Mark Mothersbaugh on Classic Hardware vs Software Emulations

[vurt]

So go see him "perform" live and you will be treated to prerecorded AI generated tracks and even prerecorded AI generated vocals

Here's a gif I created for Bones…with help from the creators of South Park.



Anyone feel free to use it liberally: https://eassae.com/img/bones.gif

it's comin up, it's comin up, it's comin up, it's dare!

[Karbon L. Forms]

IvyBirds must have a live set on the tubes we could check out?

Oh I do, but I learned a long time ago to keep a wall between my professional life and my private life especially on forums like this. No good can come of commingling the two.

My professional goal with music was always to do it full time and not have to work a "real job"

I have achieved that. I play solo piano gigs which really pay the bills at private parties, weddings, and events. Usually using my Montage and a small PA, and I play in two different cover bands one is 1980s pop/rock and the other is is more of a classic rock band. We also play in a lot of private parties and events but also at various bars, clubs and other venues around the middle Atlantic coast of the US. Now that it's summer we also play a lot of outdoor gigs at fairs and festivals

What good would come of me posting video here of myself playing Bach at a dinner party on my Montage using a grand piano preset? Or Madonna and Phil Collins songs in my 80s cover band, or Beatles and Eagles covers in my other band?

In the context of this thread we play Madonna's "Holiday" and "Lucky Star" as we have a really good female vocalist. Those use Minimoog for the baseline. I play those with "The Legend HZ" using custom made patches I made using my SFC-Mini controller. I do this live at the gig with the plugin hosted in Gig Performer on my laptop

We also play Madonna's "Open Your Heart" and "Cherish". They use Minimoog layered with FM Bass from DX7. So I made that in Plogue's OPS7 and layered with The Legend HZ

Nothing special or unique just a guy who made some presets that sound like the original so he can have fun and pay the mortgage without having a day job

You play in a shitty pub band then? That's hilarious. "Professional". Yer full of it.

[eassae]

You play in a shitty pub band then? That's hilarious. "Professional". Yer full of it.

Example of why people should/need to post a link to their music. Because this Karbon L. Forms comment—if that wasn't clear…not what IvyBirds said.

[IvyBirds]

IvyBirds must have a live set on the tubes we could check out?

Oh I do, but I learned a long time ago to keep a wall between my professional life and my private life especially on forums like this. No good can come of commingling the two.

My professional goal with music was always to do it full time and not have to work a "real job"

I have achieved that. I play solo piano gigs which really pay the bills at private parties, weddings, and events. Usually using my Montage and a small PA, and I play in two different cover bands one is 1980s pop/rock and the other is is more of a classic rock band. We also play in a lot of private parties and events but also at various bars, clubs and other venues around the middle Atlantic coast of the US. Now that it's summer we also play a lot of outdoor gigs at fairs and festivals

What good would come of me posting video here of myself playing Bach at a dinner party on my Montage using a grand piano preset? Or Madonna and Phil Collins songs in my 80s cover band, or Beatles and Eagles covers in my other band?

In the context of this thread we play Madonna's "Holiday" and "Lucky Star" as we have a really good female vocalist. Those use Minimoog for the baseline. I play those with "The Legend HZ" using custom made patches I made using my SFC-Mini controller. I do this live at the gig with the plugin hosted in Gig Performer on my laptop

We also play Madonna's "Open Your Heart" and "Cherish". They use Minimoog layered with FM Bass from DX7. So I made that in Plogue's OPS7 and layered with The Legend HZ

Nothing special or unique just a guy who made some presets that sound like the original so he can have fun and pay the mortgage without having a day job

You play in a shitty pub band then? That's hilarious. "Professional". Yer full of it.

Profession is defined as any type of work that needs special training or a particular skill

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dic ... profession

Been playing keys and piano since the 1970s, spend countless hours with specialized training from multiple teachers along with tens of thousands of hours practicing so I have a particular skill with piano, organ, and keyboard playing

So yes as in it's my profession that pays my bills. My shitty pub band must not be all that shitty because people pay me enough to put a roof over my head and food on the table

[IvyBirds]

You play in a shitty pub band then? That's hilarious. "Professional". Yer full of it.

