TimR

2 hours ago, godathunder said:

Do you think that all manufacturers measure their amps' power output the same way?

No. They don't.

There will be a THD% accompanying the X Watts at 1kHz. That will tell you how much distortion the amp suffers at that output. The lower the better. 

I'm surprised it's not USB C. 

59 minutes ago, MacDaddy said:

 

 

Why bass players kill...

Most bass players are incredibly chilled people. We have to be. There's only so many drummers you can kill before someone starts to notice. 

Sensitivity.

My 500W amp spends much of its time set at 3. If I adjust it to 2.5 its far too quiet, 3.5 too loud. 

I guess a 200W amp might give more range. 

1 hour ago, Al Nico said:

Frustrating, especially when most of the audience likely can't even play an instrument, so what do they know about it to judge?

I think it's when the attempts of middle aged people dancing to a medium rock song fail when it turns into a full on house rave. 

On 21/01/2026 at 14:03, Sean said:

We rehearsed Sultans last week and it was so fast that I was blown away by the dexterity of nailing the solos note for note.

 

I believe that a lot of songs "breathe" better at the right tempo or within a certain tolerance. 

With Sultans I found that my bass line sounded too busy at the tempo we played it whereas playing it at the "Alchemy tempo" sounds fine. 

 

I've found that vocalists struggle too when songs are rushed, their breath control goes completely and then their performance drops off.

 

In a previous band I used to nag about playing songs too fast all the time and was ignored, not even a conversation. I clocked Living on a Prayer at 151 bpm off one gig recording (it's 123bpm on the record), others were similarly fast, then one gig we had a dep drummer who played everything absolutely on the money and afterwards the other three wouldn't shut up about how well we played and how much a great groove we had, how we didn't make any mistakes etc.  

 

 

3 hours ago, Al Nico said:

I played in cover bands for hundreds of years. One of the favourite changes the drummers like to make is increasing the tempo dramatically to suit their excitement for the show.

This provides a platform for the other musicians to simplify their parts, and get to the bar at break earlier, and for longer.

Time at the bar slows down the second set and provides a more relaxed approach to tempo, timing, and pitch, complemented by an increase of guitar volume aprox. +12db.

It's called the "amateurs disease", to make something more exciting, just play it quicker. The alternative is to actually work out why it sounds dull. Some bands have sped up recordings but I suspect that's under controlled conditions while listening to it. 

I also played Livin' on a Prayer in a band with a drummer who would speed up. I used to spend most of the gig trying to hold him back. One gig I'd had enough and just went with him. By the end of the song the singer couldn't get the words in and was giving the drummer daggers, and the people on the dance floor were begining to give up one by one. 

I blame the "keeping up with the drummer" mindset. Even I have fallen into that trap in my post.

The drummer should be playing at the appropriate volume. Too many non-musical drummers playing at one volume. But that's another thread. 

Electronics is a lot cheaper and easier to mass produce than it was 'in the old days'  

Manufacturers will do market research and watch sales figures and know what sells. 

My first Amp in 1987 was 100w. It was just about loud enough to keep up with a drummer in a pub. 

But everything got louder as it got cheaper. That's not good for anyone imo.

Everything is getting lighter now. It'll get to the point where everything becomes  1000W as it'll cost the same and be the same size as a 100W amp. 

It won't be free for long. 

AI slop. The backlash has started. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wx2dz2v44o

12 hours ago, Sean said:

I doubt BotGazz uses a phone keyboard with auto correct that changes a misspelling of "tube" to "time". 

Tube is easy to mistype as tibe as U and I are next to each other. Tibe autocorrects to time. 

16 hours ago, EliasMooseblaster said:

Yeah, I should have spotted that, shouldn't I?

No. The rest of us needed someone clever to spot it as well. 🤣

Conversely, I've just had an hour long meeting with a couple of people I don't know very well on a personal level.

We discussed something very important to all of us and required every ounce of my emotional intelligence to learn and pick up on their micro body language and inferred language. 

I'm ready to go back to bed. I certainly couldn't do that regularly for very long.

When machines have learned to do that, we are in trouble. Until machines learn to do that, they are not going to be much of a problem to us. 

41 minutes ago, Woodinblack said:

 

Absolutely none of it is just accessing a database. Computers are very good at accessing data, humans are absolutely terrible at it, there is always some kind of interpretation of that data and revision based on unrelated items, rather than literally recalling the data, ie storage.

