In a recent cover session, I played guitar on Dokken's "Kiss of Death" – a song my drummer friend and I had always talked about playing together someday. I recorded the audio, and on a whim, I fed the guitar solo section to Google Gemini 3 (Thinking) and asked it to evaluate my playing in terms of technique, expression, and tone.
Here is the solo:
And here is Gemini's evaluation:
Surprisingly specific
It described the vibrato as "fast and nervous, very much in the style of 80s shred" and caught a "vocal" quality in the lead lines. I will take that as praise. It also picked up on the overall energy of the performance, calling it "urgent and on the edge," which is a fair description of what happens when adrenaline kicks in on stage.
The criticism was equally specific: a tendency to rush slightly ahead of the beat, occasional lack of note definition from imperfect synchronization between the picking hand and the fretting hand, and too much high-end "fizz" in the tone. Not all of this is entirely on the mark, but much of it is. The rushing is partly nerves pushing me ahead of the beat, and partly me trying to replicate George Lynch's distinctive loose time feel – and not quite pulling it off.
On tone, it pointed out that the guitar was too forward in the mix with not enough depth from reverb or delay. That one hit home – I have never been good at dialing in spatial effects. I need to shape the sound toward a warmer, more mid-focused character that sits better in a band mix, rather than the bright, scooped tone that sounds impressive when playing alone but becomes harsh in context.
Multimodal AI is getting real
What struck me was not just the accuracy but the contextual understanding. Gemini evaluated the performance within the genre conventions of 80s hard rock. This was not a generic "sounds good, practice more" response.
Audio understanding in LLMs is still relatively new, and Google seems to be ahead in this area. Being able to upload a recording and get this level of musical analysis feels like a glimpse of where things are heading.