The title is perhaps a little grandiose for an infrequently updated personal WordPress site but I’ve wanted to write something more for my own crystallisation of thought than anything else.
May this year saw the anniversary of ten years of posting on the site – an anniversary I totally forgot to mark. In that decade a lot has changed with how content is digested on the internet, some of which I will address later. But also I have changed immeasurably as both a writer/journalist, musician and professional, with many other things in my personal life changing too.
Before you read on, this isn’t one of those engagement bait burn-out videos YouTubers make when they pose for cringe thumbnail and explain how they’ve taken on too heavy a release schedule in order to satisfy the algorithm, far from it.
While I still get some moderate background traffic to this site (mostly bunched around about 10% of my ~120 published articles), it’s probably no surprise to anyone that has read this site for any amount of time I don’t post very much any more and that’s meant traffic has plateaued significantly.
I’ll address my motivations for starting this site in the paragraphs below but I’ve never been motivated solely by numbers (else I would have changed the tone and subject matter of what I post about), but it’s nice to know your work is being read. Anyway, on with the body of this.
The Past: 2014 to 2017
Previous to having a website I’d owned the domain and store for a few years before and was just using it as a glorified FTP with some basic contact details for any digital PR I was doing.
The early articles were adapted correspondence with people I was informally helping with various music theory topics. Publishing them on the internet was an overlap of two different strands of what I was doing previous to 2014 – some music technology journalism and some (informal) mentoring.
Funnily enough, the earliest articles I posted (which I won’t link to, because… no) are topics I would now not speak about with the same authority. There’s an element of Dunning–Kruger about this. It’s not that I don’t stand by the writing and intention, it’s just that some of the early material on this site represented where I was and what I deemed important at the time.
Early on, I spread the music theory and music technology content fairly evenly. The site was hugely beneficial to me – it landed me my first teaching job in late 2014 as well as formed a crucial part of my portfolio when applying for other teaching roles. Having a space on the internet where I could write whatever I wanted, however I wanted both proved to myself and potential employers I kind of knew what I was talking about (a claim I would now doubt!).
The reason I pursued a WordPress site where I had full editorial control over writing for paid publications what precisely why I felt my content stood out. Bigger websites relied on SEO and advertising sales had to accommodate the everyman of music, churning out boring run-of-the-mill articles, lists, viral content and such and such. Without naming names or linking to egregious examples of this, I think we all know the types of things that perform well, and it wasn’t the kind of content I wanted to write about or publish. I’m not claiming everything I’ve done is highly original, but if you’re rushing to replicate the latest Sabrina Carpenter track just because you know it’ll perform well, not because you love it, you’re probably coming from a place where we wont see eye-to-eye on editorial decisions.
This allowed me space to write about whatever interested me, and sometimes that led to some really well performing articles and other times not so much, but, not being entirely motivated by clicks that was fine with me. Early on I had some website help from Matthew Cieplak (I mean he basically designed the whole site and some later iterations of it) as well as some editorial help from Kieran Jones.
In the heyday of the site most of my traffic came from Google and Facebook, with some from Twitter. The latter two platforms I’ve since left so there’s no organic way to promote my stuff, I now solely rely on people finding it by happenstance or if it got posted on Reddit. Probably for a lot of people my age, their relationship with social media has changed a lot of the last ten years, leaving Facebook was inevitable after there many well documented sinister privacy concerns. Twitter just became a cesspool even before Musk bought it but that tipped me over the edge.
I had some biggish names reshare my articles, for example Richard Devine sharing my Modular 101 post was a cool highlight and seeing my dweebier maths articles get posted on physics Facebook groups was extremely validating. I was also cited on Wikipedia (laughingly for a quote I’d lifted from an interview my friend Tim Cant had conducted with Kevin Saunderson) and regularly had University VLE’s link to my articles on synthesis, intervals and other such things. The site was doing better than was I’d hoped for it.
The Present: What changed?
At some point during the aforementioned period, YouTube really took off as the dominant way people consumed things on the internet. There was a fork in the road – continue plodding along how I was or buy an expensive camera and some lights and become a YouTuber. Thank God I didn’t become a YouTuber… Honestly, I respect the craft of those who do it and whose content I like but it’s not me. While I did publish the odd YouTube video they were very low budget, bad editing and certainly not the kind of regular posting YouTube required in order to show your videos to the general public on their home page. Fair enough.
