BigRedX

If you don't like the DRs now, you are unlikely to think they have got any better in another couple of weeks. When I first started to branch out from what was available in my local musical instrument shop I bought a selection of DR strings because they were getting a lot of love here and on the US forum. I couldn't get on with any of them. I didn't like the feel and I didn't think they sounded particularly good compared with what I was used to. It's a fact not every string suits every player, and not every string suits every bass and price has very little to do with it.

That's because the main component of the sound is the steel or nickel strings driving a magnetic pickup and the traditional guitar amplification.

Really? IMO the only people who should be worried about the rise of AI electronic music is those who up until now have been content to produce pieces that simply mimic and reference their influences without adding anything new of their own. And stop being nostalgic for the old days. I certainly don't miss them. My studio now fits entirely on my desk and with everything contained within my DAW there are no incompatibilities. I've no desire to go back to the ways of working in the 80s when in order to connect everything together I had to contend with two different CV standards, 2 different gate standards, 3 different types of clock as well as MIDI in order to get everything to talk to each other. I don't miss peering at the letterbox sized display of the Roland Micro-composer which could only show me one note on one channel at a time. The early MIDI sequencers weren't much better, and often it was quicker to have another go at playing what you wanted rather than trying to edit even a couple of wrong notes. Using a DAW hasn't stemmed my creativity. It's opened it up because I can see everything at the same time. All the sounds I program on the various plug-in instruments and effects are saved as part of the composition. I certainly get from initial idea to finished composition far quicker than when my studio was lots individual instruments and effects.

Right now I don't think AI is taking anything away from truly skilled songwriters. All the AI generated songs I have heard so far are very formulaic which is why it can do a fairly decent job in some genres. However all the really interesting and successful songs are those that manage to do something different enough to stand out whilst still fitting into a particular genre. AI can't make that leap right now because all it is doing is regurgitating in a slightly different way what has already been done. Also I doubt whether the sorts of people who would be happy with AI generated songs are the sorts of people who go and see the kinds of bands we play in.

It's no more replacing a skill than using on-line tabs or a YouTube play-along to save you having to work out the baseline of a song by listening to it.

The wobbly rig was my small one which used light-weight cabs and was under 1.5m high. I never tried it with my big rig, because I was afraid it would have squashed the foam flat!

I only use my wireless system for gigs and full band rehearsals, and only at the rehearsals because, for me, part of the reason for rehearsing is to check that all the gear I'm going to be using at a gig is working properly. The rest of the time I use cables.

I've been using the NUX for almost 2 years now with no problems. That includes some large stages and a couple of outdoor gigs.

Over the past 30 years, I've had two guitars and two basses custom built for me. The fact that I still own three of them after a massive clear out of musical equipment and instruments some years ago should tell you everything. The bass that I did let go was a wonderful musical instrument, but it was built specifically to suit the music of a band I was playing in at the time. Since the band folded 15 years ago it had come out of its case a handful of times and, although I've used it twice on recordings, I couldn't justify holding on to an instrument that mostly got played for fun at home about once a year. My advice to anyone contemplating a custom build: 1. Pick a luthier who is already building something very close to the instrument you want. That's what they do best. 2. If the wood is going to be visible pick something that you like the look of. Otherwise it really doesn't matter and leave the selection up to your chosen luthier. On three of my builds I picked ebony because I like the look of black fretboards. No other reason. For one bass I went to the luthier with a photo of an instrument whose colour scheme I really liked (orange and grey) and woods were chosen to achieve this through a combination of natural wood colour and staining. What those actual woods were didn't not interest me beyond achieving the correct look. For any tonal characteristics they may have given the bass I trusted the luthier to make the right choice. 3. If you are going for high C rather than low B make sure that the pickup(s) and electronics are suited to this. IME most bass pickups and pre-amps tend to make high C sound like a bad jazz guitar and not very pleasant to listen to. Go and play lots of basses strung with a high C string and see what works in your opinion for getting the sound you want. Good luck with the build.

It's news like this that has made me glad that I have decided to stick mostly with the plug-ins that are part of the standard installation for my DAW. I have made a couple of exceptions, which make life easier for me when recording but none are essential to my workflow should they stop working tomorrow.

I have made a useful isolation platform for decoupling the acoustic noise produced by playing an electronic drum kit from the fabric of the building so my band could rehearse at my house without annoying the neighbours too much, but it was a significantly more substantial construction than a piece of plywood supported on two bits of "acoustic" foam,

I stopped using mine because on the one stage where it should have made a vast improvement to the sound, it was negligible but it did make my bass rig wobble about alarmingly in time with the kick drum pedal. @Bill Fitzmaurice should be along with the science as to why they aren't really worth it.

Right now for creative purposes. AI is at the same stage I was in my teens when my songwriting "influences" were very obvious, and the greatest current threat to it is that it will get sued for plagiarism. As others have said there are lots of uses of AI in music that take the donkey work out of some technical aspects such as noise removal. and frequency balancing. I use AI fairly frequently in my day job in graphic design. One use is when creatinge photo-realistic mock-ups of some of the food products and packaging that my clients are considering producing. I could spend time in Photoshop compositing inclusions onto a slab of chocolate to show through a window in the packaging, or I could ask an image generator to create one for me. One will take an hour or so the other with the right prompts less than 5 minutes. It has also been used to generate one of the "covers" for my band's releases. At the time I was completely snowed under with paying work, so we fed a series of prompts into an AI image generator and refined the output until we had something everyone was happy with. I could have done a better job manually, but it would have taken a lot longer and at the expense of paying work.

Poisoning the well. IIRC someone has created a method of encoding music so that AI thinks it is a different genre to its actual one, or "hears" the music it is being trained on as just noise.

I find with a slot loading bridge it's more difficult keeping the strings in the slots while getting up to a suitable tension that they will stay there by themselves. This is never more obvious when trying to replace a string under pressure like at a gig.