Null Rail

In 2026, I've now really embraced AI and vibe coding. Like really embraced it.

One of the projects that I've been working on is Null Rail. It is a site where I am "learning" in public, just like this digital garden. It basically came about because I wanted to share some of these tracks/songs, but I didn't want to conflate them with my actual, hand-crafted, 100% human made demos at songs.travisbriggs.com. I also wanted to be able to share notes on each of the songs, to really document my process as well as my thoughts on the end result.

I took the opportunity to use Claude Design, which was pretty new at the time. I fed it a screenshot of the now defunct Rainfall, RIP (TODO: embed image). It came up with a site with a remarkably close color scheme and design system. The point of using Rainfall was not because that site was particularly well designed, but that it was designed by me, from scratch, with my own ideas.

Of course, once I started vibe coding it, I started recklessly adding all kinds of features that I was thinking of. It was originally going to just be a blog style reverse chronological list. With a media player of course. But then I thought, maybe I can showcase different versions of the track? This came about organically because as I was playing in Suno, I would naturally try different variations. That also later came in handy when I started making versions from samples (this is the first one ever), as well as feeding in my own finished songs (that's a whole other can of worms that I have many feels about).

Functionally, this works. It gives me an easy way to share Suno experiments with people, without polluting my existing showcase projects or shuffling .mp3 files around.

So what's the end game here? I've.....asked AI for the answer. The Suno tracks sound good, they're beyond an uncanny valley. But they have significant flaws and AI "tells". The vocals sound good at first glance, but if you listen, they're obviously synthetic. These are demos. There is a ton of embellishment; noodling; "virtuoso-ism" (a term I just invented to describe lots of impossibly fast and perfect notes that no human could ever play). The mixes just sound like "mush", I don't have a better word to describe it. The vocal lines are pretty distinct, but there's no separation between the instruments in the mix. (Hmm, I wonder why. Oh right, there are no instruments!).

An existential question then: is it valuable to convert my demos (ie songs.travisbriggs.com) into, you know, more polished demos? In some ways, it makes me think of myself as a pure songwriter. Here comes the personality crisis then, because I've always prefered the view of myself as a full on DIY indie musician, in some sense an act or artist that happens to be mostly one person (a la Dashboard Confessional or The Shins or the first Foo Fighters album).

Can I find some way to pitch these songs to someone who may be interested? I see a few problems with that:

• I'm writing in styles that were popular 20-30 years ago and have almost zero relevance today
• I have no songwriting or industry network
• I'm writing songs that would be traditionally performed by rock/blues/punk bands. Those bands write their own damn songs, thank you very much. (Though there is debate about how much help they get from producers when in the studio)