Red Lab Conversations: Bob Sluys — From Roy Clark to the Suno Crack Pipe

Bob Sluys has been in music for over 50 years. Trumpet player. Bass player. Tuba player at Magic Mountain — long story. He toured with Roy Clark, played funk up and down the West Coast in the late 70s, spent a decade in LA chasing a record deal, and ended up as a musical director on the Vegas Strip.

He was also one of the people kicking and scratching against AI music. His words, not mine.

Then someone showed him Suno. And within minutes, a JG BeatsLab ad hit his feed.

In this first episode of Red Lab Conversations, Bob talks about his musical journey, how he went from AI skeptic to what he calls "the dark side," how he's using Suno to bring decades-old songs back to life, and why he thinks pure intentions are the whole game.

He also says something about Red Lab Access that I didn't prompt, didn't ask for, and couldn't have scripted.

This is Red Lab Conversations — real members, real stories, real music.

🎵 Red Lab Access — one price, lifetime access, everything included: → jgbeatslab.com/red-lab-access

📖 Unlock Suno: Mastering AI Music Production: → jgbeatslab.com/music-books

🎙️ AI Music Revolution Podcast: → jgbeatslab.com/podcast

#AIMusic #RedLabConversations #SunoAI #AIMusicProduction #JGBeatsLab #Lane2

If you're serious about AI music and ready to stop guessing — Red Lab Access is the complete system. Every book, every guide, every research report, all future releases included. One price. Lifetime access. jgbeatslab.com/red-lab-access

Red Lab Access is the complete system for serious AI music creators. Five books. Four guides. Five blind-tested research reports. Fourteen genre Blueprints. The 3-Song Sprint course. Fader your AI Studio Manager. And a private community of creators who are actually building. Hundreds of members across ten plus countries. One price. Lifetime access. Everything future included automatically. jgbeatslab.com/red-lab-access

New episodes of the AI Music Revolution drop every Friday, and most Tuesdays. Everything mentioned in today's episode is at jgbeatslab.com. Links in the show notes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Welcome back to the AI Music Revolution. I am Josh Gillolian, the founder of JG Beach Lab. This week I had the privilege of sitting down with Bob Slaus. He's a musician who has been at it since the mid-70s. He's been on the road. He's a trumpet player, bass player. He played the tuba at Magic Mountain, don't ask. He toured with Roy Clark. He played funk up and down the West Coast, spent a decade in LA chasing a record deal, and ended up in Vegas as a musical director on the strip. Bob came to AI Music the same way a lot of you did. Kicking and scratching against it. His words, not mine. And then he got on what he called the Suno Crackpipe. What he said about Red Lab Access, completely imprompted, by the way, it stopped me in my tracks. And what he said about mastering is going to make a lot of you feel seen. This is the first episode of Red Lab Conversations. Real members, real stories, real music. Here's Bob. Can you tell us a little bit about your backstory, your music backstory, the musical journey that you've been on that has got brought you to this point?

