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It certainly doesn't have the X factor.

99% of the time, the "X factor" is just perception. You tell someone they're listening to AI music, and they spit out the wine, gagging over "how terrible it is". You don't tell them what it is, and they think they're drinking something good. I tried out making 80's adult contemporary music on Suno, and it knocked it out of the park. There is no way an unbiased, non-cork sniffery, going in blind person would think this was a computer:
https://suno.com/s/1M8g9zEKJy0wHKYp

The days of "the only way to make music is plugging directly into a vintage amp with a guitar nobody can afford" are over.
Deal with it.

It's not about dealing with it, or perception, it's about sounding *really* generic tonally and stylistically because it's been scraped off a multitude of bands within the genre they're aping.  One of the songs my friend posted had vocals where you could really hear Billy Corgan or the riffs were an inch off an STP riff.

With training and refinement, I'm sure you could get something happening within your "voice".  Straight off the bat, it sounds "good", but it isn't anything special and the vocal phrasing is often a bit weird.

When my students have used AI for their essays, you can easily tell because stock ChatGPT is too wordy and likes to show how fancy it is.  Likewise, when it's used for a band blurb or advertisement it's a starting point at best because it's too over the top.

I'm not against AI, it's a bit of fun and can help you get started - but at the default settings (which is how most people use it) it's generic, inoffensive, and not particularly imaginative (and in ChatGPT's case, often wrong).

For poops and giggles, I put this together as a reel to promote a gig.  One day I'll pay to get the watermark removed but today is not that day:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DI_PHJhMNVn/

A friend of mine (who is actually an excellent keyboard player), has an AI powered band on YT and Spotify.  He writes the lyrics and band member bios and it sounds great - but not unique.  It certainly doesn't have the X factor.

I remember when Bitcoin first came out and I tossed around the idea of buying one, but AUD$60 was too rich for me at the time...

Currently still working through Baldur's Gate 3, Chess.com, got Gears of War 1 off the Microsoft Store for AUD$7 as I couldn't find a pirate version that worked, and have Armoured Core 6 installed to play through one day.

Before it died, I captured my ADA MP1 rack, Plexitone, Plexidrive, Zendrive and HT-Dual pedals into my Mooer Preamp Live.  It can certainly be done.

Phase-inverted buffer FTW! No more squeal. Thanks, everyone!

Well..... that's something I'm going to have to try in the future.

I've built the Loyalist as well, wasn't bad actually but sold that off (they're in series, btw).  I haven't played that much with this, I don't find either to overpower the other.

Gudday all, here's KTS, using Effectlayout's Kentauride pcb.  It's a TS-10 into a Klon.

There's a post here somewhere from me where I've had all sorts of issues with the pcbs I got initially.  One grounded the signal at the input, and the other two have a fairly low gain and volume on the TS side.

With this one, I looked up high gain mods and did a few component swaps and these brought it up to where I thought it should be.  Then, somehow, I killed a trace so I had to jumper across to get the output.  Anyway, it works now if a little messy and I'll socket those components in future builds (I have another 2 to build).

This was weird as the schematic and values are the same for any other TS.

I may or may not trim those leads to a shorter length.

Tayda drill and UV print, using stolen internet images from somewhere.  I'll probably try and find aluminium red/green knobs for the next one.

A couple of PCBers have set up Australian distributors.  PCBmania have someone on Bairnsdale (lol, dunno why you'd pick that podunk town, but anyway), and Guitarpcb are using Pedalpartsaustralia as resellers.

The stock neck and middle single coils in the Player strats are really, really good.  Like, good to the point where I wasn't going to replace them even though I had Lace Sensors ready to go in.

My not so wacky pickup combination was a Dimarzio Megadrive (bridge) and a Dimarzio Humbucker From Hell (neck).  It was all wired to a superswitch so the selections were Megadrive (series), Megadrive coil, Megadrive blade, Blade + HFH, HFM (series).

Now with knobs:

Well done, those are great!    Hope you made a pretty penny, they are worth it.

I think I charge a fair price - enough to fund the builds themselves and the next few for myself.  The funny thing is, I generally quote relatively highly with half up front before I start anything and people still want them....

Certainly, getting the Tayda paint/drill/uv enclosures has made it way less stressful.

Work backlogs aside, Tayda is pretty firmly fast and cheap with Good being more like "Good Enough"

Yeah, I find it's absolutely best practice to with a one colour print (white on a black enclosure in my other orders) or to get a white enclosure and just put the whole pic into the colour layer.

The clipping diode key on the south face is really smart!

Thanks, that was a request by the client - I can't claim it, lol.

While selling off my old builds on FB, I often get people wanting commission builds, usually for something (rare, obscure, expensive) that they don't want to pay for.  This is one of those times.  I had a bloke wanting a couple of Jimilee's Megarats but in an enclosure and styled more like the original Rat.

Anyway, this is the result, 2x Megarats in 1590bb2 boxes.  The desired layout means that the pcbs are only mounted by the clipping rotary switch and everything else is floating.  Not how I'd do it by choice, but whatever.  Leads are intentionally left a little long so I have something to work with if something goes wrong.  I've also started heatshrinking exposed solder joins on pots (not just on these builds either).

Tayda powdercoat, drill, and UV print.  I took a lot of time getting the white under the text properly aligned, but I think they struggle a bit with registration on the smaller fonts - ref the clipping list on the bottom panel.

Knobs will be the black/silver boss style.

One is going to Scotland, the other just up the road from me.  The client has a fair bit of experience with some other vector design app (I use Illustrator) and I learnt a lot doing these two.

Thanks Jimi for letting me do this and supplying the board docs.

I think this is the first time I've heard of somebody getting an "SL by Aria Pro II" stolen. That must have been the roughest neighborhood in the world. The pawn shop value in 2006 must have been north of Twenty...five dollars.

In all fairness, it was in a hardcase and they wouldn't have known what was in it.  They also stole the bass and rolled the car out into the street with all the doors and and hatch open.

It may not have looked like much, but it had it where it counted.  The floyd *never* went out of tune, and the Dimarzio Megadrive rocked.  I used to just run into my amp via the crybaby and used to get complements on my sound constantly.

That's a fun one. You know what it's made of?

They're marine ply dipped in some sort of sealer plastic.  Fairly common for budget korean guitars in the 80s.  Imagine this without the stain: