NITA STRAUSS HAS been one of the more extraordinary guitarists to explode on the scene in recent years. In 2016, just two years after Alice Cooper hired her to replace departing axe woman Orianthi, Nita became the first female guitarist to have her own Ibanez signature model, the JIVA10. Two years after that, she launched a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for her debut album, Controlled Chaos, meeting her target within two hours and eventually raising eight times her goal.
Few guitarists have managed to generate so much excitement in so little time. Needless to say, when Nita announced the release of her new, sophomore album, The Call of the Void, we were eager to bring her back for her second Guitar Player cover to discuss her approach to career and craft.
The guitar world has been rightly captivated by Nita and her new album. That response is reassuring in light of a new threat to music discussed by Queen guitarist Brian May in another of this issue’s features: namely, artificial intelligence. “I think by this time next year the landscape will be completely different,” Brian tells us. “We won’t know which way is up. We won’t know what’s been created by AI and what’s been created by humans.”
Strangely, for all the concern over how AI may change the world for good and ill, its impact on music gets the least attention. But it has already crept into our industry.
In one of the best-known examples, Giles Martin employed it in 2022 to “de-mix” and reconstruct the Beatles’ 1966 milestone Revolver. Since then, Paul McCartney has used AI to extract John Lennon’s vocal from a demo Lennon made shortly before his death.
But at least those are responsible uses of the technology. Less than a year after Martin dazzled us with Revolver, AI is available for the average music fan to use and abuse. Visit YouTube and treat your ears to the sounds of McCartney and Lennon “singing” everything from their own unreleased Beatles-era songs to the 2011 Gotye hit “Somebody That I Used to Know.” AI’s potential to deceive became widely apparent this past April, when a homemade track called “Heart on My Sleeve” used digitally generated versions of p
