Is Artificial Intelligence Good for Musicians? A London Music Teacher's View

Artificial intelligence is evolving at an extraordinary pace, and music is no exception. Whether you're a student taking guitar lessons, a beginner learning piano or a professional session musician working across London, AI is already shaping the music world around you.

As a professional guitarist and Musical Director at The Riff Music Academy, I've been watching this closely, and I have some thoughts.

When AI-Generated Music Sounds Real

A few months ago, I attended a masterclass on AI in music. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.

One application, given nothing more than a description of genre, instruments, mood, and style, generated a complete song from scratch.

Polished. Structured. Convincing.

I closed my eyes. And honestly? It sounded like a real band I'd simply never heard of before.

That moment left me both genuinely amazed and quietly unsettled.

As musicians, we know that powerful tools demand responsible use. The ability to generate music with AI and distribute it as if it were human made raises deep questions about creativity, authenticity, and what it actually means to be an artist.

AI for Chord Detection: Helpful Tool or a Shortcut Too Far?

One of the most widely used applications of AI in music education is chord detection. Upload a track, and AI software analyses the audio and extracts the chord progression, often with impressive accuracy.

For students learning guitar or piano in London, this sounds like a gift. No more hours spent with headphones, rewinding the same four bars, trying to figure out whether that chord is a minor seventh or a dominant ninth.

But here's the question I keep coming back to:

How did musicians learn before this existed?

They listened. They struggled. They got it wrong, adjusted, and tried again.

And through that process, they built something AI cannot give you: a trained musical ear.

The Real Cost of Letting AI Do Your Listening

We live in an age where technology helps us enormously, in music, in education, in daily life. At The Riff Music Academy, we embrace useful tools. But there's a distinction worth making.

There is a difference between technology that supports your development and technology that replaces the development itself.

If AI tells you what chords are in a song before you've had the chance to hear them yourself, you've skipped the very process that builds musical intuition.

And musical intuition, the ability to hear, feel, and understand music in real time, is one of the most valuable things a musician can develop.

I believe we are slowly losing the concept of earning our skills: working hard, struggling, training our perception, and developing abilities through genuine effort. That process is not just a means to an end. It is the development.

The Supplement Analogy

Using AI to replace your ear is like taking supplements instead of eating real food.

Supplements can help. They can support. They can fill specific gaps.

But they will never replicate the full nourishment of the real thing.

The same principle applies to learning music. AI can be a useful supplement, a way to double-check work, speed up certain tasks, or explore new ideas.

But it should never replace the core process of becoming a musician: listening deeply, practising persistently, and developing your own creative voice.

Our Approach at The Riff Music Academy

At The Riff Music Academy, our philosophy has always been: real skill comes from real practice.

We use technology where it genuinely helps. But we never let it shortcut the fundamentals, such as the ear training, the music theory, the hours of careful listening, that is what turns a beginner into a confident, expressive musician.

AI is not the enemy of music. But it is a test of how seriously we take the craft.

Vincenzo Lo Vasco