Bamboo, AI, and ProTools

Good morning. This post might be a little longer and you might want to make yourself a bowl of tea or a cup of coffee. I’ll wait.

Let’s go in alphabetical order. AI first. I heard that WordPress has made a deal, or may be in the process of making a deal, to allow one or more AI companies to scrape all of the blogs and websites that use the WP platform at wordpress.com. I don’t know whether this is true or not but think it is quite likely, because money.

Much of my website runs on WordPress, but it’s wordpress.org and not wordpress.com. The former is open source software, the latter a for profit hosted platform using that software. That means whatever WP decides to do does not affect this site. However, since this here is an open and public blog it means that there is no barrier to stop AI from scraping it. No laws exist to stop AI from ingesting this blog that has entries going back 30 years. 

I came up four possibilities:

  1. do nothing and let AI be trained
  2. archive the free diary (/latest), lock it up behind a password, and keep it to myself
  3. archive the free diary and make it only available to Backstage members
  4. archive the free diary and password protect it with something only a fan would know – example: what was the name of the studio the album Opium was recorded in

I sent these thoughts to Canton and asked “maybe there are more options that I can’t see?” 
Canton and I have been working on this website for about 30 years, having started with Pandoras Box in 1995. He often dispenses valuable wisdom, as he did in his reply (I asked permission to quote from his email):

All depends on what your mission is! If your mission is to just not have anything to do with AI, then I’d do #1. Just ignore it. Don’t use it, and don’t be fussed that your public posts will be scraped by yet another system. (All your public stuff is already scraped multiple times per week by various services and systems.) The cat is out of the bag. The horse has left the barn. The robot has rolled off the assembly line.

If your mission is to bodily throw yourself on the gears of this machine and put energy into defeating AI then you might have to do something more active than erect barriers, like try to poison the AIs. Leverage the fact that your public website has a high search engine ranking and decades of content about your music. Rewrite every of your public posts so that flamenco appears to be a kind of custard similar to flan. Get a few other prominent guitarists to do the same and maybe Chat GPT version 4.5 will slightly confuse flamenco and flan. When asked how to make a good custard maybe future GPT will answer that it all starts with a good rasgueado…

Speaking more as your friend and less as your web hosting provider, what I really recommend is making peace with AI so that it doesn’t poison your own brain space. There’s so much superficial noise and clamor around AI I find it hard to keep a balanced view on (1) what is useful and amazing about AI, and (2) what is truly destructive and diminishing about AI, where we should apply the brakes.

Do you know or know of Josh Schrei, the young musician and Yoga practitioner who grew up in Santa Fe? More or less my age? He has this absolutely fantastic homemade podcast called “The Emerald” which I’ve been eating up. It’s a wide-ranging discourse on all sorts of topics through an animist mytho-poetic lens. Full of heart, nature, and wisdom: A really good balance for all the nerdy stuff I listen to.

Here’s his episode on AI, “So you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers…”

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/so-you-want-to-be-a-sorcerer-in-the-age-of/id1465445746?i=1000620936715

I think he does a good job to reframe AI in the context of millennia of human history, along with good precautions and insights.

That second paragraph is so very Canton. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy his company so much. 

So, the toothpaste has been squeezed out of the tube and can’t be put back. That’s fine. I can control what I can and that’s the path forward. 

Here is what I have in mind. In terms of writing, this /latest blog will become more of an announcement blog. News of a tour, news of a review, a new album finished, and so on. Everything else will happen on Backstage. I understand that everyone (including me) is tired of subscriptions. (Ha, that’s why I call it a membership!) Like all of you I have to juggle subscriptions. My rule is super simple. Does something delight me? Does it make me smile? For that reason I subscribe to a search engine! I use Kage.com because I enjoy not having to wade through the ads on Google and DuckDuckGo, I enjoy getting more relevant answers, more quickly. Much more quickly! I stopped using Evernote, which I had subscribed to since 2009, when they doubled their price. I switched to open source Joplin, which may not be quite as polished as Evernote but does nearly everything I need. Subscriptions have to be tended to every year. Some need to be pruned, others become more necessary. It’s an orchard of subscriptions! :-)

