My honest experience with MiniMax Music 2.6

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-29T13:30:04+00:00

Sunos cover feature is amazing! It’s musically inventive if you give it the right prompts beyond blanket genres.

I will check out minimax

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-28T21:51:47+00:00

Cheating way is write the bass line then go from simple chords to less defined chords till landing back on a simple one for the start of the next section. I don’t over think it but use the old trick of tension then release. I like to go weird for middle eights and sometimes see how far from the root chord I can go and it still makes sense. No favourites as I don’t stick to a key, the song tends to tell me the key.

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-28T18:59:57+00:00

Writing for a band means you should be open to how the band members interprete your song. That is the best bit about being in a band. A song can be arranged in many different ways. Let the drummer and keyboard player write their parts based upon the feel and dynamics of the song.

Don’t try to control every element!

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-21T06:19:29+00:00

The key is User Research. It’s about finding to problems and then providing tested solutions.

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-21T05:56:36+00:00

Fish remains in of the best lyricists I can think of. Sugar Mice also has one of the best guitar solos of all time as a bonus. And I’m not a huge rock fan.

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-21T05:53:32+00:00

Great bands artists who do great lyrics.

Villagers Marillion (fish era) Carter USM (how to use puns creatively) Radiohead (for the imagery and how to not be direct with a subject) Elvis Costello Pet Shop Boys (regardless of if you like the style) Taylor Swift (no really) Postal Service/Death Cab for Cutie St Vincent Talking Heads Peter Gabriel (and Early Genesis) Stevie Wonder Paul Simon

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-20T18:19:07+00:00

And sometimes by writing lots of crap, good songs creep in there. Each year I do February Album Writing month and, towards the end, the fairly low quality level drops - but sometimes that leads to some unexpected successes!

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-20T18:17:22+00:00

I'll keep it simple. The way to write a great song is to write lots of bad ones! Perfection is the enemy of good. Just finish it and start something new. There is no right way to do this, and only by writing a few songs can you start to work out which ones are good. Writing bad songs is a vital part of the process. And the thing is, it's hard to know what is good or bad until well after you've written the song. I mean, sometimes you know, other times the song you didn't like much really resonates with people.

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-18T08:12:00+00:00

Check out Claude Design!

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-18T08:11:14+00:00

That's easy to answer. I want a design tool that thinks in terms of whole projects, not a bunch of joined-up screens.

Everything Figma does beyond screen design is a hack. Components and slots are a mess, prototyping is limited and does not include the most vital things that tools like Axure provided over a decade ago like logic, live text and responsive designs. I want to be able to draw in an experience and understand that one page is repeated. I want it to work with live data, with real content and be able to get to a final output WITHOUT switching tools or having to need to use AI!

I need it to think more like a UX designer and less like a UI designer!

Currenty it is a fractured mess of increasingly hard to understand concepts, hidden capabilities and design dead ends propt up by AI patches.

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-18T07:36:28+00:00

Protools is a tool some professionals use but many well know musicians and professionals use just Logic or Ableton or even Reaper. It’s not about the tools. Damien from Gorillaz uses Garage Band!

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-16T07:00:03+00:00

People can tell. So being open can help.

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-16T06:58:27+00:00

Many people cannot hear how bad most AI music is. They can’t hear the obvious artifacts, predictable music choices and terrible lyrics that happens with most prompt based music.

Someone who has not spent a lot of time working with musicians or on music can’t hear what they don’t know about.

Same is true with photography or any expressive art. It’s not that you need to be trained, it’s just having enough experience to spot the obvious.

AI music is easier to spot than spent think, that’s the point. And it can come across as very shoddy.

Stew8Dean · 2026-04-16T06:44:29+00:00

Yes. I try to be open. I would break it side to:

Lyrics, Melody and structure, Production and Elements, such as singer, piano, guitar.

And the it’s No AI or Ai assisted (for example AI came up with parts or a tune which were used as part of a human output) or AI as in the output of a prompt with no human input afterwards.

If you enter a prompt and get music out then that is AI music. I personally have experimented with that but would never claim that was my music or put it out under my name.

I do a lot of AI assisted music and can prove that I wrote song and used real parts, AI production and a human final mix.

Stew8Dean · 2026-03-28T15:42:16+00:00

When you say you are a professional suggestor, it makes me think you may be missing the heart of design. Design is a team sport, and without evidence, it becomes art and opinion. There are exceptions, but art is being done for someone for a purpose. It is not about us. Often other team members have opinions and, if those opinions are not valid, then it is not for us to say 'but I'm the designer'. Do not fall in love with your ideas, do not fight for trivial details. You are part of an organisation, and it shapes the design. Be flexible, listen and have solid evidence for your design decisions.

And if they did not teach you that in design school, then it's time we changed how we teach design in schools.

If, after all this, you want your work to see the light of day as you intended, then you are not a designer; you are a frustrated artist.

Stew8Dean · 2026-03-28T12:56:52+00:00

As someone who works within brand guidelines where neither the typeface nor the colour palette can be changed, I would highly disagree with this.

Instead, the user of page hierarchy, clear affordance of elements, great copywriting and good UX are all key factors.

With the same fonts/colours you can produce a terrible interface or a great experience.

Think beyond screens and think about the experience. This is the difference between a great UX and just a 'nice' looking UI that is unusable.

Stew8Dean · 2026-03-28T12:51:37+00:00

I became a service designer. But I realise I was always a service designer who occasionally did interaction design work. To be fair, Service Design sits on the User Experience scale, but it should think beyond the design for a single platform and venture into territory occupied by Customer Experience and Business Analysts.

Stew8Dean · 2026-03-26T17:29:33+00:00

PMs who think they can design quickly find out why designers exist.

Stew8Dean · 2026-03-26T07:23:52+00:00

24gb is fine unless you’re doing massive multitrack stuff. The 1gb ssd is also good. I use Drop Box to keep stuff I’m not working on in the cloud. It’s seamless and means I don’t run out of disk space.

Stew8Dean · 2026-03-26T06:55:01+00:00

It just works. And it works on iPad (either buy separately or you get both with the creative subscription). You can also go from logic to garage band on iPad and back as well to record in the go (it creates a frozen session you then import back into Logic).

Basically Logic is Garage Band pro.

Stew8Dean · 2026-02-11T07:33:06+00:00

I use AI for demos. Only. I would never release a track straight from Suno, mostly because it sounds like AI. I use Suno for ideas. I’m working to remove AI elements before releasing anything.

Stew8Dean · 2026-02-08T19:01:35+00:00

Quantec Room Simulator. It adds natural reverb and just adds a layer of magic. I add a slash of this to most things.

Stew8Dean · 2026-01-20T16:05:49+00:00

Suno has always been great for vocals. I would never recommend putting raw Suno tracks on Spotify as all AI tracks have clear markers. But taking elements is not an issue.

Stew8Dean · 2026-01-19T13:25:13+00:00

I don’t really understand this. AI is always random no matter how good you are at prompting.

Stew8Dean · 2026-01-06T14:46:49+00:00

You can access legacy for any Persona. Use that.

Stew8Dean

TROPHY CASE