Fender's CEO calls cover bands and bandmates 'analog AI'—guitarists are furious

Fender CEO Edward “Bud” Cole has managed to pour gasoline on an already raging PR fire. The company was already facing a brutal backlash from the guitar community for sending cease-and-desist letters to builders over the Stratocaster body shape. Now, a May interview with T3 has resurfaced where Cole makes the argument that learning cover songs is a form of “analog AI,” and that your bandmates essentially function the same way a generative model does.

Speaking to T3 editor-in-chief Mat Gallagher for the Telecaster’s 75th anniversary, Cole laid out a philosophy that has left players incredulous. “I actually believe cover music has been sort of analog AI for a long time,” he said, suggesting that guitarists who can’t yet write songs lean on others’ material just as an AI trains on a dataset. He doubled down by framing collaboration as a second analog AI layer: you bring a riff, your bassist and drummer add to it, and a song is born—a process he sees as parallel to prompting a model. “I actually think that we are in the brink of freeing up people to move beyond the same old covers,” Cole told T3.

The comparison collapses under even minimal scrutiny. A human guitarist internalizing a few dozen influences and making millions of tiny, conscious artistic decisions is not the same as a model like Suno ingesting millions of copyrighted tracks and spitting out statistical averages. As YouTuber Steve Onotera, known as Samurai Guitarist, has noted, a player’s physical limitations and happy accidents create serendipity that no LLM can replicate. Your picky bassist with a jazz degree isn’t a chatbot—they have taste, instincts, and life experience. Framing them as interchangeable with a prompt interface isn’t just technically wrong, it’s insulting to working musicians.

Cole also claimed AI will help players cross “the chasm into becoming a student of songwriting to a master,” which ignores mounting evidence that AI tools lead to deskilling. The unglamorous truth of songwriting is that you need to write a hundred terrible songs before you stumble into a good one. An AI has never sweated over a pre-chorus transition or been left at the altar. The timing of these comments could hardly be worse. Some influential guitar YouTubers are already swearing off Fender gear entirely over the Stratocaster copyright claims, and Cole’s musings on AI have only deepened the sense that the company’s leadership doesn’t understand—or respect—the artists who built its legacy.