Anderton

For a one-off, I only need to get over the logistical hurdles once. At the moment, anything else seems like it's not worth the effort. OTOH, if the act goes over really well, tweaking my goals may be in order...

That's the approach I'm trying for "The Deadful Great" Halloween one-off, with revenue sharing with the theater. But finding a venue with good acoustics, parking, proper zoning/licensing, and seating isn't always easy. Some of the best places would be the auditoriums in colleges where I give seminars, but they're often not available for rent to the public. I guess they want to keep out the riff-raff

Another issue is lack of venues for playing live.

Interesting indeed. I have one of those Gibson Les Pauls from the year they used the slightly wider neck, and the automated tuning, so I experiment quite a bit with alternate tunings. There's definitely much more guitar life than E A D G B E! One of my favorite presets is a drone, E B E E B E. The two tonics in the middle sound cool. Because there's no major/minor bias, you can layer the drone chord with anything to thicken the sound.

I'm definitely going to keep it as simple as possible. But, I want to be able to improvise and have LOTS of interaction with the audience. So if I can avoid backing tracks, I will. Right now the setup is Helix for guitar, VoiceLive for voice, and a Beat Buddy for drums. I don't see it changing much unless I upgrade to the next-level Beat Buddy. Oh, and a bag of kazoos to hand out the audience so they can do the ocarina solo in "Wild Thing."

An amazing MIDI keyboard controller with MPE, designed to be updatable to MIDI 2.0. A decked-out Mac Mini with the latest version of Logic. One of the ARM Windows laptops coming out this summer. Probably a Surface.

Fast food culture permeates everything. Fast food has the look and feel of food, very little nutritional value, can be mass-produced, and keeps hunger at bay. That's good enough for many people, and we're talking about food - an essential part of staying alive, and having good health. So they're not going to object to fast music.

Excellent question. I don't have any real-world examples, but I would imagine that the installation routines would complicate matters. Are you using Mac or Windows?

...because you probably won't have to! To my way of thinking, one aspect that makes a mix great is being able to translate well over anything.

I'm 100% with this. People only listen to the vocals and beats anyway As long as those come through, you're golden. Remember that phones are optimized to reproduce the range of frequencies that are most important for speech intelligibility. Anyone who wants to hear decent music from a phone needs to use earbuds, which connect to an audio source that's not tuned like a speaker.

Well, so far I see this as a discussion. None of the following is an argument, it's a series of viewpoints that I believe are grounded in reality. I expect the discussion will keep going in that direction. In fact I know it will, because I can lock threads 😎 The problem is that AI is a tool and as the old saying goes, you can use a hammer to build a house or murder someone. Bad people will use AI in horrible ways and cool people will use it to solve problems. I'm not worried about the people who use it to solve problems. But I do worry about the people who use it to figure out ways to shut down a nation's electrical infrastructure, or invade physical or artistic privacy. So it's not surprising that most discussions revolve around things with the potential to damage us. Think of it this way: I don't think about cars a lot, but I sure as hell would think about a car that was bearing down on me while I was crossing the street. There are also some things that don't lend themselves to nuance, like music being devalued. I don't think anyone would question that has happened. Of course, all the digital technology that has enabled music to be devalued has been a boon to those who have home studios and like to make music. And as I've said in other threads, maybe not being able to make a living from recording music will mean people will get back to a personal view of music, or live performance. But for me, music has always been about an expression of the human soul. As Huxley said, "after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." The AI-generated music I've heard so far is ideal for people who like to sit down and listen to Muzak, which at least IMHO is where the slippery slope started. You're right this has been going on for a long time. Think of all the musicologists who felt that by feeding enough Bach and musical rules into a computer, it would come up with a Bach string quartet. Ultimately, anyone who was familiar with Bach could tell the difference. But today's public is so accepting of lies and fakery they probably won't be able to tell the difference between the real Billie Eilish and a fake one, which devalues what Billie Eilish brings to the table, even if it doesn't affect her financially.

Thanks! I see a lot of acts using tablets, and it's not just for the lyrics. I do think I'll just work on the theater gig for now, that way I don't have to learn a zillion cover songs that people want to hear. Still, even though I want to do it live/real time, I'm starting to think that using backing tracks from time to time would add another dimension to the show - like switching instruments or something similar.

Yes, you should get into this, because there will be some companies where the people involved need to sleep at night. They deserve props. But they'll find out soon enough that some hot shot programmer in Belarus sleeps very well, without giving a damn about who he's stepping on. And maybe some people in the company feel the same way. Read the mission statement from any huge US bank, and try to reconcile that with such activities as paying $39 billion in fines for securities abuses, deleting 47 million emails that were required to be maintained and accessible to regulators (and suspiciously relevant to ongoing securities investigations and regulatory inquiries), criminal felony counts, ongoing money laundering, looting of public funds in countries like Malaysia and Venezuela, paying $185 million in fines for opening 1.5 unauthorized checking accounts and 500,000 unauthorized credit card accounts, and on and on. And those details relate to only two banks. Companies can say anything they want. We'll see what they actually do. "Oh no, we would never, ever base our images on photos by someone named Ken Lee. We don't even know who he is! Surely the extreme similarities are just a coincidence. Who are you gonna trust, us or your lying eyes?"

Yup.

