MisterB

I'd do videos if it didn't take so long. That said, as a one man operation, doing this purely for the enjoyment I get from doing it, its really not relevant to me. For those wanting to make fame and fortune, video is essential in some form or another - could be live concert video, or promotional video, but video something, yes definitely.

The most surprisingly great gig I've ever been to was Paul Anka, here in St. John's, Newfoundland. My wife bought tickets for her parents and us for this concert in 2007. She dragged me along very begrudgingly. Why the f*** would I want to go and see Paul Anka? Anyway, there was no opener, just Paul Anka and a small-ish big band came out and did a single 3 hour set. The guy would have been 66 years old at the time, and he does a 3 hour set - the only time he left the stage was to come down into the audience. His band consisted of the absolute best in the business, and as a trumpet player at the time, I was delighted to see two absolute greats of lead trumpet playing sharing the very demanding role. Anka had released an album of jazzy covers of 80's and 90's rock songs a couple of years prior (not on my radar at all) and he did these along with his oldies. Shockingly good concert. High energy and very entertaining.

Thanks Dave... I did I Grew Up as an early demo of what I thought the possibilities were for Synthesizer-V. That's just as much as I wrote. The lyrics are what's holding it up - it has a big meaning for me and I will get back to it, but I'm not very good at writing lyrics. I leave it there because I don't want to forget about it. As unfinished as it is, I think its the best tune I've ever written. ...and yeah, music is a life-long learning adventure isn't it?

Listening to you now on YouTube Music. Fabulous sound. Love it. Do you do your own recording and mixing?

Nice collection of songs, and great arrangements, Dave. Wish the vocals were a bit more forward.

Doesn't your operating system have a screen reader functionality built in? Ah, okay... No Spotify here... what kind of music do you play?

Awareness of what? Very impressive!

I'd say, don't believe everything your bot tells you. There's no way that AI generated music accounts for 90% of all music. Absolutely no way. And there's part of the problem. All the bots know is what they find on the internet. About as accurate as Wikipedia.

Where is the evidence that AI music is preferred over human composers? I agree with your last statement.

People have lots of varied reasons for writing songs (and music) that aren't necessarily about fame and fortune. AI bots have to be trained on something. So how do they define new genres and write with the creativity and personal experience of someone who wants change? I can see it affecting some work for hire industries, like music for TV and film, where the music is secondary to a visual, but it won't replace songwriters. It may just make it more difficult for them to reach their audience, through market saturation. AI in the industry has a lot going for it - we've seen this with advancements in plugins that make our lives as songwriters and audio engineers easier, without taking away the personality that we're putting into our writing.

There's a pinned thread in this forum that shows you the distribution as reported by members. I've been a Cubase user myself since the early 1990's when I owned an Atari ST. I work primarily with MIDI and although I've tried many DAW's over the years (mostly as part of my previous job as a music technologist), I still find Cubase to be the most intuitive for the way I write and produce. I might not use it for audio only sources... though I might.

What's up with the new cookie notice? On both of my PC's it didn't close gracefully on accepting, it pushed me to the home page. On mobile, it does nothing at all, won't close and now takes up half my screen.

Honestly, I'm not sure how you'd be able to use anything that looks nice for more than five minutes. Lugging those speakers in there is going to have anything scratched up in no time at all.

I used to play the trumpet. Played it to semi-pro level for best part of 20 years, then put it away and left it in its case for ten years. Took it out last year to think about selling it, and gave it a blow. Couldn't play a damn thing. Back in its case it went. I have an EWI which I can play (relatively badly), and I bought Audio Modeling trumpets and sax virtual instruments. They, along with the EWI, play with as much expression as the real thing, and I'm having a ball without needing to have the muscles in my face. Anyway, that's just an aside. I don't know you, so I have no idea how much of a challenge this will be for you, but I know for me, the lip part would be a huge challenge, where as the finger part came back instantly (I use standard brass fingerings with the EWI). If you're not familiar with valve combinations and need to learn them, then its going to add a level of frustration to trying to get back into it.

If I had to guess, I'd say some kind of hammered dulcimer, but not sure really.

