation is completely different. If you’re still training yourself to do engineering, mixing, etc., but aren’t at a point where you can do it to make a living (yet), songs that you self-generate using Suno are an excellent (almost limitless) source of material you can use for practicing the art of engineering/mixing a song.  And you have a great song for yourself at the end of it!

29. On to the meat of it… here are the steps used for processing an M.O. Free*Man song, starting from the downloaded .wav file from Stage 3:

a. De-noise the .wav file using Adobe Audition, utilizing the Adaptive Noise Reduction feature of that program. The Audition de-noise settings that M.O. uses are pasted at the end of this section.

b. Insert the De-noised .wav file into a track in the newest version of Apple Music Corporation’s Logic Pro digital audio workstation.

c. Generate stems from the .wav file using the internal stem generator in Logic, utilizing all options for stem categories.

d. EQ the individual stems (Vocals, Drums, Bass, Guitar, Piano, Other, etc.) using the stock Logic plugin for each track.  I also have found the "Hitsville EQ" plugin from UAD to be highly effective for these purposes.

e. Apply “light” compression to each track using stock Logic plugins, or compressors from UAD, etc. Be careful to use the Output (“volume”) control for the compressor for each track to make sure you are not greatly disrupting the balance between the stems that Suno had already established. Of course, mix the balance of the stems to your taste.

f. Generally, after compression decreasing the volume output for each stem track, except the Vocals track, will give a fairly good mix. Maybe -1dB or -2dB.

g. Noise reduction can be critically important for specific tracks, especially for Vocal tracks from Suno. This is also potentially relevant to drums and guitars, but generally less so for these other tracks versus the Vocals. For noise reduction use plugins such as: Soothe2 by Oeksound, IDX Intelligent Dynamics, and Plugin Alliance Brainworx_refinement. Sometimes the stock Logic EQ plugin is sufficient for this (dropping off the high end of the EQ curve), but hardly ever is it optimal.

h. After EQ, compression, and noise reduction for the specific tracks, use the individual track automated volume controls to adjust the mix for the overall tracks, and for specific passages of the tracks that you might want to emphasize. This step is for making the right parts of the song (vocal interludes, guitar solos, etc.) stand out in the overall mix, according to your tastes. Just classic mixing.

i. After you have your track mixes finished, it is time to do some bus-type processing of the overall song. This is done using plugins on the Logic Pro Output track. (It’s also fine to use bus-type processing for the individual stems. After all, in a "fully human produced" song, the track would probably be coming from a bus anyway.)

Finish all your mixing steps to have a great sounding song before proceeding with the following steps in this list!!  

“Fix” all the problems in the tracks before turning on any plugins in the Output channel of Logic. (This is the stage of the process that I referred to in Stage 4, Step 26, wherein you find to your dismay that there is a fatal flaw in your favorite song, and you have to go back to an alternative version. This happens about 1 out of 25 songs in my experience. It’s stuff you can’t hear in the original that is covered up in the mix, but gets revealed in the stems.)

Stage 5. Final Processing and Mastering

M.O. Free*Man songs use the following plugins (in various combinations according to the song, and adjusted to taste) on the Output track, in this specific order:

1. Overall Track EQ using the stock Logic plugin.

2. UADx Capital Records Mastering Compressor (start with Clean Capital Preset)

3. UADx Studer A800 Tape Recorder (start with Jazz Warmth Preset),

Both the UADx compressor and the UADx Studer A 800 help reduce harshness/noise from the tracks overall, add warmth, and of course compress the overall mix to give adhesion. Harshness/crispiness/sizzle/whatever is an issue with Suno .wav files and this is a stage where you get a final chance to clean that out. Each of these two plugins also allows a convenient point for controlling the overall volume output of the Output channel.

4. Waves Audio Greg Wells MixCentric helps glue everything together, and allows for overall control of the vibe and feel of the track. Awesome one-knob plugin.

5. IDX Intelligent Dynamics, which is generally turned off but can help with noise control on occasion.

6. Waves Audio Curves AQ, a powerful and effective AI machine that optimizes overall EQ for the output. It should be used to analyze each song, there is no “default” setting that you should set it to… the plugin analyzes the mix and adjusts itself accordingly.

7. Waves Audio PAZ Analyzer, to check overall EQ and stereo balance, etc. Turn off this plugin before bouncing the track to the final .wav file for release… it alters the sound of the output chain slightly if it is left on.

8. The stock Logic Adaptive Limiter, set to: Gain roughly 0.1 to 1.3 dB, Out Ceiling -0.1 dB, 20 ms Lookahead, remove DC offset ON, True Peak Detection ON. Adjust to taste... I usually find a "sweet spot" around Gain = 0.6 dB.

For the final stages of song processing/engineering, start with all of the plugins listed above TURNED OFF. Then add each plugin sequentially, turning them on one at a time. When you have the first plugin set where the mix sounds like you want it to, keep it turned on and move to the next plugin in the chain. Have the song sounding its best at each stage of the process before adding the next plugin into the processing chain.

9. The stock Logic Pro Loudness Meter. This is used to monitor the overall loudness so that you can set the output of the Output Track to around -9 LUFS overall, using the volume controls on the plugins described above. If you need to adjust the overall volume to get the loudness to -9 LUFS, try adjusting the overall volume knobs on the Mastering Compressor and the Studer Tape machine first. This usually will resolve the issue.