Example of why people should/need to post a link to their music. Because this Karbon L. Forms comment—if that wasn't clear…not what IvyBirds said.

And exactly why I choose to keep a brick wall separating the two.

Do I play in so called pub bands? Sure I do. I have never tried to hide it and speak openly about it all the time. I will gladly play piano or keys pretty much anywhere, anytime, for anyone as long as the check clears. You want me to come in and play classical, country, rap, rock, pop, new age, blue grass, jazz, or anything else. Not a problem as long as the check clears

I get to go on stage with my friends, jam out for a few hours, help the people in audience have a good time and forget about life for a while, all while playing the music I love and getting paid enough to not have to work a day job.

Why would I be embarrassed or ashamed of that fact? So it's laughable any one would try to shame me. I never hold myself out as the Pinnacle of success or as anything special. I am just a close to 60 year old dude living the life I want to live

But as always money talks and bullsh*t walks. I don't think any human being should tear down anything any other human being does to pay the bills or provide for their family. Just like I don't think anyone should say "hey look at me, I did this thing you didn't you suck and I am awesome"

[TechHaus]

I thought Ivy "fatality'ed" bones with the domain name thing, but now looking like he has taken the big L here. Sad.

[stoopicus]

So yes as in it's my profession that pays my bills. My shitty pub band must not be all that shitty because people pay me enough to put a roof over my head and food on the table

Regardless of anything else on the forums, for anyone doing this - I really respect this. Well done. Relatively few of us will ever be able to claim this for our music hobby.

[VOODOO U]

No he uses AI for far more than that, he even uses AI for vocals. It's absolutely AI created content including music and lyrics performed by AI for example

And you use other songwriters work for your performances. Thanks to others hard work you can pay the bills. You didn't write any of the songs you perform in your cover bands. Not one. How much do you pay for licensing?

So go see him "perform" live and you will be treated to prerecorded AI generated tracks and even prerecorded AI generated vocals

When I play out live everything you hear is being played live by actual human beings

You do realize that a lot of pro artists and bands play live to prerecorded music? ELO, KISS, MADONNA to name a few.

[stoopicus]

Yeah dunno about you guys but I have never once played live without at least some parts sequenced. I mean, why would you?

[BONES]

While you hope a few random DJs play your music in a club half a world away, I actually play live music in a club and other venues and get paid for it.

So you're a functionary, a cog in someone else's machine. How sad for you. Do they let you choose any of the songs or do you do as you're told?

There is no better feeling for me than playing music live in front of an audience

Imagine how much better it is being the frontman, making that real, persona connection with an audience. That's where it's really at. I get to do that on a regular basis locally and, every now and then, we get to fly half-way around the world to do it in front of thousands of people.

But that's the thing, we have different goals and needs.

Obviously you are motivated by money and I'm not a prostitute. Well, not a musical prostitute. I prostitute myself daily at work, churning out rubbish to fit brand guidelines created by someone with no aesthetic sense whatsoever. No way am I doing that with music, it is way too important for that.

Yet you constantly feel the need to be a total A Hole and pretend that your workflow and way of doing things is the only valid one and anyone who likes different things or does things differently is somehow wrong.

That's not true at all. I'm always keen to learn new things and, where appropriate, integrate them into my workflow. There's always room for improvement in what I/we do and you can hear it in our output, which just keeps getting better and better.

Serious Moment of Personal introspection: When we finished Iconoclast in 2020, I was astonished that it was something we'd made. I honestly didn't think we were capable of making music that good. It was the first time I thought I/we had done something that was of a proper commercial and creative standard, the first time I was really proud of any music I'd worked on. There had been moments in the past, little flickers of good stuff, but nothing like this album.

We achieved that by breaking out of the habits we'd fallen into since we started working ITB in 2002. We learned that there is a lot more out there than we'd been willing to admit to ourselves. We'd spread our wings and soared - new DAW, new plugins and a whole raft of things we'd steadfastly rejected for years. That would never have happened if I was as you choose to describe me. It just wouldn't.

