SumOne

I've recently bought a few MPC plugins: Mini D is Excellent. I think it's great, I immediately found presets with exactly the Minimoog bassline sounds I want. Editing is straightforward and intuative. Inspiring to make P Funk synth bassline sort of stuff. I've spent hours on it. Jura: Very good. I've found lots of great sounds and is inspiring for making 80s synth pop type stuff (it has had me listening to a lot of Italo Disco and getting quite close to replicate it) , I especially like the arpeggiator stuff and the lead and pad things. It has loads of editing potential - admittedly a bit too much for me right now to be completely sure what it is I'm tweaking sometimes. MPC Stems: Rubbish! Or at least it has been rubbish with a phone recording of the band - which is something Moises dealt with quite well, and I had Stems technology with Serato for DJ stuff and it'd do a good job of stems separation in a few seconds per song. MPC stems though - takes ages (something like 5 mins for a 5 min song) then has an extermely un-intuative way of working with the stems and the separation is bad. At least it was only £10, but so far it is one of the worst £10 I've spent in a long time. Big caveat here: I only got this yesterday and spent about an hour with it, if I spend more time with it and get better results I'll edit this. Sub Factory: Good, but I haven't been inspired by this one (which is what I think a really good synth does), it does the 808 bassline thing well - but so does the MPC Bassline (which I already have) and I don't find that to be a sound that really needs too much parameter editing, it just needs to do a good 'boom'! I dunno but I find this synth over-complicates stuff and becomes a bit uni-intuative, it's not encouraging me to play around with it. I like dubstep and drum n bass so thought this'd be right up my street for getting really in-depth control of complex bass sounds but the results so far are a bit bland and in the no-mans land of not sounding 'retro' like the Mini D or Jura but not sounding cutting-edge enough to keep up with current dubstep/dnb producers. Hopefully more time on this will help. Ring the Alarm: Good for what it is - but it's basic (but at least is only £14), it's a dub siren with a few extra bits. Sounds good but the issue with this one is using the MPC hardware because the touch screen and 4x Q link knobs that you need to swith around isnt ideal for this sort of hands-on knob twiddling thing, ideally it's something that's a separate on-hand unit to occasionally off-the-cuff do a quick siren effects - but as an MPC Plugin it doesn't quite work like that. For my ideal setup I'd like to add a small mixing desk and add a a real dub siren and some outboard effects like a space echo pedal (Boss RE-202) they could also solve the issue of playing live and filling the time for the new song to load on the MPC (but hardware dub siren + space echo + a mixer is a lot more equipment and cost than £14!).

1. Sound desk: Mackie ProFX12v3+ (£340) seems the one that does most of the things I need. 2. 4 string passive Jazz Bass. My main Bass is a 5 string active but it'd be nice to have something a bit different as backup. Neither are really essential, I can do my home recording just one thing at a time with an audio interface I already have or l could borrow the band mixer for live stuff, and a backup bass is - well it's just a backup. ....other things might come along and tempt me but that's all I'm after right now, which is just as well as that short list is gonna be at least £600 which is a stretch for Santa's budget! I could see Jazz bass creeping up anything from 'backup 2nd hand Squier' to 'might as well get a decent keeper' to 'a vintage one is an investment isn't it?!'. I'm happy with my current Bass setup: Ibanez EHB 1005MS sounds/plays decent enough and is lightweight for rehearsals and gigs, Ashdown RM 500 does the job, Markbass 102 is lightweight and good sound, Boss GX-10 covers most effects I need and is easier to carry than a big pedalboard. Practicality/gig-ability seems to be winning out for that live stuff and what I have is quite hard to beat when it comes to that.

Perhaps I've been brainwashed by the algorithm but I find Facebook okay if you can limit your time on it and choose what you allow it to show you e.g. If you get some toxic political rant pop up you don't want to see you need to click to say you don't want to see more of that, it does tend to do as asked. Turned it on for 5 mins just now and this is what I see: - Messanger notification (a friend sent a link to a song) - Marketplace notification (someone sent a 'is this still available' message for a Bass I'm selling) - Roll down my news feed is: Simpsons meme page post, t-shirt advert, random youtuber doing some click bait walkabout thing in my home town, a post in a drum and bass group asking where a sample is from, train company advert, holiday post from a friend I haven't seen in years, cycle helmet advert. ..... none of that is particularly stuff I needed to see, but also no harm done and they are all topics mildly interesting to me, not interesting enough to spend more time clicking through but not the worst way to spend 5 mins. And all of my band's gigs are listed on Facebook, it is actually my go-to calendar to find out when the next gig is!

I suppose anyone with enough Lego + time + skill could build it themselves without needing to buy a set. They make it look that simple on Lego Masters anyway! That sort of is the core idea of Lego as a creative toy rather than always following box sets and instructions isn't it?... At least that's the message I got from the Lego movie and Lego Masters!

Steve Monite, Only You

The Akai Midimix is a good relatively cheap (£77) addition to an MPC: Plugged in and it all worked as it should with minimal faff, the 'MIDI learn' function of the MPC works well. Two things I've used it for so far: For an Organ preset I use it as the Organ drawbars which is much nicer than doing that on screen, and the knobs are mapped to mirror the Organ delay and reverb screen, it means you can do stuff like change the delay feeedback at the same time as moving drawbars - stuff that's impossible (or at least tricky) to do simultaneously on the MPC alone without doing stuff like switching between screens. I also use it like a sound desk mixer e.g. A slider for guitar volume and dials above it for some guitar EQ and overdrive control, another similar channel for piano, drums, bass etc. also some sliders specifically for for effects (e.g. Global delay dry/wet mix on the slider then delay time, feedback, hpf on the knobs). Doing all this with loops is good for live dub mixing sort of stuff. ...and of course using the Midimix as a controller frees up the MPC controls to do other stuff like use the screen as the XY effects controller, assign the Q-Link knobs and the pitch/modulation wheels to specific things, assign pads as sample triggers etc. it feels with a bit of planning that it should be as many controls as I'll reasonably need and be able to cope with in a live situation. The main issue is remembering what you've assigned things to do if you get more complex and change stuff around for different presets. I'm considering some sort of interchangeable overlays I can label - something like this https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1782574539/akai-midimix-overlay-blank-template)

... Or pick fights on a Bass forum? 🫣

Yeah, spot on. I recently started an electronic music project with someone and after trying what Suno could do sort of scuppered our plans - we figured if we're just doing it to make music and not play live then what's the point? Suno can pretty much do it as well already with the right prompts. I've spent about 20 years learning music production but it now anything technical I know might as well be forgotten, it feels like learning to make photo-realistic drawings and then the camera being invented. I had toyed with the idea of being a sound engineer years ago, glad I didn't go down that road. I suppose telling Suno what to make is like being a music producer in the non-technical sense 'add some quiet guitars here'..'make it more upbeat for the chorus' etc. which does have some artistic merit. And like the video says - this might lead to very personal music being made by non-musicians which could be a good thing. Playing an instrument or playing with a band is a different matter though. AI isn't going to replace that achievement, fun, camaraderie or live event. It's partly why I've mostly moved from electronic music production into playing Bass with a pub band, and when I do produce my own music (spending a lot of time with an MPC Key 37 at the moment) I'm doing it becuase it's fun to do - not because I'm aiming to make any groundbreaking music that I'll make £ from.

I could see AI music being good if it gets to be properly intelligent and did the job of good music by making you feel something and then enhances that experience by making it truely personalised. e.g. music to help you relax/sleep that is in-tune with your sleep patterns and heartrate, music that is just right for motivating you at the righ parts of a marathon, music that helps you concentrate on study/work within the timeframes you give it. In some ways, it takes the 'celebrity/pop icon' aspects out of it and just leaves you with the music and emotion it creates which is possibly a good thing? But yeah, current AI music isn't any of that - it is just a middle of the road regurgitation of stuff humans have made. If it doesn't move on from that I'd expect that once it starts heavily referencing AI made music it will just get get increasingly bland. A quote from Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk when they split up "As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot". He went on to completely leave technology out of it and hand-wrote a Ballet score that was only played on traditional instruments. I expect there will be more of this sort of push-back, a young person today might grow up always accepting AI music for their gym workout or background ambient music but I expect (or hope) there will also be more enthusiasm to see humans playing instruments live.

It does mention Mento a few times, and the playlist has a couple of tunes like this: But that's just a couple of tunes in 30hrs of music. I think Mento is mostly skipped over to focus on when the music and culture had switched to 'Bass Culture'.

I'll need to re-read the book, but I think it took the soundsystems 'Bass Culture' as the starting point - and they didn't tend to play Calypso and Mento as they were more of a live band sort of thing and Bass wasn't much of a factor for them.

The book 'Bass Culture, When Reggae Was King' by Lloyd Bradley is probably the best account of the history of Reggae. There is a 30hr Spotify playlist of all the music mentioned: It goes all the way from late 1940s swing/RnB and Jazz that was played at the early soundsystems before Ska came about. It doesn't include Calypso and Mento though which seem a bit of an omission.

I think it is important to all be on the same page and be realistic and honest about what can be done as a team. All very well having an ambitious retiree band leader pushing and saying 'everyone learn these 5 songs before rehearsal next week' and then moaning when some haven't perfected it - but not all instruments are the same, not everyone learns at the same speed, some people have more pressing commitments. Perhaps the speed of learning for the band as a whole is one song a week. Also, as mentioned by others - need a definitive version to all learn, rehearsal recordings, all paying for the rehearsal room, and motivation of a forthcoming gig.