The loudness meter plugin is simply a meter, it does not adjust the loudness. Turn this plugin off before bouncing the song to the final .wav file or mastering the song in the following step. Otherwise it will introduce unwanted noise/tone alterations into your final mix.

Note: If you have noise in your final mix that seems to be coming from “nowhere”, you may need to go back to your individual stem tracks and back all of them off by 1 or 2 dB because you are overdriving the Output track and creating noise that way.

10. The stock Logic Pro Mastering Plugin is the last plugin in the chain. This also is a powerful AI processor. Use it to analyze and master the song as the final processing stage. Have everything in Steps 1-9 above finalized to your taste before using the Mastering Plugin. It’s best to use the Mastering plugin a day after you have finished all the rest of the final stages of mixing and sound engineering. Give your ears a break and step away from the song for a while before making your final mastering decisions.

11. The stock Logic Pro Loudness Meter (again, for a second time). This is used to monitor the overall loudness so that you can make sure the output of the Output Track is around -9 LUFS overall post-mastering. Turn this plugin off before bouncing the song to the final .wav file.

12. Bounce the song using the BNC button on the Output Track:

Settings for DistroKid, etc.:

Uncompressed

Normalize: Off

File Type: WAVE

Bit Depth 16-Bit

Sample Rate 44.1

Interleaved, No dithering

13. Save the finalized .wav file for your new song, and make a backup copy to save on a different device. By this point you will likely have a lot of .wav files for the same song in various folders/locations, all with similar or identical names. Do the necessary housekeeping to clearly identify the final mastered version. For myself I denote these files with -9LUF4416 in the file name to keep track of them.

14. Congratulations! Have a glass (or three) of your favorite libation to celebrate. You deserve it.

Footnote: Adobe Audition De-Noise Settings for Step 29a:

REDUCE NOISE BY: 4.06 dB

NOISINESS: 20.97%

FINE TUNE NOISE FLOOR: 0.09 DB

SIGNAL THRESHOLD: 4.99 DB

SPECTRAL DECAY RATE: 263.11 MS/60DB

BROADBAND PRESERVATION: 113.61 HZ

FFT SIZE: 1024. (Dropdown menu)

CHECK ON: High Quality Mode

FOOTNOTE: 

EXAMPLES OF M.O. FREE*MAN SUNO SONG STYLE PROMPTS... A LITTLE TASTE OF M.O.'S SECRET SAUCE.

1. blues, raw, rock, blues rock, male vocals, gritty guitar riffs

This is the basic song style prompt for M.O. Free*Man. It is the default prompt for the M.O. Free*Man Persona in Suno.

Variations of this prompt:

114 BPM, Key of A minor, Blues, rock, male vocals, guitar riffs, jazz chords, guitar solo in aeolian mode

Blues, rock, male vocals, guitar riffs, jazz chords, guitar solos in mixolydian mode, rap feel

2. Straight up funk instrumental

Self-explanatory. I use these types of prompts when working through the basic groove with draft lyrics.

Variations of this type of prompt:

Contemporary country ballad, 95 BPM, key of D

Jazzy pop interpretation of a traditional love song

3. An upbeat, swinging blues track driven by a tight funk rhythm section—crisp drums and syncopated bass groove. Wurlitzer delivers punchy chords and runs, while soulful guitars riff and fill. The horn section punctuates phrases with bright hits. call and answer vocals and horn section

These types of prompts are what I use for actual song production. Here are some additional examples of those types of prompts, for various specific types of songs.

120 BPM, key of A. Complex jazzy chord progressions weave through verses, enriched with electric guitar leads in dorian and Phrygian modes. Layered vocals and dense polyphonic textures collide with jazzy guitar riffs, country rock influenced, evoking an ecstatic joyful feeling, funky beats, drum solo for a bridge, large drops during the verses, breakbeats, Rhodes, funk, 808 beat, slow tempo, horn section, p-funk, sexy, reggaeton influenced lyrics in English

A high-energy blues rock track driven by Complex jazzy chord progressions weave through verses, enriched with electric guitar leads in minor blues and Phrygian modes. Layered vocals and dense polyphonic textures collide with jazzy guitar riffs, evoking an ecstatic joyful feeling, funky beats, funky bass, large drops during the verses, breakbeats, electra 88, funk, 808 beat, horn section, p-funk, sexy

4. Funk influenced Southern Rock 105 BPM jazzy chord progressions mixolydian and lydian dominant mode, strong melody Style: Southern rock, radio-polished, festival-ready

I used this type of prompt (with many variations) for the “AI is My Instrument” album.

5. funk influenced grunge 125 BPM, up-tempo, complex jazzy chords, guitar solos in phrygian and locrian modes

I used this type of prompt (with many variations) for the “Sonic Art” and “Your AI Is Incomplete” albums.

It’s important to note that I have trained Suno by using it to generate over a thousand song drafts at this point. What these prompts mean to Suno is something different for me from what they will mean to Suno if/when you try them out for yourself. Over time, Suno will adapt any song prompts you use to mean something more specific to you, by virtue of your using thumbs up & thumbs down feedback signals to train your instantiation of Suno.