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Hi Ruari, it's not here, is it?

What is the low end, price?

Yup. I'm an aspiring songwriter and I'd have been pretty pleased with myself with a couple of those Rick Beato AI songs. I will definitely have to up my game. Rick showed a song that was nearly completely machine generated, but I can see people feed in their own lyrics, have the AI system generate the tune & harmony, then learn to perform it themselves, and it becomes a very blurred line between human and AI art.

We had a reasonably musical family, my nan, mum and uncle all played piano but my uncle played keys in a band in that London, covers and a bit of a party band who did well in the late 60s/early 70s. when he quit, me and my brother inherited his Vox keyboard , AC30 head and a Selmer 2x12 cab . this was awesome and great fun , but a trip to Steptoes in canal street meant £15 was invested on a epiphone Gibson copy , and a rat pedal followed. this lead to some great noises from the garage, that not all the neighbours appreciated. However , Mrs Tristram next door was a touch more enlightened , and happened to mention that her eldest , Graham , had an old guitar that he wasn’t using and was in a box under the bed. And Lo , I became the owner of a late 60’s Hofner violin bass…with a broken neck socket , but hey , I was 17 , had my dads tools, and yes, a couple of wood screws put it back together. Having a bass at school was a novelty and thus I was seconded to play at all the assemblies and school shows. I moved on to an old Fender I think (that would probably with a fortune now , but was pennies or I wouldn’t have bought it) , that went missing as did the keys , amp and cab from a rehearsal room . suffice to say that my brother took on the violin bass duties at school and obviously corrupted @Leonard Smalls after his exposure to its subtle charms 😁

It's really good to see so much love for the little XR/MR18 mixers. I was fortunate enough to be given an MR18 by a good friend of mine as he said it was a bit iffy. However, a firmware update and some reflowing of a few xlr joints on the pcb and a couple of years later it's still going strong! The rack contains a budget IEM until the gear fund is enough to get a ew300 G4 kit. Around the back is 1u patch panel with Powercon and 2 thrus to feed my kemper rack and a 4 way for laptop, chargers etc... Also scored a Behringer P16D and a couple of P16M controllers which the bass player and the drummer have. The little green Cat5 is for the drummers Roland TD12 inputs (4 way rack di at the bottom of his rack with the cat tails coming from that) This enables my singer, lead guitarist and my self to use the stereo auxes on the mixer itself as we're all wireless iems in stereo.

Zomby Woof - Zappa.

I’m A Werewolf, Baby - The Tragically Hip

Phoenix Rising! I had another full-gig dep with my old band at a nice pub in Gillingham (Dorset) on Sunday afternoon. I don’t think the pub's name (‘The Phoenix’) was inspired by my gently-reviving bass career, but who knows? Mrs G came a long as it was a 4-7pm daylight gig in the pub garden, on a very pleasant sunny day, with free drinks for the band all afternoon and a good crowd – whoopee! I took the H-B Mustang-alike along with my usual AG700 and Darkglass 2x12 through an Aguilar boost pedal. It’s nice how my set-memory sprang to mind after months of not playing bass, even down to those unfortunate (but thankfully occasional) bum notes. I unwittingly added a little street-theatre to the second set – the KB player uses a bespoke drink-glass holder screwed to his mic-stand. This works fine with normal beer glasses, but the pub was (for some reason) using stemmed glasses with a C of G was a lot higher than normal, and his drink-holder had a gap in its circumference neatly judged to allow the stem of a glass to fall through. During an enthusiastic bout of pogo-ing I managed to swipe the glass with the head of the bass, the glass fell through the holder and upended a good ¾ pint of beer all over and into the KB - cue some interesting electronic noises and a mild ‘bang’. The KB-ist started laughing, removed the KB from its stand then stood in the street pouring beer out of a vent in the side of it, left it to dry in the sun, drove home (nearby) and got a replacement KB – back on the stand after we had done 20 minutes as a four-piece to cover – what a trouper! Here’s hoping it dried out and just needed a fuse… I did my usual sax-set, we finished at 7.15, Ms G and I were back nursing a cup of tea and an upset cat (‘What time do you call this?!’) by 9.15, then we slept like whacked haddocks. ‘Yes’, I thought just before starting to snore, ‘this gigging is as exciting (and tiring) just as I remember it! ‘ ZZzzz…

I did say at the bottom of my response that it mimics how humans learn. The difference being while we take information a bit at a time, AI can read and digest large volumes very quickly. The legal decision is can tech derived art be classified as art… luckily not my decision to make!

My sire jazz sounds huge even in passive mode, and even with a hefty dose of back pickup mixed in. perhaps it’s because I run it through the ampeg modelling on my ancient zoom b2?

I used to get all the regular Bass mags and there were articles in the US mag on mains cables and how oxide build up on your plug pins could also affect the tone. So I regularly would use a glass fibre contact cleaning stick to clean up my plungs pins till they shone . There were adverts for oxygen free mains leads at exorbitant prices as well. I did get rather anal there after making up larger mains leads using 2.5mm flex and also amp to cab leads at 4mm oxygen free from HiFi shops. I am over that now but always make sure by amp goes straight in the wall and not via many extension leads. Volt drop at venues, definitely affects your tone particularly in the bass, i have gone into this before on here, when in Marquees just be aware long standard extensions are a tone killers. I have noticed this in Hotels also when the dish washers go on just as you take to the stage, as well as chillers in the Bar cutting in, you can physically hear the change.

I found the same. I could never get on with Squier Jazz, no matter what I did it sounded thin and weedy compared with all my other basses including my 60s Burns Sonic. Also whenever I let a Jazz Bass user play through my rig I would have to turn it up massively compared with my usual settings in order to get anything like a usable sound.

But surely we all learn to create art whether it be visual or audio starting off by copying what we see and hear and like? Certainly no-one in the 21st century is emerging fully formed doing completely brand new work without having gone through this learning process first. The way I see it AI is just like me at 14-15 where my "influences" were clearly on show in both the music and art I was making, and I was only a whisker away from plagiarism. And even today I'll freely admit that if I see or hear something I like it will at some stage probably get incorporated into something I create. What experience has given me is the knowledge not to make it too obvious. AI hasn't learnt that yet and IMO will require a lot me resources and effort putting into it to reach that stage.

I just use it for a couple of songs that need gang vocals, so everything all the way up. Normal bvs I don't use anything

Sounds like a typical function gig audience! We did one a couple of weeks ago and it was exactly the same scenario. Thank god for alcohol though eh? 😅