Three minute reads for audio engineers and music makers

By Thomas Dulin

Hey Reader, here's this week's Take Three email.

TAKE ONE: QUICK LINKS

• Willie Nelson lashes out at AI Data Centers in Texas (Billboard)
• Apple have announced Apple Upgrade, allowing you to lease a Macbook Pro or Mac Studio
• New SSL "Odyssey" console is 96 channels, fully recallable

TAKE TWO: GEAR HIGHLIGHT

Lots of folks wrote in after my "tune your PA" email and asked what kind of measurement mic they need.

I have used this inexpensive Dayton EMM-6 mic for the last TWELVE YEARS and it's been amazing. I've tuned rooms all over America with it and it's definitely a better value than you'd assume for less than $100.

​Here's the amazon link.​

TAKE THREE: INVESTIGATING THE D'ADDARIO SCANDAL

D'Addario came under fire this past week from social media users who claimed their Instagram post was made with generative AI.

The resulting backlash, doubling down, and beyond has been extremely interesting to watch.

I did some analysis of my own on the files, and what I found makes the whole story more interesting, and speaks a bit to where I believe the music industry is headed.

First, a recap of what happened:

Post #1:

In a since-deleted Instagram post from D'Addario's account, a guitarist is seen playing over background metal music (the unlisted Youtube version is still active here.)

Commenters on the post immediately started pointing out that the background music sounded like AI.

D'Addario deleted many of the comments as they came in, and responded to some of them dismissively or with "LOL." Not the best PR move, but okay. If they had ended things here, that would have been the end of the story.

Post #2:

After deleting the original video, they doubled down with a follow up "proof video" showing they had the multitrack DAW session and insisted that no generative AI was used in the making of the original video.

This post is what caused the scandal to skyrocket in virality because all the nerds (like me) analyzed the audio and observed that they were completely different sets of audio files.

Post #3:

D'Addario tripled down a few days later by posting an "open letter" stating their strong stance against the use of AI and explaining that the confusion was due to the use of Logic's Mastering Assistant which caused "noise and drift."

My analysis

You can see in my Pro Tools screenshot below that the tempo of the original video drifts significantly against the Logic video.

This is a known limitation of generated AI music -- it has a hard time giving a result that's precisely on a tempo grid.

And tonally, the sounds themselves are just nothing alike.

There is no possible way that the Logic session shown in that video resulted in the final output from the original video without the use of a Suno-like generative AI tool. Full stop.

Why this matters

I truly love D'Addario (and all their sister brands like Planet Waves and ProMark etc) and they can mime to an AI video of Mary Had A Little Lamb for all I care, I'll probably still buy D'Addario strings for my acoustics.

But like, read the room... The music industry has a strong anti-AI sentiment right now. And they should!

Just this past Friday, a court in Munich found Suno to be guilty of violating US and German copyright law for training their models on copyrighted music without permission from rights holders.

Instead of putting their hands up and saying "Look. We composed this promotional song and didn't love the way the mix was turning out. We fed that song into Suno and mimed to it. We shouldn't have done that, it won't happen again," they went full steam the other direction and claimed the moral high ground, while basically telling social media users "trust me bro, we just used a lot of compression."

One thing is for sure - other music brands will think twice before allowing any content to be posted that even smells like AI generated content.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Did I get this wrong? What did I miss? Hit reply and let me know.

Until next week, happy music making, Reader.

P.S. I'm working on my next software release -- a plugin! More on that soon, but if you are someone who:

• uses a DAW
• works with multi-microphone sources (drums or dialog, etc)
• have a basic understanding of phase coherency/alignment
• you're interested in trying out a closed beta

Hit reply and let me know about that. Cheers!

Thomas Dulin Producer / Engineer / Mixer