MacDaddy

The drummer forgot his cymbals 😖 Including hi-hats. We were in one of Pirates rehearsal studios, and they didn't have anything to lend or rent. So interesting rehearsal. Drummer put a tambourine on the floor tom, and tbf it wasn't too bad.

I could write lots about this, but I did once wonder if I had too much gear when I was contemplating buying another bass amp. But I came to the realisation that as I don't tend to spend my money on anything else, I'm not in debt, and I enjoy it, then buy the amp 😁

He doesn't play bass on the albums so makes sense he'd also cheat with the vocals 😜

I can't. I haven't got a stencil...

It's one and a half hours long. Haven't got time to watch that. I need an AI to summarise it for me 😉

Any excuse to show me hanging out with him last year... 😁

If they're no longer good enough for Hooky, they're not good enough for me!

Which bass?

We've been through this before in the 70s & 80s when computers took a lot of peoples jobs.

The horse has already bolted when it comes to AI in music. Tools like Suno can generate full songs, backing, melody, vocals, from a short text prompt, (and give you the stems) and they’re already in the hands of bedroom producers and ad agencies. Using The Beatles as an example, because why not: Imagine a system trained only on music up to 1966. Feed it the Beatles’ catalogue up to that point and say, “Write the next Beatles song.” What you’d get would sound far closer to something from the Red Album era than anything on the Blue Album. That’s because these models learn patterns from existing material and recombine them in plausible ways. They’re excellent at imitation, pastiche, and interpolation, but they don’t experience the cultural shocks, new instruments, studio breakthroughs, or interpersonal dynamics that pushed the Beatles from early singles into the Sgt. Pepper/Abbey Road period. From a business perspective, that’s not necessarily a problem. Plenty of genres run on “don’t scare the fans,” and production music for TV, film, and ads often just needs to hit a familiar brief. For that world, a machine that can churn out convincing, on‑brand material forever is close to ideal. AI is here to stay, and it will dominate the “we need something that sounds like X” space. The real question is this: AI can remix what it has seen in novel combinations, but that’s not the same as being part of a scene, reacting to new technology, or four humans in a room pushing each other somewhere unexpected. Will these systems ever produce the equivalent of the Blue years, those left‑turns where a band invents a new sound rather than iterating on the old one? Imitation is easy. Evolution is the hard part. TL:DR current AI excels at stylistic imitation rather than genuine artistic evolution.

Thing is, after watching Danny Sapko, I'm not convinced everything Mohini does isn't A.I. 😸

So what should I do with my Future Impact V3? Paper weight? 😉

How did you get on?

Battle of the fans? Many years ago, my then band won a BotB, and because of this the following year we were invited to play a festival at the home town's twin town in Europe, all expenses paid. Plus lots of publicity in the local rags for winning. So all good 😊