Before Suno, there was a lifetime of music

Don’s musical journey began in second grade, playing cello. By sixth grade, he’d moved to upright bass, eventually participating in school orchestras and jazz ensembles.

At fourteen, he picked up electric bass and began playing in garage bands. By eighteen, he was performing professionally.

Over the following decades, his musical experience extended across an unusually broad collection of genres: jazz, big band, Dixieland, bluegrass, polka, Irish music, rock, gospel, and more.

He studied at Ohio State University’s School of Music and performed in its jazz ensemble between 1971 and 1973.

Then came an unexpected opportunity. According to Don, Disneyland invited him to perform bass with one of its groups, leading to two years in California. During that period, he also performed alongside Christian musicians affiliated with Maranatha! Music and Calvary Chapel.

It was there that his connection to contemporary Christian worship music began taking shape.

Don had become a Christian at eighteen. Music became an increasingly important part of how he expressed that faith and connected with others.

When he returned to Ohio, he began leading worship at a campus church called Fish House Fellowship.

He later married, and he and his wife performed together in the Fish House Fellowship Band, recording several albums and performing for approximately fifteen years.

The Fish House Fellowship Band performed in bars and concert venues, recording several albums during fifteen years of music-making together. Throughout those years, Don and his wife continued leading worship. Their work as performers and worship leaders was not a divided life: each informed the other.

More than fifty years later, that shared musical ministry remains part of their lives.

One purpose, many musical languages

Over time, Don became frustrated with what he saw as the stylistic limitations of contemporary Christian music.

His objection wasn’t to worship music itself. It was to the idea that worship should be confined to a relatively narrow set of familiar musical approaches.

Having performed everything from jazz and bluegrass to rock and traditional folk styles, he understood how differently music could communicate emotion and meaning.

He also believed music could communicate ideas in ways that spoken explanations sometimes couldn’t.

Don points to traditional hymns as an example. Historically, hymns helped people remember and communicate theological concepts through music, including people who had limited access to written religious material.

He wanted to explore a similar principle in contemporary forms.

Could Christian worship music connect with people through Nigerian musical styles? Bollywood influences? Spanish-language performances? Bluegrass? Other musical traditions?

For Don, those weren’t simply experiments in genre. They were different ways of communicating the same underlying message.

One of his clearest demonstrations of that conviction is One Holy Song. Don says he has explored the composition in more than fifty styles. The Bollywood version is not simply a novelty arrangement; it represents a goal he had when he first began using Suno: to see whether a worship song could speak through the musical language of Bollywood.

That recording illustrates the larger idea: the lyrics and purpose of a worship song can remain recognizable even as its musical language changes.

Discovering Suno in 2026

Don says he discovered Suno in February 2026.

With decades of musical experience behind him, he was immediately interested in what the technology made possible.

But rather than pursuing increasingly elaborate production methods, he deliberately kept his workflow simple. His approach was to experiment, listen, refine, and keep moving.

He described musician friends who used advanced production controls but sometimes became overwhelmed by the process of perfecting individual tracks.

Don chose a different path. He wanted the freedom to explore musical ideas without becoming trapped in endless technical adjustments.

Some of the ideas were not new at all. Don had written Any Day Now in 2019 and envisioned it as a Latin song in the spirit of the music of Gloria Estefan. He had also kept other older compositions in GarageBand. In his account, Suno eventually made it practical for him to realize productions that had remained unfinished for years.

That distinction is important: AI did not create the desire to write those songs. In some cases, it gave long-held writing and production ideas a path into recorded form.

The result, by his November account, was a catalog of more than 300 AI-assisted songs.

That number is striking, but it isn’t the most important part of the story. What matters more is why he created them—and what he intended to do with them.

Why he chose to publish instead of perfect

When Don began sharing his AI-assisted recordings on YouTube, he was still figuring out how the songs should look on screen.

The basic MP4 videos exported from Suno made it possible to share his songs, but he wasn’t satisfied with how they looked. He considered ways to improve the presentation while keeping the music itself at the centre.

Later, however, he made a conscious decision. Rather than waiting until each song had an elaborate video, he would begin releasing the music.

His priority was to make the songs available to people who might want to listen, reflect, or worship with them.

By September, he reported having uploaded more than 200 songs to YouTube, organizing them into playlists so listeners could explore different subjects and musical styles.

The project was not simply about putting songs online as quickly as possible. Don was working through an existing catalog and trying to make it accessible.

That distinction matters. There is a difference between releasing music without direction and making a deliberate decision to prioritize access over production polish.

Don’s objective was never to make every song into an elaborate visual production. His objective was to make the music available for its intended purpose.

As the catalog grew, his focus expanded toward helping listeners find their way through it, including more thoughtful playlist organization. A polished video for every song could come later; accessibility to the music came first.

THE CREATOR’S CHOICEMake the music available for its intended purpose.

From a local ministry to a multilingual catalog

One of the more interesting developments in Don’s project has been his experimentation with musical traditions and languages beyond his own.

His Nigerian-influenced Christian songs attracted interest, prompting him to ask a new question: what if the music not only drew on a cultural style, but could also communicate worship in languages familiar to those listeners?

