Pete Peterson Prompts Pals for Potential Percussive Parts: Can humans create better drums than AI?
11 Jan 2026In case you haven’t noticed, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. It’s disrupting all sorts of industries, and many popular musicians have taken to promoting products that use AI to generate music.
Frankly, I have no interest in listening to AI-generated music. The technology is interesting, but one of the great things about music is that it’s art, i.e., it’s made by humans who have something to share and work hard to do so. You get to know someone through their art. You build a kind of relationship with the artist and other listeners. So, per that measure music created by AI is not really art. It’s more of a sonic decoration created by averaging together a bunch of art.
But it seems like the industry is going that way. When you treat music as a product, and some technology comes along that allows you to create that product more cheaply, it’s going to get used. Other digital recording tools have had similar effects, i.e., lowering the cost of creation. Hell, I probably wouldn’t be making music if not for technology invented in the last few decades.
In any case, I wanted to do an experiment to see how well AI can do with more unconventional music. Since the models are trained to produce the most likely output, which you could think of as the most generic, average, etc., you would expect the output to be not so novel. On the other hand, I have very little experience with AI music generators, so I don’t really know what to expect, other than that I believe humans will do a better job.
In this experiment we pit AI against humans to see who can create the most interesting and enjoyable drums. I wrote a short tune (likely to be track 10 on Greyleaf) and will send it off to your favorite drummer, Travis Orbin, with my own programmed drums omitted. I will feed the same audio and text prompt into an AI model, or maybe a few, to see what comes out.
I also wanted to open it up to anyone else to try their hand at composing and/or recording drums, and that includes you! If I like them enough to use in a release (there might be multiple, with some re-recorded guitars, bass, vocals, etc.), I’ll pay $75 for MIDI and $250 for high quality recorded audio.
The deadline for submission is roughly March 31st, 2026. The audio and “prompt” are in sections below. As you can see, there’s only one constraint on the drums at the very end, and that’s there in order to make it flow into the next tune. You can email entries to pete.peterson.music@gmail.com with the subject: “Human vs AI drums”. Have fun, humans, and beat those robots!
The inputs
You can download a WAV file of the guitars and piano here. A MIDI file of just the piano, from which you can extract a tempo track, can be downloaded here.
The prompt
Create some fun and exciting drums for this prog metal song with some honky-tonk vibes.
Below are some descriptions for how I imagine each part should sound, along with tempos and timestamps. You don’t need to take every description literally, as if that would even be possible for most of them. They are meant to be abstract so you have some room to be creative.
| Time range | Tempo (BPM) | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00:00–00:02 | 100 | Count-in | Nothing here. |
| 00:02–00:18 | 100 | Intro | This part reminds me of a mix of Plini and The Faceless. It should feel powerful. |
| 00:18–00:21 | 100 | Chicken Honk | Old-timey honky-tonk country feel. Drums should not be overpowering here. It’s not a heavy part. |
| 00:21–00:28 | 100 | Intro More | Back to heavy, powerful, toms, snare, crashes. |
| 00:28–00:30 | 100 | Chicken Tonk | Back to old-timey country whatever. |
| 00:30–00:35 | 100 | Intro More Redux | Back to powerful. Come in swinging with snares and crashes. Maybe blasty with kicks between. |
| 00:35–00:38 | 150 | Country Beetles | Tempo actually switches at 00:32.7. I feel something like a train beat but with some ride bell. |
| 00:38–00:49 | 100 | Mystery Holly | Tempo switches at 00:37.9. Crispy hats and kick following the higher pitch piano stabs. |
| 00:49–00:58 | 150 | Bumpkin Donuts | Tempo switches at 00:47.35. Maybe skanky. Hats, kick, snare. Nothing too complex. Choke on the pinch harmonic, where it gets a little heavy. |
| 00:58–01:34 | 133.333 | Vital Sines | Tempo change at 00:55.35 to lead in. This part kind of reminds me of the verse in Rush’s “Vital Signs”. |
| 01:34–01:45 | 100 | Feral Bleat Marine | Tempo change at 01:32.25 to lead in. Sidestickin’ and kickin’ like the softer solo in Future Breed Machine. |
| 01:45–02:24 | 100 | Don’t Bread on Me | Slow Djent breakdown-ish to start. Ya know, china, kick following the palm-muted guitars, sparse, slow snares. Eventually gets march-y. Reminds me a little of “Don’t Tread on Me”. Must end the song with the snare flams and kicks since that’s how the next song starts. |