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I used to know Ron Sexsmith a little bit. This is how it happened. An actor friend of mine used to invite me to her place in the Catskills each year for a few days around New Year's. I earned my way by doing chores and bringing my guitar and singing. One year, she told me that Ron was going...

There's a thought-provoking thread on this forum about AI and songs. It started out being about Synthesizer V, but the focus broadened into larger issues of AI and songwriting. What is an AI song? If somebody types in a prompt on Suno or Udio and clicks generate, I think we can all agree that...

The Naked Truth Words & Music by Reid Rosefelt (2025) This is my first and only attempt to write a song in the style of a jazz standard. It's going to be on my upcoming album, which is all songs about women. I played my (real) guitar, played piano, bass, and sax-ish virtual instruments, and...

1) Distributors like DistroKid, Landr, TuneCore, UnitedMasters, and Symphonic put unlimited songs up on streaming services for a yearly fee. In the past, there was a fee per song. Solely because of these companies, we have over 100,000 songs up on Spotify every day--and that number is many...

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Suno raised 125 million to fund their company. The only money coming back is a $10/month plan or a $30/month Premier Plan. What percentage of their customers are just using the free plan? I think the vast majority use Suno for free. AI takes an enormous amount of processing power, so...

Dreamtonics is one of the exhibitors at the upcoming IMSTA FESTA in New York City on October 4th. Typically IMSTA has exhibitors like IK Multimedia, Eastwest, Soundtoys, Imageline, Fabfilter, PreSonus, PSP, Sonnox, Softube, u-he,etc. But it's fun to be able to talk to people, and I learned a...

I’ve always wanted to be able to write better melodies, and Synthesizer V has helped me more than any other piece of software. While I could have seen the shape of my melodies if I wrote them as notes on a staff, or as MIDI notes in a DAW, I never did. I just sang them. Recently, I compared...

This is not clickbait. It's quite a story. And a very common one. Apparently Spotify will just kick people off without allowing them any recourse. If they say you're doing something nefarious, that is it--your album is off Spotify forever. It is true that there are tons of people using...

Sometimes I have a burst of imagination and I come up with a chorus or some other important part of a song. I don't think this is unusual for songwriters. I sit down with my guitar or in front of my keyboard, and suddenly my vague idea for a song becomes more concrete. But it often happens at...

I am working on an album now which will be completely songs about women. Some of them are women in my life, some of them are fictional, but some are real women I've never met. For two of them, I read about them and then wrote my own song. Took a few things I learned and then I used my...

Lyric Éditeur is an "AI Agent in the form of a Google Doc™ Add-on built to help songwriters craft better lyrics." You can get it in the Google Marketplace here https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/lyric_%C3%A9diteur/1058210089586 The app makes extensive use of Artificial...

I use Synthesizer V for every song I write. It is as essential to my songwriting process as a pen and paper, laptop, guitar, keyboard, and DAW. My Synth V vocals are intended as guide tracks for me and for any vocalists I hire. But nobody has to do that. If you want to read discussions...

I wrote my first song when I was 15 years old. I wrote it on a cheapie used upright I bought for $50. It was my attempt at a 60s protest song. If you can believe it, it was called "Lord I Heard Amazing Sounds." I still have my handwritten copy and could play and sing it if I wanted to--but I...

I had an accident while on vacation in Paris in late March. If you know the stairs at Montmartre, you know what it means that I rolled down them. One mistep and off I went. My wife says I went down over twenty steps before some nice French people stopped me. While rolling down these steps...

One of my favorite companies is Eastwood Guitars. They make re-imagined versions of classic guitars, with different designs, pickups, colors, etc. I bought a beautiful 12-String electric from them last year called the Classic 12. It listed at $699. I got it for 40% off, or something like $420...

Two years ago I decided I wanted to make an album. While I have notebooks with dozens of songs, I didn’t want to record songs that were written in my teens, twenties, thirties, etc., no matter how much I liked them. I wanted to do a better job than I had done on the old songs. So, for the first...

Before I started visiting VI:Control in 2016, every piece of music I wrote was a song. After that I became a hobbyist who pursued virtual instruments for their own sake. Sometimes the new software inspired me and I wrote some instrumental music with it. I was so virtual that although I have...

Staff members of the Atlantic Magazine made suggestions today for ways to use the internet to make you happy. Not doomscrolling. Joyscrolling. John Hendrickson wrote about reading the YouTube comments beneath his favorite songs while he listens to him. This is something I've always enjoyed...

Microsoft OneNote - Everything I put in here, whether on my regular computer or music computer, iPhone or iPad, is available on all the other devices, and online. Mainly I use it when I think of lyrics when I don’t have my notepad with me. It can transcribe what you say. If I come up with a...