BigRedX

But what will you do when your 3rd party plug-ins need to be upgraded because you've upgraded to a new Mac or MacOS or a new version of Logic and old ones don't work any more? Or if the developer decided they don't want to develop a particular plug-in anymore or they go out of business (cf Native Instruments)? And what do you £1800 worth of plug-ins do that you couldn't do already with the massive number that are part of the standard Logic install? Logic already has more quality effects and instrument plus-ins than most of the studios that produced some of the all-time classic recordings. Wouldn't it be prudent to spend the time learning to get the best out of what you already have first? It strikes me that there are a significant number of users for whom the main reason to get a new plug-in is the vast number of pre-sets that come with it rather than learning how to create something new of their own.

Personally in the current financial climate I couldn't recommend any DAW other than GarageBand or Logic to anyone who owns a Mac. GarageBand and Logic are two of the things that actively sell Macs to creative users, and remember that Apple makes most of it money out of its hardware not its software, and therefore they are very unlikely to be abandoned any time soon. Everyone else is not looking as good. While Fender have just bought Presonus I wonder how long it will be before they realise that selling software is whole different proposition to selling guitars and they abandon it. Just remember what happened with Gibson and Opcode and Cakewalk. Cakewalk got a lucky reprieve, but Opcode and their innovative products are long gone. Audition is just a curiosity for Creative Cloud subscribers, and Avid stumbles from one financial crisis to another with ProTools not sitting well with the rest of their portfolio and since the platform was opened up to 3rd party hardware it has never been as robust or reliable.

There's no easy way to answer this, without knowing exactly what you want to do and how you expect to work. I'm a Logic user, but there's a good chance that a lot of the time GarageBand would do everything I need. The synth player in my band does a lot of his initial ideas in GarageBand on the iPad because he finds it very immediate. Those GarageBand projects will open up directly into Logic with all the sounds and settings preserved and then we can work on them in more detail if necessary. It depends whether you want to spend £199 on Logic and be faced with an extra layer or two of complexity before you can start composing or recording. My advice would be to start with GarageBand and if you regularly find yourself wanting to do things that are beyond its capabilities then consider upgrading to Logic. As I said you won't loose you existing work because Logic will open all your old projects directly and they will sound exactly the same as they did in GarageBand.

In my industry (graphic design and artwork) the people who lost their jobs through the introduction of computers were those who couldn't be bothered to learn to use the new methods. I started off with the traditional methods of working in the 80s and those core skills I learnt were the things that meant I didn't mess up when I transferred over to the computer. For me I was just using a mouse and keyboard and looking at a screen instead of drawing pens, cow gum and rulers on a drawing board. It's also those core skills that keep me in business today where a lot of my work comes from sorting out "designs" done on the computer that can't actually be printed properly.

The drum and some of the synth parts for when my band plays gigs aren't "performed" by a human. Although I've done the programming, there was very little playing or performance involved. Most of it involved dragging "notes" around on a grid until I got the parts I wanted. Also most of the programmed synth parts are pretty complex but have lots of repetition. From previous experience we would struggle to find a keyboard player with the required technical ability to play them, regardless of the fact that on their own the parts are rather boring. IMO it's far better to hand these off to a machine that won't complain about them, and doesn't take up lots of additional room on stage or in the band transport.

To get a passable piece of AI generated music you still have to be able to write a decent prompt (or more likely a decent set of prompts) in the first place.

As an artist myself in both music and graphics I would completely disagree with rejection of digital forms for creation and distribution. The internet and digital media both audio and visual have allowed me to reach a far wider audience than I ever could before those things existed. Before the internet became mainstream the best I could hope for with any of my musical projects is that we would reach a couple of hundred people mostly here in the UK, and it was hard work doing just that. The first band I was in produced a handful of albums on cassette and two tracks on a vinyl compilation before disbanding in 1983. In the early 2000s we were contacted by an indie label in the US offering us a deal to put out a retrospective compilation on CD which meant we could now reach listeners all over the world and more importantly our music could be heard without it being buried under 3 generations of tape hiss. Without the internet or the digital domain that could never have happened. Without the internet and digital media the bands I have been in during the last 20 years would have probably done a couple of years worth of local gigs before folding. Instead we've played to knowing and appreciative audiences all over the UK. My current band derives a useful portion of our income from people all over the world streaming our music Similarly with my graphic art. I'm old enough to have worked with paint, ink and Letraset when there was no alternative, and while I produced some cool stuff that way (one example of which has been deemed interesting enough to be in the V&A Permanent Collection) I have absolutely no desire to return to those days. With the computer I can produce something far more interesting and innovative far more quickly and that won't include mistakes that I didn't have the time or money to correct. Again I can produce work for clients all over the world and not be limited to those on my doorstep. Innovators come whatever the medium and they will find new ways to use it that the majority of us had never even considered. IMO those worrying that "The Sky Is Falling" are those without sufficient talent or artistic vision.

But right now AI can't produce something that is as new and different as your three examples were when they first started producing music. Sure your "fat uncle Dave can ask chat gpt to crap out an acid techno banger or a Kraftwerk-style song in under 12 seconds" but it will just be a facsimile of what has already been done. It won't have any of the innovation that the originals had when they were first released. Of course there are plenty of "artists" whose musical output could be described as a facsimile of the real innovators. They are the ones who should be worried about AI. Those who keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible and acceptable are safe for a long time yet.

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.

I suppose my foot pedal use is different to the majority of musicians who if they have anything complex appear to be rooted in front of it. In the past, if the stage was big enough I'd be all over the place and often have to rush back to my pedal(s) to be able to make patch changes. All the important footswitches had to be in the "front row" and even then there was a chance that I'd hit the wrong one. Anything in the second row that required mid-song operation would have resulted in me either also pressing a switch in front of it or falling over or both. Therefore for me anything with two rows of foot switches is generally impractical, as the top row can't be used by me mid-song. As a result of this, these days all my patch changes are run from the backing track via MIDI so I don't have to worry about being in the right place at the right time to make changes to my sound. It has also allowed me to have patch changes exactly where the song requires them and not what is more convenient for me to activate manually. Some songs have changes every other bar, and a new song we are currently working has a change that comes every four bars but only lasts for 1 beat.

Spotify will carry on until one of its rivals decides to offer a free service with all the features of a free Spotify account. The problem with the other Streaming services is that you can't easily share a link or a playlist because unless the person also has an account with the relevant service they can't easily access it. As an artist I make far more money out of Spotify, through being on several popular playlists, than all the other streaming services with higher per-play rates put together.