This decision to basically not chase where the eyes and ears are is one of the biggest reasons I’ve not been able to make this something more than what it is. I did sort of try recruiting people to write or contribute at various stages, but the site made no money and I felt as soon as it DID start making money my journalistic integrity would be compromised (lol – it’s not like I write for the New York Times or anything, but hopefully you follow my train of thought).
At one stage I was convinced to try running Google AdSense. I did this for about six months and the money it made was not life changing and what I felt I lost in return was the experience I wanted to see when I visited someone else’s website.
I hate ads, I hate what they’ve done to the internet. I use an adBlocker and would encourage everyone else to do the same. They pollute the internet in an intrusive and ominous way. I wish we could find an ecosystem that allows people to make a living without having to rely on nefarious companies snooping on your internet activity in order to serve you an advert for a new reverb pedal or whatever.
Some other things really pissed me off during this period. I can’t remember when but at some stage there was Malware installed on the site and it took a real effort to get it off, going back and forth with the hosting company and Jetpack. That really got to me – it was like finding rodents in your pantry or something. I felt I’d pumped a lot of man hours into writing content for free and some hackers were trying to scam readers into clicking on local singles in their area or whatever.
Similarly (another moan), costs of the site have gradually gone up and up, and in return I’ve felt the service I get is worse. I find the WordPress editor I use has become more unfriendly (who really likes Blocks?) and I even saw Jetpack trying to charge me to view my own stats – this seems bizarre that they’d gatekeep my own analytics considering this is the service I pay for. I dread to think what the increase in hosting costs have been in the last decade but it’s not reflected in what I feel I get back from them.
I get daily emails from Wordfence and MonsterInsights and other plug-ins I don’t remember installing telling me things are ticking along on my website but I’ve not written anything for the whole of 2024.
In 2018 the internet had to comply with GDPR too – this is a bill I fully support – it’s mandatory you are entitled to stop websites tracking you.
It shouldn’t really affect my site, as it was some tiny corner of the internet, but the hoop jumping required just to allow people to subscribe or enter their email into a mailing list… I wont get sidetracked too much but this was a turning point for someone running basically a casual website.
I’ve been approached on countless occasions by companies wanting to sponsor posts on my site, sometimes it’s gambling, sometimes they’re middlemen acting on behalf of “clients who they can’t divulge until a contract is signed”. I always start by saying I’m not interested but for a significant amount of money I’d bend to their wishes, and I’m talking like over a month’s salary. I know if I set a fee which is the threshold of where I can’t ethically turn it down for my family’s sake, they’ll leave. Again, I do not want this site to be hiding shitty links in my writing.
The Future: Like, what’s the point?
This all leads to what the future holds. For one, I have a folder of drafts that I intend to get through. I am still motivated to write, but I think my focus is now on doing even more long form analysis, and less tangible techniques or little titbits. YouTube and other places are awash with people far more (and far less) qualified than me telling you about modal mixture or multi-band compression or why it’s important to tune your kicks or why you’re an idiot for thinking you should tune your kicks!
While YouTube kind of put the boot in on blog writing a bit, Instagram and TikTok are going even further to change the expectation of what’s needed to understand a subject. You can now distill your 2000 words in a 15 second reel or even a three-slide pictorial. There are some fantastic real-world engineers and producers sharing genuinely interesting and insightful technique on their work flow but for every one of them there are ten people with zero experience trying to make their way in the content creation world flooding my For You Page with utter nonsense in order to build their page numbers up, (probably to sell it one day? Or are they going to release a book? Or sell a course? They’re always selling something).
This is getting a bit ranty and I feel the this coming apart at the seems a bit as I get more enraged with my own lack of clarity in trying to explain the last ten years, but I’ll try and get myself back on track… It’s like your losing an argument in the pub and realising you’re getting more and more drunk as you struggle to make your point.
Broadly speaking I am going to continue writing, and no, I’m not moving to Medium or Patreon or anything. While I’m open to the idea of trying to make some passive income from this, I don’t want it to be more than what it is. I have a full time job in the music industry (something else this website has helped me to get) and I don’t want the site to become a distraction.
I think the content I am more interested in writing is more academic (even though I am not an academic myself, I like to cosplay as one), more analytical, more historical, more musicological. If you want to read about Serum presets for making donks then Google it. Or the difference between an 1176 and LA2A you can probably go to TikTok and learn from some kid who’s never used either (He who is without sin can cast the first stone etc).