I never reject anything out of hand, I ask questions, I seek enlightenment. If the answers are stupid, then yes, I will let you know. e.g. If you'd admitted up-front, as you eventually sort of did, that you simply prefer a box of knobs, even though it doesn't make a lot of objective sense, I probably would have left it alone, but instead you tried to convince us all that it was objectively better, which it clearly is not. So if that's what you enjoy using, fill your boots, just don't piss on our heads and tell us it's raining.

What you really mean is than an AI wrote a song for you that you didn't write, that you tweaked a bit using presets on plugins you didn't design, and some DJs half a world away played an AIs song while you took credit for it.

So what? It's how the process works. I've given you this Picasso quote a dozen times already but it never seems to get through your thick skull - "good artists borrow, great artists steal". Before my bandmate started using Ai to generate idea, 80% or more of the songs on our albums came from him. Does that mean I should feel differently about them to the ones I wrote myself? What kind of egotistical monster would I have to be to see the world like that? A good song is a good song, I don't give a monkey's where it comes from, without my effort and expertise it wouldn't have got into the chart. Perhaps my "genius" is in knowing which bits to put into the album, whose work to take to build on what we have to make it better. Sort of like finding the right session player to make your recording as good as it can be.

Wow you must be very proud about that and shockingly think anyone should care, and now you are mastering an entire album of AI created music

Says the man who plays in a cover band. Seriously, if you can't see the hypocrisy there, there's no hope for you, I'm afraid. I mean, you admit to taking money for playing songs you didn't write, that you didn't make famous (assuming they are well-known songs) and that you only contribute a fraction to on stage, based on a performance someone else created years/decades earlier.

To be fair, playing the songs on this album does feel a lot like doing covers but it's like doing covers of all your favourite songs, because we've been able to tailor them to our exact liking. After all, the AI has no more agency than Sample & Hold, it randomly generates results based on your input. It does what you tell it to do, not much different to the piano roll in a DAW - you put notes into it and it plays the instrument. But if you don't put notes into it, it doesn't play anything. Same with AI, if you don't tell it what to do, it doesn't do anything and anything it does by your direction is owned 100% by you, the creator.

I can't imagine the emptiness and humiliation I would feel knowing that an AI made music for me and I released it to the world as my own work.

Well, it's my voice, my vocal performance, plus a lot of the music you hear is based on my performances (with some judicious editing in the piano roll by me). And the lyrics are mostly ours, too, so who else is going to take the credit? Of course, it's all pure speculation at the moment, the album could sink like a stone, but we're quietly confident that it will go the other way and the label seems to share our enthusiasm for the material and it's their money.

That's really no different than Milli Vanilli releasing an album they didn't work on, winning a Grammy, and then having to give it back

Except that I've spent the last 6 months working on these songs, desconstructing the AI generated mp3s, rebuilding them almost completely in Studio Pro and recording my vocals to replace the AI vox. Even the AI powered song checkers can't detect any use of AI in them. We're also giving Tunee writing and arrangement credits in the metadata and sleeve notes, so we're not pretending it is anything other than what it is.

If you however want to release AI music as your own awesome. I wonder how many DJs and club owners in Germany know they are playing AI generated music, and how many paying customers of those clubs know?

That will be up to them, we're making no secret of our use of AI in the process. But what you're worried about is that if we didn't tell them, they wouldn't know and that prospect scares you, doesn't it?

You have also openly bragged multiple times in this thread how you distribute music through Bandcamp how it's your #1 website Yet Bandcamp has a strict No AI Policy

Our label has distribution through The Orchard, which is Sony's distribution arm. They see BC as a competitor, so we won't be able to put any of our AI inspired stuff up there for another 3 years. But that's OK because they'll be available absolutely everywhere else from the day of release.

In this thread you have repeatedly said that people who don't make music with AI, and who's personal goals are not to have a few DJs in a few clubs in Germany play AI generated music we are passing on as our own, are wasting money and somehow wrong because they make different music, in a different way, with different tools than you do. Again awesome

I'm just pointing out that you have f**k-all credibility as a creative artist, that you are too gutless to put your work out there to be judged. But you're probably the only one who doesn't see the truth of that already. Still, I thought there would be no harm in giving you an opportunity for a bit of personal growth. You're welcome.

