About Barrios AI

Real Musicianship. Ethical AI.

Barrios AI is built on a simple principle: You can use AI for almost everything around your music: research, learning, career planning, promotion, protecting your work, building your own tools. It can even help you bring ideas to life that you couldn't reach on your own. But you make the music. The vision, the playing, the creative decisions, the struggle that actually makes you grow as a musician, that stays yours. You can outsource tasks, but you can't outsource your musicianship.

We're not anti-AI. We build with it every day. But we're also not supporting generative AI music tools, selling finished songs from a single prompt with no lived experience needed. Music isn't a problem to be solved. Generative music is the wrong tool: it's trained on other people's music, and even when that's legal, it's not ethical. Because models imitate the average of their training data, the output drifts toward homogenized music and model collapse. Original music keeps the whole music ecosystem healthy. To fight against this, we teach musicians how AI actually works, in plain language: Python, prompt engineering, and building your own AI systems. Not shortcuts. Tools that help you go further than you could on your own.

We also work with educators. We help teachers understand what these systems can and can't do, and how to fold them into lessons in ways that support real learning. The goal is to strengthen good teaching, not replace it.

Books

Our books meet learners at every stage—from fundamentals to practical projects. They build technical understanding from the ground up, in plain language: how models are trained, how data affects output, how to write effective inputs, and how to string tools together to solve musical problems. Musicians learn how to guide AI models effectively for their needs, and how to use prompts and vibe coding to generate useful practice and compositional material. They also learn to set up repeatable workflows that strengthen their playing and creativity while the music stays 100% theirs.

Educators learn to create responsive materials and track understanding over time. Groups—whether ensembles, bands, or teaching teams—learn how to use AI collaboratively, shaping shared workflows and creative processes without losing the human connection that makes music meaningful.

Certification

For musicians who want proof of applied skill, we offer the AI Musician Certification: four books from foundations to building custom AI systems. Complete the track, submit a capstone project, and earn the AI Musician certification, a human-reviewed credential you can post on LinkedIn and social, not an auto-graded quiz or certificate mill. Capstones are reviewed personally by Jonathan Barrios, so the feedback is practical and the certification means something, and you'll have a powerful skill to add to your resume. Learn more about certification.

Live Workshops

We offer live AI workshops on Google Meet or in person, tailored to your group's domain and experience level. Sessions are exciting, hands-on, and focused on doing: guided labs, clear takeaways, and practices you can put to work right away, whether you're putting AI to work around your music or fitting it into day-to-day workflows and planning.

Founder

Barrios AI was founded by Jonathan Barrios, a jazz musician, multi-instrumentalist, and composer who also builds AI systems and teaches AI/ML engineering for a living, with 10+ years teaching data science, machine learning, and full-stack development at Treehouse, Thinkful/Chegg, and CBT Nuggets. That combination is rarer than it should be, and it's the whole point of Barrios AI. He uses AI every day, for everything from research to building tools, and still makes the music and the creative decisions 100% himself. Everything we teach holds that same principle.

Want to work with Jonathan directly? Book a 1:1 AI coaching session.

Read Jonathan's writing on AI and music: Music Isn't a Problem to Be Solved and Artificial Intelligence for Musicians.