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Inspired by my recent discovery of the classic late 60s AI band The Fossils, I am raising funds for a Pro subscription with Suno, so I can re-do the Vampire Cats album with AI.  After Vampire Cats, there is a large handful of older material I'd like to fix, in addition to one or two albums' worth of new material I haven't recorded yet.  I have always loved Vampire Cats, but it is by far the worst album in my discography, production-wise.  It's unlistenable.  I've been wanting to salvage it for years.

The monthly subscription is $190 with no commitment to a longer term.  If it looks like something that will bring in some revenue, I will be interested in extending my subscription indefinitely.   Thank you for your support.

If you're old school, or at least middle school (I don't have any way to ship physical media, and an extremely limited inventory to boot), my entire discography is still available on Bandcamp at a 75% discount.  With 21 homemade studio albums, a live album, the first 4 greatest hits collections, and a couple demo/outtake collections, it comes to just under $57 US for everything.  I am very happy to sell it at that price.  No matter who you are or what you like, I am confident you will find something in my discography that resonates with you.

All 7 greatest hits collections are available on YouTube, but Vol. 4 is probably the strongest overall:

There are cheaper models than Suno, but my initial instinct is to go for the one that is obviously better than something that costs a fraction of the price.  MusicGPT put some cornball horns on the demo I uploaded, a fake, pixelated honk that sounded like an 80s synthesizer from Toys-R-Us.  Something with huge keys that toddlers can play with their feet.  Which is a useful sound, of course.  But it's not suitable as a default setting for the present day.

Suno took a demo of my song "The Neverending Kiss," and with almost no prompting turned it into a reasonably boring jazz number that could easily be chiseled into something interesting.  The sounds were solid, but the singer it gave me was a high, wispy mosquito of a man who sounded like he had a kazoo lodged in his throat.  So Suno took a vocal sample through my laptop mic for future reference.  My initial impressions of the machine as recording engineer were good, but I couldn't download anything without paying.  To actually access the recording studio costs upwards of $500/month, a price that flies in the face of my old-school desire to have the recording program downloaded on my computer, storing files on an external hard drive in the physical world, cold and digital though it be.

(Recording is the art of sonic taxidermy.  Live music is a living animal; recording is the art of making stuffed animals.  Live music is a circus; listening to an album is like going to the zoo.  And while my dream of dreams is to re-record Vampire Cats in its entirety on 2-inch tape with a real band, a digital AI reboot would be great.  While analog recording is the equivalent of slow-cooking something in the oven compared to digital recording, which is done in a freezer, analog is expensive.  It isn't necessary.  Digital media has its place).

People have been suggesting Freeware recording programs to me for years; without exception, all of them are terrible.  I have tried them all.  I'd rather make an album on an Etch-a-Sketch than use a program that forces me to apply miniscule changes in reverb to the entire track before being able to listen to it.  "Stop, Adjust, Apply, Wait, Play.  Repeat until you stop caring if the song is ever finshed.  Etc..."  It's ridiculous.  If you can't listen to your adjustments in real time, don't bother.  Unless you don't care about adjustments that can be measured in .01% increments, of course.  If your standards for scale in reverb can only be measured in terms of DRIPPING WET and BONE DRY, with NOTHING IN-BETWEEN, if you want to teach Fred Flintstone to apply compression to a bass track by rubbing 2 sticks together, knock yourself out.  Audacity is the program you've been waiting for.  But I can't do it.

Barring an obvious act of God, I wouldn't leap at the expensive studio option until some kind of revenue came in from the results of playing with the $155-190/month option.  In that case, I'd be inclined to spring for a better computer and the newest version of a high-end recording program shipped in an actual, physical box.  But who knows.

Maybe later.  By whatever means, monetization is the goal.

Thank you in advance for your support,
NP

Afterthought:  Aside from liking the music, I know why the AI band inspires me.  The irony is that the music is manufactured in a computer, completely, but the views and likes are organic.  It's the total opposite of the fake agenda-ridden pop swill we hear today, where the music is sung and produced by teams of real human beings, presumably, but the views and likes are manufactured.  I'm incapable of believing people are actually interested in the music of Taylor Swift, among others.  One glance at her is all it takes to have no interest in her whatsoever.  Her fanbase is completely manufactured, but her music was put together by legions of overpaid industry mechanics who are forced to work on unlistenable, disingenuous garbage.

The 650K+ views of the Fossils AI band, however, indicate that real people would rather listen to something with guts that sounds good, something that rocks, than a bunch of narcissistic warbling from a propped-up rich girl.  Because it is conceived entirely in the mind of one individual, the music of The Fossils actually resonates with people.  It is free to be what it wants to be.  This is what people want.  Nobody wants to be told what to do, what to say, who to like or dislike, or any of it.

Even though The Fossils aren't a real band in the traditional sense, the popularity of their album indicates that people would rather listen to the vision of an individual (the guy behind SynForge Records, in this case) than any artless musical Frankenstein torn apart by the horses of agenda pulling it in different, unnatural directions until all that's left is a piecemeal corporate aberrance shoehorned into the skulls of a bored, captive audience by a system that promotes an agenda of division, degeneracy, fear, and compliance.

Long live SynForge Records, and long live The Fossils.