Aerosmith removed from roller coaster preshow at Disney's Hollywood Studios

Lord Gonchar:

Yeah. And how many times have you seen the muppets?

Twice, when I was 7 and 8 years old, apparently (and I'm sure the programs are stashed away in some old box in my parents' basement).

Wow. That Muppet Babies stuff really was giagantic back then.

Crazy how they can't seem to get the lightning back in the bottle on most of this.

I just came here to say that I knew that I watched Muppet Babies when I had aged out of it, but I had no idea there were enough of us to start a support group.

Lord Gonchar:

Wolf Alice gave their producer Greg Kurstin writing credit on their latest album.

Yeah, they haven't been shy about saying that in interviews, but with the proviso that he's more of an enabler to make the record they wanted. Lots of piano on this one, compared to the last that I think had one song with piano. What I'm really getting at though is the pop stuff (which that Aerosmith song most definitely is), where you can have someone who is a talented performer like Beyonce and literally 100 people attached to a single song, and Ms. Knowles just shows up to sing it. There's a difference between producers trying to get something out of the artist (Antonoff and Tay Tay is another one) and a squad there to make product. I really think the Mutt Langes, Rick Rubins and Butch Vigs of the world aren't trying to put their stamp on things.

Art is often pretentious in that sense, I guess. Integrity and authenticity is so important to folks who have a more discerning taste. Not saying that's bad or good, it just is.

I'd wager most of the wane of the Muppets popularity was the death of Jim Henson. They didn't end up growing bigger as Disney did after Walt died.

I'm a huge fan of Korn. Like, lifetime fan since the very beginning. Throughout their career, I have been aware of how much producers have made their songs better. Even their debut album was altered by Producer Ross Robinson. The difference between that album and the demo that came before it is immensely different. Many, if not all, the songs were restructured, rewritten with some new lyrics, ect.

Getting outside influence from a Producer is pretty important. They force an artist to step outside themselves and hear what they are writing from a different perspective.

That's my take on producers in music.

AI, on the other hand, has the ability to steal what makes us human, which is creativity. It can be useful as a tool or shortcut, but the degree of how much AL is used to create something is parallel to how much of a soul a work of art has. I am always aware of how I use it. I don't want to sound or look like a robot.

Plus I hear that it will cause our demise sooner than later.

Just my opinion.

(AI was not used in the creation of this post.)

So what we're all pissed off about is the difference between "an artist with ability who gets shaped by the ideas fed to them instead of bring their own" and "an artist with their own ideas, that then get shaped by the same people in the same way"?

It's a rounding error.

If you're listening to it on Spotify, it's a product.

(AI was not used in the creation of this post either.)

Lord Gonchar:

(AI was not used in the creation of this post either.)

Never believe the robots

I think the argument boils down to "the artists that I like are awesome and the artists that you like have sold out to the man"

With regard to music, AI is today's drum machine of the 1980s. Drummers were all bent out of shape then because they thought they'd all be replaced.

I think the only true artists are those who were orphaned at birth, raised themselves on a deserted island, taught themselves music, made their own instruments and recording equipment and created their own distribution channel. Anyone else isn't worthy of recognition.

To me, if I like what a given artist produces, I don't really care how much help he/she may have gotten to produce it. And the idea that I am supposed to track down how much help he/she had to increase/decrease my enjoyment of it doesn't make much sense to me.

Shades:

I think the argument boils down to "the artists that I like are awesome and the artists that you like have sold out to the man"

From one angle, yes.

My angle is, they're all the same. It's great that they've fooled people, but...

Vater:
With regard to music, AI is today's drum machine of the 1980s.

Awwww. I've been holding that in my pocket for a while now. Waiting for the big discussion to feel right.

Flat out, AI is a drum machine, guitar machine, bass machine, vocal machine...

anything machine.

If you want me to tip my hand a bit, I'm so far beyond "prompt and use" with the AI music that I know it would break someone like Travis's brain.

At this point, creating something like that stupid Lou Bega cover is no different than bringing musicians into a studio and then manipulating their multiple takes into a performance. I'm literally doing (on a much less talented level) what the guys we're discussing - Mutt Lange, Greg Kirsten, Ross Robinson - do. It's just the the performances I'm working with were generated, not performed.

But, like Mike said - drum machine. That's a generated pattern, not a performance.

Quantinization? Machine intelligence aligning music to rythmic timing patterns. Every artist discussed in this thread's recordings use it. I first messed with the concept in (consumer recording software) Cakewalk...in 1998.

Sample swapping? Taking the performed and recorded sound and swapping it with a sample. You reduce the pulse of something like a snare drum hit to an electric impulse that siginals the machine to play/insert the audio sample. Yeah, you know what I'm gonna say about our favorite artists here too.

The music we enjoy (even live at scale) is SO far from someone simply performing a musical work for us that it's laughable how much what we call "music" or maybe more specifically "performed music" or "recorded music" has changed in 30, 50, 75 years.

And if you think there's not a whole market of up-and-comers who aren't being taught that being a "musician" or "band" is prompting AI until you get what you like and then simply performing that as your own work, then you really ARE fooling yourself.

There are more shades of grey then ever.

The tool is only as good as the person using it.

Sorry to crap on your hobby, Gonch. No disrespect is intended towards you directly. I can guess you are probably pretty talented and probably work hard to make what you create. And I get it. AI is easier and cheaper than finding real human musicians, trying to get them to do what you want, and renting a recording studio with all the bells and whistles, and paying the people to operate it. A lot of songwriters in Nashville are using it to write the next hit these days, or so I've heard.

Drum machines are great, but a rock band without a real drummer is boring as hell.

The acceptance of AI music really does hurt my brain. I respect Johnny Cash, Jesse Wells, Jack White, ect. because they are/were songwriters. Korn, Eminem, The Ramones (doesn't matter the genre) -they write music that comes from deep within themselves. It's self-expression. It's cathartic for them. Gaining fans who relate to your music and its message is a huge bonus.

For a large portion of my life, I've prided myself on collaborating with other like minded musicians to create music. It was my entire identity at one point in my life. Now that I am a hundred years old, I support kids picking up instruments and making music with other kids. It the greatest feeling in the world, even when the music you are making isn't perfect. I hate the idea of a kid losing out on the experience of picking up a guitar and practicing for hours and hours a day, then forming a band with their friends and writing stupid songs, because he decided to type a prompt into AI and create a song that way instead.

At the expense of rambling on, in 2000, during COVID, you saw so many musicians collaborating. That's because most musicians would go bananas without the ability to play music with others. The band I was in during the old days wrote and recorded a nine-song album, remotely, in less than a year. 2020 was one of the best years of my life because "we got the old band back together." I was that twenty-year-old kid again, hanging out (remotely) with my best friends, with a common goal of creating something that means something to us.

I can't say it sounded as good as something created by AI, or that anyone listened to it, but I am so immensely proud of it. If I would have just typed my lyrics into AI and told it what I wanted, it would have been a lot less fun.

As always, YMMV.