Before I move on to my second topic I am going to take a moment to make this announcement:
In April the digital distribution deal for HuHeartDrive is up for renewal. After Higher Octave 1990-1992, Sony/Epic Records 1992-2001, SSRI 2001-2018, HHD is my fourth label and the only one where I have 100% control over the distribution. HHD released Fete in 2019, two versions of vision 2020, Bare Wood 2, several Dance 4 Me remix singles, guitar + pipe (from the video I made for the Dallas Museum of Art) and all of this music is currently available from all digital distributors and streaming platforms. I intend to end the distribution deal in April, which means  that while the music will continue to be available from Bandcamp it will disappear from Spotify and Apple Music and all other such platforms. This move could very well mean that I will earn less money. I think that a lot of people are in the habit of listening to playlists–either their own or their stream provider’s–and they may not even notice that my new music is no longer part of that rotation. This is fine. What I am doing is what I want to do. I feel it in my bones.


My second topic is Bamboo, the album I am currently working on. I am have five pieces in different stages. I enjoyed creating shorter pieces for Rain Poems, which Culture Court called Audio Haikus in this piece that imagines a long conversation about the subject:

Short tracks. Beautiful, atmospheric pieces that celebrate the sound of water like audio haiku verses.

I am planning on carrying on like that for this new Bamboo project: mostly shorter pieces. But, looking ahead, I’d like to do an album of longer pieces next, after Bamboo. I love how the guitars shift on African Rain because I play around with shifting accents. That I would like to dive deeper into. Cool rhythms that shift subtly, arpeggios and melodies that change shape through changing accents… like flowing water or a murmuration of starlings. 

Yesterday I read Gioia’s new post regarding the dopamine culture. (Ted Gioia is another subscription that I am happy to pay for.) Last month he started with The State of the Culture, 2024, which was followed by 13 Observations on Ritual and the latest post is How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture. These three articles are full of gold and I think most of them can be accessed by non-subscribers.

Here is a quote from the newest of the three posts:

Even before this scroll-and-swipe mania, I was telling people they should listen to longer music tracks—at least ten minutes in duration.

I originally got this idea from researching the practices of shamans around the world. I noticed that it typically took 10-15 minutes of drumming or singing before the shaman entered an altered mindstate. I later gathered scientific evidence from other fields (neuroscience, biology, etc.) that also suggested a ten minute threshold.

That fits nicely with my intention of creating longer pieces. I imagine pieces that are about 9-11 minutes each but will see how it feels and what the muses command.

Gioia mentioned the 42 minute orchestral composition Become Ocean, by John Luther Adams, in his piece: link to Wikipedia entry about the music, link to a recording on Apple Music. I would love to hear that performed live someday. 


Pro Tools is the last topic. I saw this post by Tim Prebble, who recorded all of the rain sounds on Rain Poems. He wrote:

AvidLink, which I have zero use for, is using 96.6% of my Macs CPU!
I Force Quit it and my Mac becomes responsive again…
My next thought: can I delete AvidLink? What use is it?

“Avid Link is a free app for anyone looking to find, connect, and collaborate with other creatives, promote your work, stream video, purchase and manage products—all in one interface”

No thanks.
But rather than delete it, for now I’ll follow this advice of how to stop it auto-launching Stop Avid Link from starting at boot 

There you have it, some good advice for any of you using Pro Tools.


That’s it, end of post. I hope you will enjoy a very fine day.  