A Latin acoustic guitar - https://www.oscarschmidt.com/product/oq40se/

I think you have a cymbal hoarding problem. 😄 Honestly man, I wouldn't call these covers. You're just playing the drums along to the original track. That's practicing. Its good to see that you're doing that as a musician. Comments on the videos themselves - the video and sound don't sync up, and the audio is pretty boomy.

Yesterday was a much anticipated day for me, with the release of Toontrack’s EZkeys 2 (EZK2), the sequel to (surprise) EZkeys, which was released back in 2012. That's several lifetimes of normal product cycles, and it was for a long time thought that EZkeys had been abandoned by Toontrack. But the rumours of an update started towards the end of last year, and now the product is finally here. It is unquestionably a massive update, coming into line UI-wise and to an extent, functionality-wise with Toontracks other EZ products (EZdrummer and EZbass). That in itself is worth the price of admission of this update, but as we'll find out, in spite of some amazing additions, its not all rosy. This is a really superficial review - I’ve only had the product for a day. In case you're not familiar with Toontrack, or the EZ line of products, these are virtual performers, where you buy the shell product, and add-ons, which are typically genre specific MIDI performances and sample based sound libraries which work within the shell. No prizes for guessing that EZkeys is a piano based virtual instrument, though there are also some synth based add-ons which expand its usefulness. There are currently 77 add-on MIDI performance packs, and 17 sound libraries that work with both EZ keys and EZ keys 2. The UI of the original EZkeys was its most annoying feature, and the fact that it was never updated to allow for resizing meant that it always looked dated in your DAW, and was inflexible in its use. It was also hard to use on today's laptops because the UI size was so small. In contrast, EZK2 has a resizable UI, and multiple screens to help keep things manageable. Honestly, it looks a bit disorganized even with these multiple screens, but things are laid out in their logical screen areas based on activity, so it is at least easy to find things within your normal workflow. You can use EZK2 standalone, or as a plugin in most DAW’s. It has MIDI in and MIDI out, the latter of which is useful if you want to use your own piano or synth sounds with the performance from EZK2 while writing. Once you have complete MIDI parts exactly to your taste, you can simply drag them to your DAW’s timeline for further manipulation. EZK2 has four main screens - - Keys - where you set up your instrument preferences - Grooves - where you choose your MIDI performance parts - Grid Editor - a piano roll where you can edit your performances - Bandmate - where you can import music (audio or MIDI) to help you find the right companion piano part, with chord and rhythm recognition. The bottom of the UI always shows the timeline, where you add chords, grooves and where you can make adjustments within these. I’m not a huge fan of the colour scheme, and this particularly noticeable in the Grid Editor where the background is dark, the pitch and timing dividers are very light, and your data is light also. That’s a personal preference thing, but it would be nice to have been able to reverse the colours at least, so that its easier to read. I would also add that the color scheme is exactly the same as EZbass, creating some confusion when having both open at the same time. A different hue would have helped enormously to differentiate on a quick glance (as is the case with EZDrummer). In terms of performance content that comes with EZK2, its a bit on the light side. I was hoping for something more extensive with some nice, general purpose comping rhythms that are somewhat genre agnostic, but I should have learned from my lessons with the add-in packs, which themselves typically have just eight almost complete songs for you to work from in their specific genres and split between sections as appropriate for the genre (some are verse, chorus, etc, others Section A, Section B etc). I say almost complete songs because there is a distinct lack of endings in almost all of their products, and the library that comes with EZK2 contains a big fat zero endings which is twelve less than came with the original version. I’m not sure whether Toontrack thinks we should be fading out our endings, or whether we should be coming up with our own content here, but honestly, its a bit bizarre. One of the new additions to EZK2, which is also found in the other EZ products, is the ability to create