[BONES]

Oh I do, but I learned a long time ago to keep a wall between my professional life and my private life especially on forums like this. No good can come of commingling the two.

As I said, gutless. No confidence in his ability whatsoever.

What good would come of me posting video here of myself playing Bach at a dinner party on my Montage using a grand piano preset?

What!?! You use presets? I seem to recall you intimating that using presets was a terrible, terrbile thing.

Or Madonna and Phil Collins songs in my 80s cover band, or Beatles and Eagles covers in my other band?

What!?! You perform songs that you didn't write? Isn't that something else you were intimating was a terrible, terrible thing?

Nothing special or unique just a guy who made some presets that sound like the original so he can have fun and pay the mortgage without having a day job

Sounds like prostitution to me.

So go see him "perform" live and you will be treated to prerecorded AI generated tracks and even prerecorded AI generated vocals

I'm not quite sure how that follows from the quote you used. Quite the opposite, what I said was that there will be plenty of AI sounds involved, but there will be far more use of samples - drums, strings, guitar, even sample-based synths - and 95% of it will be coming from Studio Pro, fully sequenced, as it always has. I'd defy anyone to pick what bits are which.

When I play out live everything you hear is being played live by actual human beings

A sad excuse for a human being, anyway. Nobody cares if the music is good but yours, apparently, is so bad you're afraid to share it.

Sure I play live solo piano usually a mixture of classical and contemporary basically whatever the client wants as they are the ones writing the check

Yeah, and you can get 'em to swallow for the right price.

None of that is very sexy of course, and I am not saying it is, but I have fun and it's pays the bills well enough that I don't have to have a day job

Serious again: I honestly couldn't do that, music is far too important to me to make those kinds of compromises. I'd feel dirty and I'd hate myself for it. Which is why it has surprised me how much I like doing covers but, being the ornery bugger that I am, I'd never do it if people asked me to, even if they were willing to pay.

It's the same with DJing, I used to play 80s stuff at a club on a Saturday night. It was fun for a while but as it got more and more popular - we were getting 1200 people a night in the end - there was less and less opportunity to play the music I wanted to play and I walked away from it when we were taking in around 10 grand a week (split several ways) and became a graphic artist for $40 an hour. Still, it got me the RX-7 I'd always wanted so it wasn't all bad.

[BONES]

So it definitely would take CPU cycles. I would say that a good portion of the reason that the saturated feel of certain analog synths doesn't get to 100% is likely due to a trade off between CPU cycles and accuracy

Now that you mention it you can actually see it with bx_oberhausen because "TMT" (Transistor Modeling Technology" or some such thing) can be switched on or off. Just looking at it now, a big 16 voice Unison lead shows 25% CPU on my machine with or without TMT turned on, but you can definitely hear the difference in the sound, it is so much richer with TMT turned on.

[andrelafosse]

Bones and Ivy have WAY more in common than they have differences.

They both make music for very specific audiences and environments, and tailor what they do to work well in those contexts.

Playing classic rock covers at a summer concert vs. playing original industrial music at a festival? Come on, my dudes. You're making music you enjoy, for audiences that enjoy hearing what you're making. You're working musicians who have found receptive listeners for what you do. All the gotcha posts in the world won't change that, and thank goodness for that.

So sure, snipe at each other all you like about original material, AI, MIDI controllers, income streams, charts, posting clips, or whatever else. But I hope you guys can appreciate what you're doing, and give credit to one another for doing their own (very slight) variation on the same basic thing.

[zerocrossing]

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything. There are millions of people who make a living playing music with a ROMpler that don't even bother editing the presets. My brother is that kind of guy. Just as happy with the Luckyman preset on his Yamaha ROMpler as he would be with an actual Model D. Actually, a lot happier. He's hate to deal with a vintage analog synth. There are also just as many people who have only the finest classic instruments who've never made any real money doing music.

[stoopicus]

Bones and Ivy have WAY more in common than they have differences.

Really they should just get a room