117 Victoria St

 Well, well, well! Third incarnation. Wow!

117-victoria-street-potts-point-nsw-2011-2020781229

As we've known since the mid 70s, the views are unsurpassed. Incredibly rich panoramas. 

 

Good colours

This is the time of year when the angle of the rising sun shines square on into my windows. Ideal for renewed experiments with prisms. Some of the most exquisite and rich effects I've ever seen. Not lasers, only the sunlight of 7:30am! Some of these rays seem to hover in a plane above the surface they are shining on.

Brilliant intensity in these re-re-refractions. Such subtle tints. By tuning the prisms into each other, you can cut the range of visible light into smaller segments and refract that into another prism and so on, setting up a random shower of refraction beams. A single tint can be selected in pin stripe brilliance. Superb, really.

Suuuuweeet to say the least!

My Taste

 After reworking most of the demo tapes from previous bodies of work, plus adding some recent Ableton works, the potential and limitations of Suno are evident. New insight into old pieces. Fascinating interpretations, interesting instrument combos, great vocals and vocal editing.

Without a lot of prep, Suno cannot deal with a thoughtful, changing composition. It want to roll everything into its aggregate learnings, truncating and just plain ignoring segments of the upload, and often formulaic and indecisive rendering. I've sent more versions to trash than I've kept. Supposedly it depends on use of the style prompts, but the AI is fickle and cheeky, and if you have a typo, or misspelling, or a key word that it can apply the opposite to, or ignore, it will. It also likes to throw up a 7 minute version of what it usually does in 2 to 3 minutes. But this isn't a properly fulfilled style prompt, either. It completely ignores the style prompts, adding vocals and vocalisations where not wanted. Try putting 'no guitars' - in some cases it just ignores that. Hilarious antics.  

But original composition remains paramount for me. I really cannot stand the bland slop it creates, the false excitement, the continually style changes without letting a groove set in, etc if there is no constraint.

However, it is fascinating to have scratched the surface. I did want a time out from Ableton work, as it's been 13 years of comprehensive use and huge amount of original material on hand. So many ideas. So I greatly value the Suno platform as a tool beyond Ableton, in a sense. 

It summarises your style and gives a capsule comment, here is mine after very many uploads and covers thereof.

Core sound: English-language electronic-jazz-funk with art-rock edge; exact-source fidelity, high contrast, dramatic focus.

Production: Synth-driven grooves, funk pocket, occasional orchestral pop lift, backing vocals, acoustic piano touches.

Lyrics & mood: Surreal wordplay, satire, tribute, social commentary. Admiration, irony, frustration, belonging.

Avoids: No heavy improvisation. No vocal ad-libs. No loose timing.

I don't let Suno improvise, as the original upload (my pre-Suno demo version) contains all the improvisations if required. The AI is just not (yet?) sensitive or subtle enough to be able to improvise my particular style successfully - in my opinion. 

@astext

Music theory

 This article absolutely confirms my lived experience, although I have also closely studied music theory along the way. 

you-might-understand-music-theory-better-than-you-think-regardless-of-formal-training/

Quality results

A new place to workshop and publish music tracks, blows SoundCloud out of the water, and for not much more at the reasonably exciting entry level.

https://suno.com/s/yooxwFQOw209SWgQ

This is one of my relatively recent, meticulous compositions in Ableton Live, uploaded to Suno last week, and very quickly workshopped to this superb result. So pleased!

I suppress all AI cheese by using a very simple constant to follow the original closely. By serially processing upload -> to cover -> to mashup with upload -> etc with this instruction, the AI begins to play powerfully within the boundaries of the existing composition, no outside invention, since I have already composed the piece long before Suno.  

Remarkable results also from tapes of material from 1990 and before on all my earlier songs with vocals by me and friends. 

Stunning.

Further versions: https://suno.com/@astext