variations to the MIDI performances, by moving a slider to add or remove complexity from those performances. In general it works quite well, though thinning out (ie, removing) complexity tends to make the performances sound incomplete, rather than just simplified. Hopefully Toontrack will work on improving this. I use it a lot in EZ bass and EZ drummer, and find it works great in those products. Its a complex thing to do, and they obviously need to use algorithms that understand performances to make these changes in an idiomatic way. I think it currently falls a bit short. I mentioned earlier that you can pick from a library of grooves, and these contain both rhythmic and chordal information. If you are applying them to an already existing chord progression on your timeline, they will adopt those chords. If you have no chords currently written, and drag a performance from the groove library to the timeline, it will also drag a set of complimentary chords. You can set your base key inside EZK2 and the chords that the grooves use, will adapt to that key. You can change your chords in a number of ways once they are on the timeline, so nothing is set in stone, and the intelligence of EZK2 in voicing chords according to the groove performance is basically the same as in the original EZ Keys and is executed extremely well. At any time you can replace the groove or the chords you’re using and using the piano roll you can change individual notes. EZK2 is intended to be your songwriting companion, and is geared to song creation a little more than the other EZ products which are virtual bandmates. You can start with your own chord progression, or theirs, and there is a full suite of chord options/extensions available. Their chord selection wheel (based on the circle of fifths) is a carry over with just a minor tweak, and works very well both for selecting chords/extensions and for recognizing chordal relationships. There’s a new section that allows you to pick new chords if you want to make your progression more exciting. I haven’t figured out how these are calculated, but I assume they are based on standard substitutions, and they differ based on genre, with fifteen broad genres to choose from. When you pick one of the suggestions in any of the chord boxes, the subsequent selections update based on that, so it does seem intelligent. I will go through and see if I can figure out what its basing its suggestions on. My theory is rusty to the point of not seeing a specific link at this point. You can also roll a dice on a single chord or a full progression and get new chords generated by EZK2. Another songwriting tool that EZK2 has is a songwriting scales section that gives you scales and chords to use based on different musical ideals. This is in the Grid Editor and suggested chords can be dragged to the timeline to be incorporated with any rhythmic/midi performance data that was in that space. I think it might have been more helpful to find this in the Suggest Chords section, but I can see why they put it where they did since you can also use it to highlight usable notes in the Grid Editor, based on scale/modal choices. I think its a little clunky to use it this way, and the “highlighted” notes in the grid editor aren’t easy to differentiate from notes highlighted for other reasons. It all seems a little unclear, if not outright confusing. Toontrack suggested that they had a new awesome sampled piano with EZK2, but I have to say, I’m not overly impressed. It’s not bad, but there are much better sounding pianos in much older products. The only other bad part to EZK2 that I’ve found, is that you can’t import project files that were created using the original EZ Keys. Your projects have to be re-built. Even dragging in chord/performance data from EZ Keys into EZK2 doesn’t hold completely accurate data swap. This is another bizarre omission. I’ve highlighted some disappointments in this very quick review of EZ Keys 2, but I have to say that overall the experience is excellent, and they’ve done a great job in giving it a similar look and feel to their other EZ products. It’s very snappy to use and feature packed. If you use the original EZ Keys, the upgrade is an absolute no-brainer, both for aesthetics and functionality. If it’s never been on your radar, you might consider it if you’re not a keyboard player but have a need for keys on your projects. As a songwriting tool, I think it’s excellent, again, especially for folks who aren't great performers, and those without expert theory chops. I hope Toontrack doesn't ignore what they've now created like they did with the first version (MIDI pack content aside).