The first deliberate language experiment he described was a Spanish translation of Any Day Now. Don translated it from English with Google Translate, then checked the wording with two Spanish speakers before releasing it. He reports that the Spanish version later received more than 750 views in two weeks.

That experience encouraged him to continue, rather than assume a machine translation alone was sufficient. Don also spoke with a worship leader on his team who travels to Nigeria each year, and he went on to translate some Nigerian-style worship songs into Igbo and Hausa. He also consulted a woman at his church who grew up in Southern India and speaks Tamil. She reviewed the lyrics of a translated Bollywood-influenced song and a worship song and told him they were accurate. Don says she also found the worship song meaningful.

For Don, translation was not simply a matter of pressing a button and assuming the words were ready. He sought feedback from Spanish and Tamil speakers on the meaning of selected lyrics, while continuing to explore how worship songs might speak across languages and musical traditions.

But they also reveal something essential about Don’s motivation. He’s looking for new ways to communicate—not merely new ways to produce.

His goal is not to claim that one arrangement belongs to every listener. It is to explore whether the same worship message can be conveyed in different musical and linguistic settings—while taking the accuracy and meaning of those words seriously.

Where AI fits into the story

Don’s professional musical experience predates AI music generators by decades.

That makes his perspective particularly interesting. He knows what it means to play an instrument, work with musicians, perform professionally, lead worship and build a musical arrangement through traditional methods.

Today, he uses AI-assisted production to explore musical ideas and approaches that would otherwise require very different resources.

His approach also challenges an assumption that every experienced musician must use the most technically complex tools available. Sometimes, choosing a simpler workflow is an intentional creative decision.

There are limitations, of course. AI-assisted recordings don’t replace the experience of live musicians collaborating, and producing songs across different languages introduces additional responsibilities around pronunciation, translation and cultural context.

But in Don’s case, the technology has become another means of pursuing a purpose that already existed.

Don’s catalog contains different kinds of creative work. Some songs began as texts he wrote years ago; others grew from newer experiments with lyrics, arrangements and musical styles. The approaches vary, but his creative and spiritual intention remains consistent.

Patrick The Musical: A story waiting for its music

Another chapter of Don’s creative life began long before AI music tools entered the picture: Patrick The Musical.

Don says he finished writing the original musical in 2008. At the time, he did not have the production resources needed to create the musical score he envisioned. Instead, he used existing worship songs as emotional and thematic reference points for the work.

Now, years later, he is using Suno to begin producing new songs for the musical—music intended to serve a work whose text and larger creative vision were already in place.

Don created a spoken-word trailer using text from the original musical, with Suno providing the background music. It offers an early look at a work he is now developing with new songs.

It is a fitting continuation of his story. Here is an experienced musician using new technology not only to create more recordings, but to return to unfinished work from another chapter of his life.

The full musical is still in development. That matters: this is a current creative goal, not a completed production being announced as ready for audiences.

The next chapter: Helping listeners understand the person behind the songs

A catalog can reveal what a musician has made without showing everything that shaped the work.

Donald’s experience—from professional bass performances to decades of worship ministry—adds another dimension to the AI-assisted recordings now appearing on his channel.

The playlists help listeners discover the music. The stories behind individual songs help them discover the person and purpose behind it.

Sharing more of those stories may help people connect with the work beyond a title, thumbnail or musical style.

His next moves now include two complementary kinds of work: continuing to organize a large, multilingual worship catalog for listeners, and giving new attention to select projects with deeper stories, including Patrick The Musical.

That doesn’t necessarily mean changing how Don creates or requiring elaborate music videos.

It could mean sharing more of the stories behind selected songs, explaining why certain musical styles matter to him, or introducing listeners to the decades of musical experiences that shaped the project.

For example, Don previously shared that ‘It’s All About Jesus’ originated during a prison worship service before he later explored it in other musical styles.

A story like that communicates something a title and thumbnail alone cannot. It gives listeners another reason to connect.

And for a project called ‘Music Made With Faith, Hope & Love’, those personal connections are especially relevant.

The Jack Righteous First Look

There’s a temptation to evaluate AI music creators primarily through technology, production quality or the number of songs they generate.

Don’s journey deserves a different perspective.

Here is someone who spent decades playing music with other people, participating in worship, exploring multiple musical traditions and thinking seriously about what music communicates.

At this stage of his life, he’s discovered a new creative tool. He hasn’t abandoned his musical background. He’s applying that background to new possibilities.

His publishing strategy may continue to evolve. Individual songs may receive more attention, his channel presentation may develop, and his approach to multilingual music may become more refined.

But the underlying mission is already clear.

Three works make that range tangible: Any Day Now, written in 2019 and now heard in Latin-inspired and Spanish-language contexts; One Holy Song, revisited in dozens of musical styles; and Patrick The Musical, written in 2008 and now being given new songs. Different creative histories, one enduring intention.

Don describes his work as a service to God and to the people who may find meaning in the songs.

He doesn’t claim to know exactly where the project will lead. He’s choosing to keep creating, sharing, and taking the next step.

And perhaps that’s the strongest part of his story: the technology is new, but the purpose is not.