Wow. Everybody who frequents this site should watch this video. At 2X, it takes less than 10 minutes. Anything that's online can be manipulated...like video streaming services too, which promise the world, remove content, end ownership of physical media, and then raise prices.

"ARA shared an open letter called 'Stop Devaluing Music' that implores developers and tech companies to cease 'the assault on human creativity.'" A lot of good that's going to do. Music started the devaluation process when Napster appeared, and the iPod ran with it. Then streaming services put the final nail in the coffin. Like Amazon says on their packaging, "millions of songs for free!" That says it all. The music business is on life support, and AI will remove even that. The only hope is if consumers develop more refined musical tastes, vote with their dollars for the non-AI-generated music, make a conscious decision to support their favorite artists, and the people explolting generative AI say "hmmm, maybe this is wrong and we shouldn't do it." I'd place the odds of that series of events happening at 1,000:1 against.

Totally! Think of it this way. There's a row of objects with spaces between them. Behind it is another row of objects, which you can see through the spaces. If looked at head-on from the front, you can clearly see the differentiation of where the front row object ends, and the object in the back. That's stereo. With Atmos, it's like you're standing 10 feet higher, and looking down on the two rows of objects. You can see their spatial relationship to each other much better, although the dividing lines between the objects as seen from the front aren't as obvious. Hmmm...maybe I should draw a picture.

Wow. People really aren't very bright.

That looks very cool. Also, May is going to have some interesting news about what Microsoft is doing with Qualcomm. And I have to admit, that little copilot button that just got added to my display's lower right is getting a LOT of use. I use it to ask questions as trivial as "Does PreSonus capitalize 'view' in 'Arrange view'"? and a couple seconds later, I get the answer and it's right. Didn't need to open a browser or anything, it's in the OS. Being able to generate illustrations, titles, and text rewrites, as well as coordinate schedules in Copilot, is also cool. For creative stuff Copilot doesn't always get it right by any means, but it hits a surprisingly high percentage. I think Mac and Windows users are going to be very happy over the course of the next year. Apple will keep tweaking the ecosystem so well that you'd be crazy to venture outside of it.

Headphones! I render to binaural, because I post my music on YouTube. YouTube can't play back multichannel files (at least not yet) but binaural isn't a problem. Judging by the PreSonus forums, most users don't realize what it means that Atmos can render to binaural. Given that a huge number of people listen on headphones these days, this isn't as much of a limitation as it may seem. I liken it to when stereo came out. Not everyone had stereo turntables, so records were released in mono and stereo. Eventually, stereo took over.

I'd vote for the latter as being worse. I use algorithmic composition a lot in what I do. For example, I have a way to generate drum fills using Studio One's probability slider in the pattern generator, and note shuffling. I do the same as you - initiate the macro a few times, and when there's something cool, I keep it. But the fills are based on a note framework I created, using a macro I wrote, whose suitability I determine, with edits I create if needed. So I see it as more of an interactive experience compared to pulling loops from a "make these dope hit beats with this dope hit MIDI pack."

I think there's a differentiation between players and composers. What you're describing happens to me in the studio. It happened to me playing live as well, and don't get me wrong, I love playing live. But for me, composng/recording doesn't come with the same kind of logistical downsides.

So that's one aspect. The other is that if it's impossible to support yourself by playing music, then people will play music only for their own satisfaction. I don't make music to make a living. Been there, done that. It was fun and profitable while it lasted. Eventually you reach a point where enough is enough. Doing music purely for myself is more fun that going to the CBS studios at 52nd street and playing a session for an alcoholic country and western singer making a comeback...or touring the backwaters of the USA. But I'll NEVER say "enough is enough" about making music. I'm making kick-ass music that probably 99.9% of the people in these forums have never heard. Am I going to go out of my way to get more "engagement"? Why? I put it out there. If people want to find it, fine. If they don't, they won't know what they're missing so it doesn't matter whether they would love it or hate it. Do I care about having more people hear what I do? Of course. The comments I get on my YouTube channel are immensely gratifying. But do I care enough to prioritize getting more people to hear what I do? No. I'd rather spend my time making music instead of marketing it, which as far as I can tell is the way the business works these. Bottom line: Whether or not AI takes over won't matter to me, or the people who listen to my music. Should I care more about that?

I think it's entirely possible that most people will be satisfied with "the look and feel" of music and not care that it sounds more or less like 72 billion similar songs. Will AI produce a Brandenberg Concerto or Sketches of Spain? Probably not, at least in the near future, but most people don't listen to classical or jazz music anyway. I think music becomes more than background music only if tied in with a social movement. That happened with the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and started to fizzle out in the 90s when grunge became a significant factor. It was a localized movement, not a world-wide one. The only social movement I see these days is people being angry and upset about a huge variety of subjects. So, maybe the only music with a chance to make a difference to listeners will be Nu Punk. You heard it here first

This comment from Analogika in a different thread is too provocative not to have its own thread: Just saw an interview snippet with Trent Reznor on music streaming, and he phrased it thusly: "I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They're not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered." We always thought music mattered to most people the way it matters to us. Most people don't give a shit, and most people never did. People didn't believe me 25 years ago, when I said that for the vast majority, "music" is something they switch on on a device on the windowsill when they walk in the office. It's interspersed with news and the odd interview. Occasionally, something familiar comes on; that's nice. This is also why A.I.-generated music will take over a large portion of the market (yeah, other thread, I know): in reality, most people just never gave a shit.