About

David Barrat is a non-performing songwriter based in London, England, who has been writing songs, mainly in the pop genre, for over forty years, since he was a teenager in the 1980s.

 

Not being a musician, and, at the time, unable to play any instruments, he sang his songs onto cassettes, accompanied by only a drum machine. 

 

In the 1990s, after finishing university, he teamed up with a couple of producers, Richard Charlton and Charlie McIntosh, who owned their own recording studio in East London. They wrote the chords for his melodies, arranged the songs and, with session musicians and singers, started to create demos of his songs.

 

It wasn't long before computers rendered the need for session musicians redundant (with the exception of the odd saxophonist), and the backing tracks could now be created electronically on a digital audio workstation without them.  Their work together culminated in the release in June 1996, on their own label, of a dance single, Love Me (From Every Angle), performed by Jacqui CLark, one of the session singers they'd been using, under the name of Jakk, which reached the heady heights of number 44 in the Commercial Club Chart. 

 

By the end of the '90s. Richard went off to Portugal to become a financial trader and Charlie left for Scotland where he ran a successful whiskey business.  David remained in London and, during the 2000s, teamed up with another producer/arranger, Christian Fontana, who ran a recording studio near to where he lived. 

 

By this time, David had taught himself to play keyboards and was able to write his own chords as well as melodies.  David and Christian wrote many songs together and recorded many demos designed to be submitted to recording artists.  But opportunities of this nature were few and far between. In 2009/10, they put out some music by one of their regular session singers, Debbie Saloman, including the dance single "My House".  

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Christian went off to Dubai for a few years in 2011 and David learnt how to create songs himself on a digital audio workstation, using Ableton Live.  He reconnected with Christian in 2018 and they created music remotely while Christian was living in Dundee. 

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In the 2020s, David also worked some other producers hired on Soundbetter.

 

In August 2024, Christian retired from music production leaving David, who had by now written over one hundred songs, to explore the possibilities of creating music with AI. 

 

AI has become very controversial, especially in music, but "AI music" has a very wide number of meanings.  At one extreme, it's possible to provide an AI tool with an idea, or even a photograph, and ask the AI tool to produce a full song based on that idea or image.  Such an approach involves very little human input.  It is clearly what could be described as AI music. At the other extreme, one can provide the AI tool with a fully written, fully produced and professionally sung composition and ask it to replicate that song, note for note, creating what is essentially a cover version. Is that to be described that as AI music?  Not really.  It's just an electronic interpretation of what has been produced by humans, with computerised instruments and vocals.

 

No one these days is surprised to hear computer generated instruments but it's still novel, and perhaps off-putting, to hear realistic sounding computer generated vocals.  This is true even though most vocals on hit records for many years have been computer generated through pitch correction tools like autotune which, unknown to most consumers of music, mean that the vocals on the songs they are listening to are not genuine human vocals but have been translated from human to computer generated through pitch correction.  AI music is just a continuation of this. 

 

The recent advances in AI music generation are quite extraordinary and allow the creation of high quality, fully arranged songs in an absolute fraction of the time, and a fraction of the cost of doing it manually, in what might now be termed "the old fashioned way", albeit the that the really old fashioned way was in doing it with live instruments.  

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Taking advantages of the possibilities of this new method, David has re-produced and re-imagined all his songs using AI, either with cover versions or melodic interpretations (see the article Music and AI), slowly releasing them under the name of Bubblegumelicious, a name derived from the title of one of his songs, "Bubblegum".

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They can be heard on the Bubblegumelicous YouTube Channel, also on Soundcloud and Jango.  The purpose of releasing these songs is twofold.  Firstly for people to enjoy them, rather than having them sit in a metaphorical drawer, and, secondly, to showcase them for artists who may want to cover them.  There's no doubt that it's better to have humans singing and performing songs rather than AI vocals, so it would be ideal if someone else is sufficiently interested to cover any of the songs.

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A brand new original pop song will be uploaded very week to the aforementioned platforms for the foreseeable future.

 

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