My schedule can't keep up, but the course goes on: the videos are now made with artificial intelligence

I owe you an explanation. My work schedule no longer allows me to record the course videos the way I used to: hours at the sequencer, writing every example, recording my voice, editing, and starting over whenever something went wrong. If I kept going like that, each lesson would take months, and that isn't fair to the people studying with me.

So I made a decision: starting with Lesson 4, the videos are made with the help of artificial intelligence. The Storm Sequencer v4 tutorial and Lesson 5 were made the same way. I apologize if you miss seeing me at the sequencer, but I also want to tell you why I'm so excited.

How a video is made now

• The content is the same as always. Everything comes from the course I took with my teacher, Medrano, and have taught for years. The AI doesn't invent the theory: it works from my notes and checks itself against them.
• The script is prepared by an AI assistant from the lesson, sentence by sentence, and I correct it. In Lesson 5, for example, I asked it to use the Spanish terms "oncena" and "trecena", and to call the period of Schubert, Chopin and Brahms "classical and romantic".
• The voice is a clone of mine, created with ElevenLabs from my recordings. It sounds like me because it is made from my voice, but I want to be clear: I didn't record it sentence by sentence.
• The scores and graphics come from our own sequencer and from the Virtual Teacher's engine, so every note you see is checked by the same code that checks your assignments.
• The musical examples are chosen and mixed by me.
• At the end, I watch the whole video, ask for corrections, edit in my intro and outro, and publish it.

Several AI assistants work as a team, and I want to give them credit:

• Claude, by Anthropic, writes the script, checks the music and theory, generates the narration with my cloned voice and reviews every video before I see it.
• Codex, by OpenAI, builds the sequencer and site tools, recorded the sequencer tutorial and assembles the videos.
• Gemini, by Google, has helped me with drafts and other parts of the project.

Everything goes through automated tests before it reaches you.

An apology for the small details

You will surely find small details: a word that doesn't sound quite natural, a graphic that could be better, a mistake that slipped past us. I apologize in advance. We would rather publish with small flaws than not move forward at all, which is what actually happened while I waited to have the time to do everything by hand. If you find something, let me know and we'll fix it.

Completing our dreams

I've carried this course in my head since 1988. I wrote it down in pencil and pen, taught it in class, and recorded videos whenever I could. I always dreamed of having it complete, in order, in two languages, with a tool that checks students' exercises. For years I thought that would take more time than I have.

Today Lesson 5 has its video in English and Spanish, in my voice, with graphics I could never have drawn on my own and a musical example from every stage of the history of harmony. It was made in a single day.

That is what moves me most about this moment: artificial intelligence doesn't replace what we know or what we love; it gives us back the time to finish what we started. I believe that's true for everyone: the musician who always wanted to publish their method, the teacher who wants to reach more students, anyone with a project kept in a drawer waiting for "when I have time".

What comes next

Lessons will come out more often. Lesson 6, the harmonic vocal quartet, is already under construction. If something about the new videos doesn't convince you, or you miss something from the earlier ones, write to me from the contact page. Your feedback helps make this better every time.

Luis Cárdenas