 

The 'people who liked this also liked...' problem is a big data lookup issue. You have a database of 100 million peoples listening preferences and what they like. User A liked this song by this artist? Well, we have another 5 million that liked that, and of those, 1 million also liked this song, 900,000 liked this one, 800,000 liked this one - thats your list. A straight database search is really easy, and cheap, a neural net lookup requires a ton of more power. 

 

 

I would say the first three hours of my weekday, every day, is exactly the same and can be done on autopilot. I suggest most people are the same. 

1 hour ago, Woodinblack said:

 

That really is the weakest definition of AI - ie, its AI in the same way as a spreadsheet is AI. But that is the trouble now, marketing is putting everything done on a computer as AI, as by some definition it is.

 

I would just call that a database. Or probably more normally Big Data.

A lot of what we think of as human intelligence is just accessing a database. Very little of what we do requires actual intelligence*. 

*Luckily, or most people wouldn't survive longer than a day 

I can't imagine anyone employing people to sit a desk all day, looking at the music you like and then working out what other music you would like. For a start, no human would have that massive encyclopedic knowledge of songs and genres, including album tracks etc.

Certain jobs/processes are only possible and have been created because of AI. I suspect this will be the better use. 

Self driving cars, where one accident can be analysed and then the scenario be exported to all the other self driving cars so they don't make the same mistake, unlike human drivers who all seem to make the same mistakes over and over again and never learn from either themselves or others. 

15 hours ago, 80Hz said:

 

Well sure, but I think that still involves some critical thinking/reverse engineering, no? And I would think what you're talking about is still beyond most people.

 

Example: I've tried to get an LLM to spit out some code for an audio thing I wanted to do, and no, it didn't work, and furthermore, no, I didn't know how to fix it 😂

A lot of kids are being taught programming by assembling pre built units, that do things, together. 

We should remember that a lot of programming we do, if we are using a language is also assembling things that other people have already written for us. No one writes in binary or assembler. 

Very few of us have built our own amplifiers, leads, guitars. We all rely on the donkey work being already done for us.

It just depends on what level of individual human input you're comfortable with. 

Seems most of us draw the line at the actual performance.

There's some very interesting music created from received telescopic data by NASA's Sonification project. 

I think all AI produce should be labelled as such. 

On 30/01/2026 at 00:20, Judo Chop said:

He should put something inside the gap to avoid the risk of trapping your hand if the strings break. Perhaps a block of wood.

Maybe some more wood surrounding that block of wood attaching to the entire frame of the body to keep it stable.

 

You could then paint that wood in all sorts of cool colours and finishes, and use different types of wood to get different tones.

Wood isn't magnetic though? 

Before the days the internet really got going I received an email reveiw from a 'producer' who had been at one of our gigs.

I'm sure he was trying to be helpful. I read it several times before replying -

"Thanks for your email."

In hindsight I think that was 4 words too many. 

"And this next one is one that my computer wrote earlier"...

2 minutes ago, Al Krow said:

 

For sure. Just as Henry Ford did with the car production line (see longer post above).

Not really. There's no actual skill in assembling something the same over and over again. Practically anyone who has ever worked on a production line can do it. They have children doing it in some countries. 

I used to put bottles on a conveyor belt in a bottling plant. No skill, just a bad back. Robots do it now, thank god. 

This is why AI will only replace certain mundane tasks. 

42 minutes ago, dave_bass5 said:

Today’s Logic Pro update has a cool new feature that lets you drag midi or audio to a chord track and it gives you the chords over the track. 
To me that’s going to be a huge time saver when working out songs. I can imagine it’s not going to be totally accurate, but a good starting block. Another + for AI in my book. 

That's basically replacing a key requirement of what it means to be a musician. Although it will be interesting if it can do that in real time with other musicians and then improvise. 

Quite.

It's only free while we do their Beta testing for them.

51 minutes ago, Uncle Rodney said:

Just a different view, perhaps. I had this discussion with our drummer. I said to him - you are from a different culture than me, and me from you. The singer has his own culture, it's us in this rehearsal room who then brings these different cultures togther and we play our music as one. I will learn vibes from your culture and you from me. AI can never do that.

It's the new world order. We all become one assimilated culture all speaking the same language, living by the same rules, using the same currency, eating the same food.

I think there's a book about it. 

21 minutes ago, Marvin said:

I've got to the point where I'm bored rigid of nearly every movie being a CGI fest, so AI has no chance. 🙂

Quite. The CGI should enhance the storyline, not be the whole film. 

AI in music should be there to do the same. Improve, not replace.