Do any of you guys worry about accidentally plagiarizing someone else's work? I did it twice when working on my film composing diploma years ago... one of the pieces I was familiar with, and recognized it as soon as it was pointed out to me... the other, I don't recall ever hearing in my life before, and I did a bit of research into it at the time to try and figure out if I was ever exposed to it unknowingly. I couldn't come up with a reason why I would have. But recently, I've started to find writing music to words much easier than I have ever in the past... it's like the melodies come to me automatically, and I worry its because I'm being highly influenced by something I've already heard. While I've had quite a lot of theory study in my life, I don't consider myself a good composer, and it concerns me that suddenly I'm able to come up with songs fairly easily (thank goodness I still find arranging difficult LOL). I wish there was an app where you could put your music in, and it would check it. Like YouTube does for copyright infringement. I've tried using SoundHound and one of its competitors (can't remember which one), and have never got a hit from any of my stuff, but that doesn't really mean much. If the tempo is more than a little different its not going to recognize it. I would love something that deep analyzes. I guess AI will do this at some point. Anyway, if anyone has any other tips on how to avoid it, I would love to hear about it.

I said I'm not sure about the AI thing. I think it needs defining. I use Ozone (on my master), and I use Neutron on channels quite often. They train themselves on material, but I'm not sure this goes as far as being termed AI. It's just analysis to me.

My vocals are all unquestionably AI based virtual instruments, and they've single handedly changed what I do with my spare time. Very exciting. The term AI gets banded around a lot. I'm not sure what the qualifier is technically speaking. Tools like Izotope Ozone can analyze programatic material to come up with a suggested response. I'm not sure that really qualifies it as artificial intelligence though. If it is, it seems it would be pretty rudimentary. If Ozone is, then I guess something like Toontrack's EZkeys is too. That's been around since 2012. I think songwriters and composers will always be around, because their purpose is not necessarily end-consumer focused. Work may whittle down a little, as AI takes over some tv/film/radio duties, but people will always want to write. I want to write no matter what a struggle it is for me. It's not about being famous, not about being recognized. It's about the activity itself that I love. I realize that's not a very profitable viewpoint. I think tools that help us to our best work are great. Letting it take over completely defeats the point for many who do write, but letting it help you achieve your goals... well, there's nothing wrong in that. It's just like working as part of a team.

Happening for me all over SongStuff...

I just wrote my first blog entry and I wanted to include a musical sample, but the maximum attachment size allowed was something ridiculous like 15kb. I've had a similar problem with attachments in PM's that reach a limit after a few back and forths, and then I'm no longer able to use attachments. Since SongStuff seems to discourage the communication of individuals through e-mail, can we get some kind of increase to attachment allowances?

This first blog entry is being written just as we see an exciting new development in virtual vocalist tech, with the addition of rapping to Dreamtonic’s Synthesizer V, and on the eve of the release of Toontrack’s EZkeys2. Synthesizer V and EZkeys are two of the products I use in every production I do, and have not only allowed me to reveal my musical voice but also to write songs in record time. Since downloading Synthesizer V in August of 2022, I have co-written 9 vocal songs, handling the music composition and production completely. That’s enough for an album! My previous efforts to write vocal songs have taken months each, as I fumbled my way through the writing and recording process, then re-writing after a vocal session, and then re-recording after trying to fit in a busy singer’s schedule and studio time. Loss of my fresh supply of university trained singers led to me giving up writing vocal songs completely when I changed my career back in 2017. I released a 100% instrumental EP as part of the worldwide production RPM Challenge back in 2021, but there was no question, I was missing something from my musical desires. While some talented a-holes are able to play just about every instrument known to man, and sing with a beautiful tone with a five octave range at that, most of us are not so talented. Back in the 1980’s, I would probably be a tape op, and maybe go on to be a producer. Never a performer. I have played as a side musician on a number of commercial album releases, including one or two popular ones (relatively speaking), but those days are long gone. However, it does highlight a side of song production that has always existed - the use of session musicians. Products like EZkeys are often looked down on by musicians as being cheats, but they are really no different than employing session musicians, and there’s absolutely no need for any animosity toward people who use these products. Whatever tools people use to break down barriers and enable them to get their voice heard has to be a good thing. I’ll use another blog post to explain my process for writing vocal lines in Synthesizer V. While you might think that this is a long winded process, that would be much quicker done by a real singer, the reality is that its the inspiration of WHAT to write that holds up the process. Armed with inspiration, I can write a verse and have it sung back to me in a manner of minutes, and we’re not talking 59 minutes and 59 seconds here… literally 10 or 15 minutes is all I need. Uninspired, it takes a lot longer, and the final production usually needs some clean up, but its really not that involved of a process. Coming up with the ideas is the difficult part, and Synthesizer V helps there too - you can put in a pretty random line and manipulate it to your hearts content, until you have something you’re happy with. It’s not constant re-writes… its manipulation. I wanted to make this first entry pretty short, so I'll leave it there, but if this is something you are interested in, I hope it won't be long before blog entry number two.

Thanks man. And yeah we should get rid of all the sounds from the past. Drums, bass, guitars, piano. Synths only right? And not those old analog ones. 🤮 Just PhasePlant. And maybe Serum. 🙄