Maybe it’s fatherhood or the chaotic state of things around the world right now, but I’ve been reading (and thinking) a lot about the future lately.

We can try to hide from it if we wish, but technology is coming at us fast. The leaps in advancement are arriving very quickly in many areas. Big data collect info on us from every direction and gets to know us better than we know ourselves.

These are incredible and helpful in areas like medicine and car safety but scary in marketing and the manipulation of consent.

Yes, yes. You’re here because of the guitar. Don’t bring that stuff near my hobby; it’s what I use to escape all that! I hear you – but let me explain how these things make exciting food for thought in music land!

📒 And by the way - Prof. Yuval Noah Harari has brought up some fascinating ideas about music and arts. If you haven’t read that yet, make sure you don’t miss out on his book, Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow. That should be required reading for all humans.

Now let me explain my point.

Profile Me

I love my Kemper Profiler – it’s such a fantastic tool and makes my job a lot easier in so many ways. I find that technology quite astounding. It has been developing for some time (remember the old kidney bean Pod?), but Kemper made it real.

My Kemper can listen to any one of my amps with specific settings and then replicate it. But to the point where I really can’t tell if it’s the real one or the profiler. That means that all that tone hounding came down to zeros and ones in the end. I can now download and use, in a matter of seconds, that unique blackface tone that I’d spend years searching for!

Michael Britt profiles the amps I love. I buy them, pop them in the Kemper, and then I’m set up in a matter of minutes. It’s effortless, easy, and fast. The majority of players I know love The Kemper Profiler - and I won’t lie: I love it too. But it got me thinking about what else might be in the future for musicians. I started thinking about individual players and styles.

What else can be profiled?

Then, I realized that I do a lot of profiling myself. Manually!

I’m a Profiler Too!

I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Freddie King, studied the notes he likes to use, the way he bends, the inflections and curls that he adds, and to which notes! I know how he phases way back on the beat…

In some ways, I have a profile of him in my mind. I can even do a poor man’s imitation of his style!

Not just him. I’ve really studied and learned from most of the guitar players I really like. I’ve analyzed licks, concepts, tones, harmonic ideas.

Now, I’m wondering how long it will be before a computer can analyze all that.

Computers can analyze big data relatively quickly. Once the technology is in place, they’ll be able to pull a music composition into its individual elements. Working out the profile of an artist will unlikely be very difficult.

It would also make quite a fascinating Blues family tree of vocabulary!

In many ways, I hope that comes in my lifetime. I’m curious.

Nowadays, computers get to know what music we like and what affects us on an emotional level. If we end up with any kind of brain implant computer link, then a computer would take all that info and make something that we find emotionally stimulating. Or could it?

When we create music, be it composition or improvising – we are mostly regurgitating and exploring things we have learned, practiced, or studied at some point. So, being aware of the ingredients that make up our own style can be quite an interesting one.

More than a few times I’ve ask students to make a lick book of the licks they play the most. We’ve analyzed and explored each one, found where they come from, and worked out many ways to use and get creative with them. You should try it too - just write down all the licks you know on tab paper and do some detective work.

That feels pretty much like some AI programs might do in the future when they make a profile of Stevie Ray Vaughan and then try to do solos in his style. Or mix that profile with Stevie Vai’s for an exciting musical adventure! :)

Will any of this ever happen? Who knows – but giving it some thought can take your mind to all kinds of places!

In the current age of short attention spans and endless scrolling, taking the time to think about anything is valuable, and what better place to direct your attention than on the future of music.

Safe travels.