Pirate to Suno
In Pirate Studios Silverlake, when you walk the halls, you can hear—muffled but alive—the music everyone is making. Every room holds something different. I went at 11 PM on a Monday. Yeah, I had work the next day. I don’t care. I’m young. #Fuckit. :p
This is the only Pirate Studios all the way to Westchester, so you get everyone here. It feels like the mall after school. The ones who know their shit. The ones testing the waters. The ones doing it because everyone else is. A guy with a full rig, a laptop covered in stickers, cables spilling out of his bag like vines. A girl testing out a mic she probably saved up for, running the same verse back again and again. A group of friends making something loud, messy, barely holding together, but they don’t care because it sounds good enough in the moment. The whole place hums with that energy—the mix of real talent, pure curiosity, and people just here for the hell of it.
Yeah, there are posers and people who are just going to press play on that damn CDJ and call it a day with their premade mix. And that’s okay because there’s no right way to DJ. Maybe that’s all they want out of it—to hear their set on real speakers, to feel what it’s like to stand behind a booth and watch waveforms glide by. Maybe they’ll get bored and never come back, or maybe next time, they’ll bring a USB full of tracks they actually dug for, start messing with transitions, start thinking about what makes a crowd move. Half the time, it turns into a quiet competition—who can find a more obscure mix on SoundCloud, who can dig deeper. In reality, the DJs seen as “mainstream” in the underground barely hit 50k all-time streams. No shade to EQ tho, B.S.A.S. is a really good track.
Walking through feels like stepping into a museum where every painter is still at work. Instead of looking at the final portrait, you see them mix acrylics, cover up something they decided they didn’t like, step back, start again. Behind every door, someone is looping a chorus, tweaking a synth, spending an hour going through an entire sample pack and finding nothing they like. The right snare is either too punchy or too flat, too compressed or too dry. So they drag in another, layer it, pitch it down, roll off the high end, still not right, still not what they hear in their head. Someone in another room is layering harmonies, whispering, then belting, stacking takes until their voice barely sounds like a person anymore. It’s process. The stretched-out kind. The kind you can’t automate, can’t template, can’t speed up without losing the whole point.
I wonder if this disappears.
Suno, or whatever comes next, will get good enough. Right now, it’s a tool, an experiment, an amusement. Type a prompt, get a song. Suno is an AI that can generate full tracks—lyrics, instrumentals, vocals—without a human ever touching an instrument. No need to learn how to play, no need to book a studio, no need to sit in a room at midnight looping the same four bars until they finally feel right. The AI does it instantly. Right now, it still has a certain stiffness, a little too clean, a little too predictable. But AI gets better. Fast. Soon, it won’t just assist musicians; it will replace them. No late nights, no half-finished ideas, no rooms at all. Maybe this becomes impractical, like handwriting letters or shooting on film. Maybe Pirate goes the way of anything that takes effort, that relies on people wanting to be in the room.
And if it does, what happens to places like this? Maybe people won’t need to rent a studio when they can type in a mood, a reference track, a vague idea, and get something playable in seconds. No patching cables, no soundproof walls, no nights spent listening to the same loop until it either clicks or falls apart. Maybe music won’t need places anymore. Just prompts. Just outputs. But the thing about music is that it isn’t just sound—it’s decisions. A hundred little choices stacked on top of each other. The way someone hesitates before hitting record. The way a guitarist shifts their weight before a take. The extra breath a singer takes before a high note. AI doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t shift, or rethink, or decide something is wrong at the last second and scrap it all. It just generates. A perfect facsimile of a song, but no instinct behind it. No person in the room, losing sleep over a snare or a melody or a feeling they can’t quite get right. Maybe that won’t matter to most people. Maybe they’ll just hear a finished track and call it a day.
But here, in places like Pirate, you can hear the difference. You can feel it.
I hope not.
Pirate has a look, a weight. The colors, the lighting, the way every door holds something in progress. The belief that what’s happening still matters.