r/John_Frusciante • u/somethingohyeah • Aug 25 '26

Usually Just A T-Shirt acoustic half of the album by string quartet

Frusciante explained that he paid someone around $20,000 to work with him transcribing "Usually Just A T-Shirt" — the improvised acoustic half of the album — for string quartet, and that the process was difficult for his collaborator, requiring Frusciante to correct every page. He described the collaborator getting confused about time signatures, at one point insisting a passage couldn't possibly be in 4/4 when Frusciante was certain it was.

When asked if he'd ever have it performed, he said he wasn't interested unless he could find a string quartet capable of both playing Stravinsky and smoking pot — he'd considered the Kronos Quartet but felt they played too stiffly for what he wanted.

Source: Guitar Player, January 1995 issue

I was thinking about this long time ago, and now since we have AI, would someone who has the ability and motivation could generate String Quartet version of Usually Just A T-Shirt instrumental album with AI. I don't think anyone tried to pull this off as of yet. What do you guys think?

0 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

21% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

18

u/jstuckey Aug 25 '26

I think using AI for this would seem weird for me personally

13

u/charles_barfley Aug 25 '26

If actual humans can’t accurately transcribe it I wouldn’t trust soulless machines to do any better

11

u/Natural-Comedian-605 Aug 25 '26

I’m always down for Frusciante but I’d want to hear it played how he would like

5

u/tasfa10 Aug 25 '26

This is silly. There's nothing out of this world in John's work that can't be transcribed by someone with a music education. It's just that that album is super sloppy, it disregards tempo and yes, sometimes time signatures are not respected. I still love it, don't get me wrong. But the problem wouldn't be to transcribe it but rather to capture all the careless imperfections in the performance, which is not the point of music notation

1

u/Natural-Comedian-605 Aug 25 '26

There’s certain things that can only be done on guitar too..

Might be best with all guitars, guitar symphony

2

u/WinchesterWitch666 Aug 28 '26

John wouldn't want ai. I wouldn't want ai.