The other elephant in the room is AI and particularly ChatGPT. I can’t be bothered to get into the politics or ethics or even use cases for AI. Every time I start talking about AI to a colleague or friend I always caveat by saying “I can’t be bothered to talk about this, it feels so 3am in the kitchen at the afters” and inevitably get goaded into talking about it for hours. But why am I bringing it up?
ChatGPT and maybe more broadly other MLMs make me second guess what I read online. They’re generally fine at what they do, especially if what you’re writing about is generic nonsense like “10 tips on how to use a compressor”. The reason MLMs can reproduce this kind of banal churnalism is because there’s such a plethora of it out there. And not much of it of it is unique or interesting.
The more I’ve learned about teaching music production (including ten years of teaching privately, adult education, university lecturing, teaching online and as a peripatetic teacher) the more I’ve come to the conclusion that some things are best learned by doing.
There’s a great article by Ethan Iverson on Received Wisdom (Ethan’s stuff is very very good and he’s a writer who has inspired me the most in the last five or so years). In the article he discusses received wisdom in jazz education, particularly centring around chord scale theory and how it has become the default teaching position with jazz performance undergrads, despite it being only common-place post late 1960s. Anyway, I’m butchering the summary and I’d encourage you to read it to form your own conclusion.
What has this got to do with ChatGPT? ChatGPT is great and I use it a lot for various tasks, be they technical, coding related, my son’s maths homework, random nonsense. It’s fine. What I am not interested in using it for is to write articles for myself. Sure, you could probably use it to editorialise or change the tone of something, but generating ideas? Are we at the stage where we have to ask AIs for ideas because we’re so bereft of ideas ourselves? If this is you, my suggestion to you would be to step away from the laptop and touch grass (as the kids would say). This goes back to why I do this. I enjoy writing. Why would I subcontract that to an MLM?
So what has this got to do with received wisdom? Go into any classroom of second year sound engineering students and ask them what compressor to stick on a bass guitar. I guarantee most of them will say an LA2A or some other optical compressor. Why? Because that’s what the internet says. Is it true? Maybe. I’ve certainly done it, but I’ve used other compressors too, including the Logic Platinum compressor model and hardware mimics by basically everyone.
This sort of received wisdom even permeates into preset design. Is there any logic to why an optical compressor might be good for bass guitar? Possibly but I’d guarantee the sort of people peddling this gospel couldn’t explain it beyond the sort of stock cliches we all say when asked about this stuff. And yes, I am certainly guilty of it in these pages elsewhere. It’s a sentiment I’ve held for a while, but it’s wound me up more and more.
Or, as them about high pass filter. The number of times I’ve seen students use as 48 dB/oct HPF on EVERYTHING including their bass and kick, regardless of weather or not they can hear a difference. Why? Because the internet teaches we should high pass everything. I was absolutely guilty of this once upon a time. There’s a good video on this here.
Another pethate of mine is the insistence on mono-izing your sub. Is this good practise? Well there certainly used to be reasons for it when pressing vinyl, but we’re well past that in the digital era. I remember hearing a mate of mine play one of my tunes on his radio show and hearing the bass vanish because I’d used some stupid inflexible unison in Logic’s ES2, but there are also tonnes of stereo basses. Should you stick a chorus or reverb on there? Probably not, but if it sounds good it wont be the difference between getting signed or not.
And Jesus, don’t get me started on how voice leading is talked about online. There are many many examples of how the internet has changed how we produce because of how much we read about (often from people not entirely reliable) parroting the same old guff. YouTube perpetuates this. Instagram has made it even worse. Your music production insights are now reduced to single sentence slides written by some second rate content farm probably using AI or some-such-other thing to generate a copy for their instagram page where they’re probably trying to flog you something.
ChatGPT can only reproduce what’s already out there. I don’t criticise it for what it can’t do. It can do a lot, it will change many things. But what it can’t do is be genuinely insightful, at least not in my exhaustive tests.
If there was a new plugin that came out tomorrow and NO ONE wrote anything truly journalistically neutral about it, all ChatGPT could do is regurgitate the press release. MLMs require people to write things in order for it to be trained on. And what tends to happen is we write the same nonsense over and over and AI will make this worse. ChatGPT can’t use an 1176 but it’ll tell you FET compressors have a fast attack and release stage making it great for drums! It can’t hear the difference in the AD converters on an Akai S950 and an SP1200 and compare the differences. It can’t with authority tell you about the bottom end on a Neve 1073 or how SSL bus compressors g l u e your mix together or anything else.
Look, I get it, if I was learning about music production or theory now, I don’t doubt I’d use ChatGPT but I’m waring we’re entering a place where the veracity of what we read is being diluted. Anyway.
