Photo credit: Geezer Butler from Back to the Beginning, Villa Park, Birmingham, 2025 (Public Domain)
Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler has revealed that he is using AI to bring unreleased songs to life, some of which he said he wrote in the '80s.
Amid all the controversy surrounding artificial intelligence, its practical applications are often forgotten, but musicians like Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler are using AI to bring old material to life. Butler revealed during this week's Steel City Con Q&A that he is using AI singers to gift tracks to real vocalists who will contribute to the new album.
“Oh my god, I have so much stuff,” Gieser said during an interview in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. “After the last Sabbath show, [Back to the Beginning in July]I've gone back over everything I've written since the 80's and updated everything. And what was holding me back before was that I didn't have a singer when I was at home. But with the advent of AI, we now update all our songs and use an AI singer to pull all the lyrics. ”
“So now I can take that to the singers that I'm going to work with and say, 'I want this on the album,' so they have a better idea,” he explained. “Before, I'd play them a bass riff or something and be like, 'Can you sing this?'” And they'd say, “…Yeah.” But now it's much better. Because you can sit in your studio and let AI do all the work for you, and then hand it off to the right musician to take over. It was really helpful. Many people consider it cheating. ”
“With Sabbath, we would sit in a room together and just jam and jam and jam and jam until one of us came up with a song that we could work on together,” Butler said of the early songwriting process, especially with his Black Sabbath bandmates. “Once I have a good riff, I complete the musical part of it. Ozzy [Osbourne] I sang his vocal line and then I wrote the lyrics. So it mainly came from jamming. ”
Best known for his work with Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler began his career in the late 1960s, performing with bands such as Heaven & Hell and Deadland Ritual, as well as solo projects g/z/r, Geezer, and GZR. his first solo album, plastic planetwas released in 1995 and featured vocalist Burton C. Bell (Fear Factory). He followed it up with a 1997 piece black science and in 2005 ohm workboth featured vocalist Clark Brown.