Seven Questions About Progress

Ted Gioia (thanks again to Steve for letting me know about his blog on Substack) wrote a great post about Progress. How does technology impact human flourishing? What about health and culture? Read the post and let me know what you think. After posing his seven questions Gioia comes to these hypotheses:

  1. Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.
  2. There was a period when new tech improved the quality of life, but that time has now ended. In the last decade, we’ve seen new tech harming the people who use it the most—hence most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.
  3. There was a time when lowering costs improved quality of life—raising millions of people out of poverty all over the world. But in the last decade, cost-squeezing has led to very different results, and is increasingly linked to a collapse in the quality of products and services. Some people get richer from these cost efficiencies, and a larger group move into more intensely consumerist lifestyles—but none of these results (crappy products, super-rich elites, mass consumerist lifestyles, etc.) deserve to be called progress.
  4. The discourse on progress is controlled by technocrats, politicians and economists. But in the current moment, they are the wrong people to decide which metrics drive quality of life and human flourishing.
  5. Real wisdom on human flourishing is now more likely to come from the humanities, philosophy, creative and artistic spheres, and the spiritual realm, rather than technocrats and politicians. By destroying these disciplines, we actually reduce our chances at genuine advancement.
  6. Things like music, books, art, family, friends, the inner life, etc. will increasingly play a larger role in quality of life (and hence progress) than gadgets and devices.
  7. Over the next decade, the epicenter for meaningful progress will be the private lives of individuals and small communities. It will be driven by their wisdom, their core values, and the courage of their convictions—none of which will be supplied via virtual reality headsets or apps on their smartphones.

I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

The Online Review

One night he sat next to a couple and observed them as they ordered the most expensive dishes, drank the wonderful wine, and left, after paying, thanking the staff for the amazing evening. The next day, they emailed the restaurant detailing how they had been rudely treated by the staff, saying that the food had been vile, and asking, before they wrote a review online, how they might be compensated. My friend suggested a free glass of wine on their next visit, so they posted a scathing online review. He’s also had people eat a sandwich but return the last bite saying that it tastes off and could they please have their money back – or else. The online review is the preferred weapon of the modern extortionist.

Saturday 29 July 2023 – Monocle Minute | Monocle

The Food and Beverage business is hard. I don’t think I have ever written to a restaurant. If the food is great, I will be back often. If the food isn’t good, I won’t go back. Unless it seemed like an off night, in which case I would always give the restaurant a second chance. All of us have a bad night now and then. 

We have had to learn how to read online reviews, especially how to ignore the stupid ones. 

Donko Donkou

I want to create a place where the flow of time is slow. The private library and cafe designed for that purpose are “Donko Donkou/Cafe Yoshi Kissa Fang”.

As the daily flow surrounding people accelerates, it is daring to be slow from the speed required by social systems and technologies. And to continue to think spontaneously about pleasure and health as a person. That’s the time I want to encourage with “dumb thinking”.

Read a book while tasting the coffee slowly roasted and carefully brewed. I believe that the lonely time of nothing and the fellowship with someone in the past called books will be the foundation of human’s ingenuity and wealth in the future, and I will open up “dumb thoughts” here.

BACH Kyoto branch office Donko donkou/喫茶芳

Machine translation isn’t perfect, but sometimes it comes up with good phrases. I like this:

I want to create a place where the flow of time is slow.

Check out the photos on the website. I also love the blue drop animation. I admit that I scrolled down several times to watch it disappear in the puddle at the bottom. 

Changing Your Mind

I recall buying his solo debut, Movies, when it came out in 1979. I returned it after a couple of listens. But 6 months later, I found an entry into his Dadaesque world and Movies became one of my favorite albums with his mix of hipster lounge exotica on “Cool in the Pool” countered by the epic expanse of “Hollywood Symphony.” That album is my first pick for essential Holger Czukay CDs.

HOLGER CZUKAY TURNS 70 – Echoes

I love stories like that. It’s happened plenty of times to me, too. And not just with an album of music, also with painting styles, or with food. Some things we need to approach slowly, some win us over immediately.

Does this happen anymore, in a time when all music is available and streaming everywhere? I suspect that a lot of people stick to the stuff they like and thus get challenged less in a streaming world. Radio used to be a great medium to get challenged by… but that was a long time ago. 

This hasn’t happened just to music, but to much of culture, including politics. Fences are higher than ever and people stay in their group. Tell me the stuff I want to hear, play the music I already like, and don’t make me deal with anything different. The internet created more walled gardens, not less. That must have surprised the people who designed the internet.