Making music with AI: practical tools to try today

AI doesn’t compose for you. It amplifies what you already know how to do, and if there’s no real musical grounding behind it, the result shows. That’s the starting point for everything that follows —and it’s exactly what I already laid out from the technical, professional side in «AI as a tool, not as the final product», on labs.tever.es. Here I go straight to the practical ground: what concrete tools you can open today, and what you’ll actually be able to do with them in an afternoon.

Separating tracks to rehearse clean: Moises

Before generating anything, there’s one AI tool every musician should know about even if generative composition doesn’t interest them at all: Moises. What it does is simple and genuinely useful: it takes any song and separates its tracks —vocals, drums, bass, everything else— so you can isolate or mute whatever you want.

For anyone who rehearses, this changes the day-to-day. If you want to play a song’s bass line, you mute the original bass and play over the rest, without “stepping on” the actual musician from the recording. If you want to sing, you mute the vocal and use the rest as a backing track. There’s a free plan with a limited number of uploads per month; unlimited use and the full feature set (chord detection, tempo adjustment, lyric transcription) require a subscription.

Generating a song from scratch: Suno

The central tool of this post is Suno, today one of the most widely used for generating complete songs —lyrics, music and sung vocals— from a text description. Xataka’s tutorial on Suno explains the basic mechanics well, and here I’ll summarize it in concrete steps:

1. Go to suno.com and hit “Make a song”. You can sign in with Google, Microsoft, Discord or your own account.
2. Choose simple mode if it’s your first time: write a description of the song you want (genre, theme, mood) and hit generate.
3. Wait a few seconds. Suno generates the full song: lyrics, music and a synthetic voice performing it, plus cover art.
4. If you want more control, use custom mode: there you write the title, the full lyrics and the exact genre yourself, instead of letting the system invent them.

The free plan gives you around 50 daily credits (roughly 10 songs), works better in English, and doesn’t allow commercial use of the result —for that you need the paid plans. If you want to go deeper than the basics, suno.hk’s Suno handbook has more extensive guides on custom mode.

Other tools worth knowing

Moises and Suno aren’t the only pieces of this ecosystem. To get a sense of the full landscape, this Xataka roundup of 14 free AI music tools is a good starting point:

Tool	What it does
Udio	Generates songs by splitting creation into three steps: style, lyrics and feel
AIVA	Assisted composition, with more than 250 styles and track editing
LALAL.AI	Track separation, an alternative to Moises
ElevenLabs	AI voice synthesis and cloning — doesn’t generate full songs, but it’s the reference if what you need is a quality synthetic voice for a demo or a voiceover
Lyria	Google’s music generation model (text to music), built into the Gemini ecosystem

What’s happening in the industry meanwhile

This isn’t an isolated hobbyist experiment: it’s reshaping the music business in real time. Spotify is already dealing with a real flood of AI-generated songs —to the point that in April 2026 an AI-generated artist, Ruby Black, made it to the top of Spain’s 50 most viral chart— and it’s had to respond by setting clearer limits on how that content gets labelled and paid. In parallel, on May 22, 2026, Spotify and Universal Music Group signed a licensing deal that lets Premium users generate AI remixes and covers from UMG’s catalogue, under three explicit conditions: prior consent from artists and songwriters (an opt-in model), attribution, and financial compensation for every version created.

What I learned teaching this to adults

This 2025/26 school year I worked as a substitute Digital Skills teacher for the Principality of Asturias, and among the tools I taught adults to use —some with little prior experience with computers in general— was generative AI. I wasn’t doing it as a gaita player or from the angle of traditional composition: it was general digital teaching, but the lesson I took away applies just as well to any creative trade. What surprised me most wasn’t how powerful Suno is: it was watching a student put together a full song, with her own lyrics, without me ever having explained that specific tool to her. All it took was exploring the interface for an afternoon.

That confirms something worth being clear about before touching any of these tools: anyone, in an afternoon, can put together a reasonably decent song. The technical barrier to entry has practically disappeared.

What doesn’t change

And here’s where I come back to the starting point. A tool letting you customize a song doesn’t make you a musician. There’s a lot of music theory and an enormous amount of accumulated practice that these tools don’t teach you and can’t replace —you can’t really compose without knowing them, and without the real hours of practice it takes to play an instrument.

For the industry, this is a deeper problem: millions of songs are produced every day, a pace that’s flooding the market, and barely any of them last more than a month in the conversation. As a complementary tool in the creative process of a musician who already knows what they want to say, AI adds real value —it hands you plenty of ideas fast and spares you a lot of time staring at a blank page. But that’s exactly what it is: a tool. Not an end in itself.

Bibliography

• Xataka. «Cómo crear música con IA: 14 herramientas gratis imprescindibles». xataka.com. Overview of AI music generation tools.
• Xataka. «Suno AI: qué es y cómo usarlo para crear una canción». xataka.com. Reference tutorial on how Suno works.
• Moises. Product documentation. moises.ai. Track separation features and available plans.
• wwwhatsnew.com. «Spotify y Universal Music acuerdan que los fans puedan hacer versiones y remixes con IA de sus canciones favoritas». wwwhatsnew.com. Details of the May 22, 2026 Spotify-UMG licensing deal.