I asked ChatGPT to write 10 article ideas for alijamieson.co.uk and before I hit return I guessed my threshold would be 30% good ideas 70% bad. Let’s see:
“Exploring Microtonal Scales in Modern Music Production” A deep dive into microtonal music, how to compose with unconventional scales, and how to integrate them into DAWs like Ableton or Logic.
I am absolutely not qualified to discuss this subject matter. I would suggest following the very many microtonal composers out there using modern DAWs and ask them.
“The History and Applications of the Shepard Tone” Discuss the Shepard tone’s auditory illusion, how it’s created, and its practical applications in music production and sound design.
I once was commissioned to write a piece of music that looped ad-infinitum and used Shepard Tones to make it feel like it was always increasing in pitch. So while I have some experience here, I know nothing about the history. It’s a no from me.
“Demystifying the Melodic Minor Scale: A Producer’s Guide” Explains the melodic minor scale, its modes, and how it can add emotional depth to compositions.
Come on there’s already loads of stuff out there about this. Besides, I don’t know how much producers need to know about the melodic minor scale. It’s not a hard concept really.
“The Polyrhythmic Toolbox: Layering Complex Rhythms in Electronic Music” An exploration of polyrhythms, how to create them in a DAW, and their creative applications in electronic genres.
There should be a new law on polyrhythms that if you can’t play it you can’t talk about it. I’m sort of joking because this would only the space for musical servants or like Collier whose music I don’t love. But anyway, we’re not short of people talking about polyrhythms on the internet.
“Building Generative Music Systems with Modular Synths” A tutorial on setting up modular patches or software equivalents to create evolving, self-playing music systems.
Sounds cool and while I do have some thoughts on this, there are modular full-timers far better placed than me who could address this with more practical experience.
“Soundscapes in Focus: Designing Realistic and Surreal Ambiences” A guide on creating immersive ambient soundscapes using field recordings, synthesis, and effects.
Again, if I was commissioned to do a seminar or video on this I certainly could, but I’ve done close to zero field recordings ever. I’d certainly point anyone interested in the direction of the very cool Amfivolía.
“How the TR-808 Shaped Modern Music: Beyond the Kick Drum” A look at the cultural and technical impact of the TR-808 and its influence on genres outside of its typical uses.
I’m not interested in this, or best placed to make any original claims.
“The Influence of Baroque Counterpoint in Modern Electronic Music” Analyzes the use of contrapuntal techniques in electronic music and how they enhance complexity and depth.
Funnily enough I was considering writing a “counterpoint for the modern musician”, but it would involve me really upskilling what I know and see if it had any modern takeaways. The kind of article where you learn as you go along. I really don’t think there are any examples of modern electronic musicians using counterpoint species (at least rigorously) so it would full under the category of prospective rather than retrospective.
“Embracing Limitations: Making Music with One Synth and One Drum Machine” A discussion on how limiting tools can boost creativity, with practical examples using hardware and software setups.
Yawn.
“Reaktor for Beginners: Crafting Your First Synth or Effect” A beginner-friendly guide to creating a basic synthesizer or effect in Reaktor, breaking down the intimidating interface into approachable steps.
This is basically something I’ve already written. It’s out of date, but still relevant.
Am I bitching about ChatGPT here? No, not at all. I think if you understand the limitations of the application for AI there’s kind of no winning – either it spits out generic things broadly within the scope of what you can already do or it makes things up, which is another bugbear of mine.
Side note: a few weeks ago I asked ChatGPT to tell me about Lebanese recording studios during the 1970s, in particular Uniart Studios and Polysound. It spat out a load of generic recording studio word salad about consoles and acoustics and microphones etc. The kind of stuff I’d expect from a first year undergraduate essay on recording studios. Was any of it wrong? Not necessarily but none of it was right. Well I asked it to provide a citation, of course it couldn’t, because none exists. This is the problem. ChatGPT can’t say “I’m sorry I don’t know the answer”. More people need to admit when they don’t know the answer, and we should start with computers.
So, why have I bothered writing this? I don’t exactly know but I do feel better having got some of that off my chest. I might go back and revise some of this as it’s all been written in one session (minus half an hour for a lunch break). I’ve been a tad repetitive and ranty at times but I wanted to offer some reasoning of why things haven’t moved along. Perhaps as 2025 comes and I’ve resigned from all-but-one of my teaching roles, I’ll get around to doing some more writing. Watch this space.