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Yeah, it's it's kind of unusual. I was a born in Holland back in the 1900s, way back last century. And uh we moved to America when I was four years old. And my dad was a pastry chef in the old country, but he also was a weekend hobbyist accordion player, because in Holland everyone plays soccer and everyone plays accordion. And so I grew up uh listening to him play his accordion and just sort of laying on the carpet and just, you know, with my coloring book, and he'd be playing whatever standards and old waltzes and polkas and stuff. And then, you know, uh uh fourth grade comes along and school band, and so I picked up the trumpet and um all the way up through junior high and high, and I I became, you know, I was I was I was the man kind of, you know, I took it serious and I learned all the Herb Alpert songs back from the 60s, and I, you know, I did all that stuff. And then right out of high school, back in 74, long story short, I ended up getting a call to audition for a production company that booked Roy Clark of Hee-Haw fame, you know, picking up yeah, and so I went on the road with him for about a year. He had a little two-piece horn section, and we toured around playing, you know, county fairs and and TV shows and casinos, you know, whatever. And uh I dropped out of that, went back to college for a year, just played in the jazz band. Then I went on the road. I was in Seattle at the time and went up and down the coast during the mid to late 70s playing trumpet in various funk bands, you know, back in those days, Tower of Power, Bleds What and Tears, Chicago, all the disco stuff as well. And then the music biz kind of shifted in the late 70s, you know, New Wave, uh, Devo, the cars, all those groups came out, and horn sections was too expensive. So you could get a five-piece band instead of an eight-piece band. So out of necessity, I learned bass like overnight just because it seemed the easiest instrument to pick up. You know, you didn't have to schlep drums around or you know, I mean, I knew keyboards because I knew theory. I wasn't I was a trained musician, which sort of plays into the AI angle down my story, as you'll hear in a second. So, anyway, so I moved to LA. I got a job playing tuba in a Dixieland band at the main gate at Magic Mountain. Don't ask me, I'd never played tuba before, but I'm the kind of guy I just jump in and I'll make you think I know what I'm doing, even though I probably don't. And so I spent 10 years in LA playing uh bass. I had a couple projects, you know, you're in 10 different spec bands at the same time, all hoping to get signed to a record deal. Remember, remember those records? So I played in a couple good bands. Excuse me. I uh played bass and I had a home production, you know, an eight-track reel to reel. And then, you know, MIDI came along, and that we were all rebelling against that. Drum machines were sure to replace drummers, and you know, and and not realizing at the time initially that they were simply tools. They were tools that we still had to have that human part of it, you know, and no one's gonna go watch a band with a drum machine unless you're Depeche Mode. But I anyway, so uh uh in 1990 I moved back to Seattle. I got a job, I helped create a program that was a school of rock years before the Jack Black or whoever, whichever Jack movie, right? I was teaching kids how to go out and you know, like be in a wedding band and um that kind of thing. And then I moved to uh Vegas in 2001. I was a musical director, a bass player for a headliner on the strip, and he was a Nelton John impersonator, and we we did shtick and comedy, you know, just kind of a variety type show. And then um I had a project with my girlfriend, and it it, you know, it was very competitive and never really got anywhere. So really it I've had a very varied and diverse uh trip trip through the the you know the halls of music here over the past 60 years or so. Anyway, to the get to the AI component. Um many years ago I did a demo for a young girl, and she was a precocious songwriter, 10, 11 years old. And anyway, I stayed in touch with her, and she ended up marrying a guy that had written Paula Abdul's hit song straight up. His name is Elliot Wolf. He also wrote Cold Hearted Snake. So he was a very established, prominent songwriter, had many hits, and they got married, they lived in Santa Fe. Well, about 10 years ago, he passed away. And so now she's sitting on this huge catalog of songs that he had written that had never seen the light of day, you know, and she reached out to me and said, Hey man, I you know, I'm sort of grieving and I'm, you know, and I don't know what to do. And I'm her Uncle Bob, and you know, can you help me get these things figured out? And so over a process of some years, I I did that. I I liquidated his studio and you know, and then recently, a few months ago, finally after all these years, she reached out and said, Okay, I'm ready to move forward and let's see what we can do with these songs. And some of them were from the late 80s, 90s, whatever. They were well recorded, they were masters, they were ready to be released, but you know, they were 30, 35 years old. And one day she calls me up all excited. She's on this thing called Suno. Suno was doing, I thought those were Japanese guys wearing diapers, you know, rolling around on a that wasn't funny, but I couldn't wait to use that one. But uh anyway, so Suno and uh so I got out of the Suno crack pipe just instantly, and she was taking some of Elliot songs and running them through Suno, and and so I went ahead and ordered the Suno thing as well. And I was for the last couple years was just kicking, scratch, and clawing anything against AI. I thought it was going to destroy mankind, and especially for music, that some kid could just sit there and type in some words, and two minutes later they got a hit song, and which actually has happened on on Spotify and some of those places as I understand it, that you know there's some of that out there. Um so that's sort of how I got into the AI thing. And when she turned me on to Suno, I bought it, and within minutes, your JG Labs ad started coming through my phone.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Perfect, good.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Nice, nice job there in your marketing app. And so, of course, everyone that's listening, first thing, the smartest thing I did since getting Suno was to subscribe to Red Lab and access and get all this wealth of information that I'm sucking up to uh Josh right now, but uh, but it's it's incredible information, and I am now overnight a proponent of AI because I recognize it just as I did with drum machines and synthesizers as a tool that there's still the human component. And that's my take on it, and there's my history.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

I love your story. You know, you've been around music and making music for decades. And to come to the realization that AI is a tool. If you were to talk to your peers in the music space who took you know similar journeys to you, uh, I'm assuming you'd get probably a bit of pushback about how you know AI is cheating. Uh, but I'm glad that you were able to make that leap, you know, and come over to the dark side.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

You know, it's funny you use that term because that's exactly how I described it. When I did reach out to, I've got a good friend whose uncles were Monk Montgomery and Wes Montgomery, two of the early 50s, 50s, one of them was the first one to ever play a fender P bass on a recording. And Wes Montgomery might have been one of the finest uh jazz guitar players of all time. And he's about my age, and I I told him I said, Hey man, I went I went over to the dark side, and um and you know how I look at it, uh Josh, partly is not as much of a creative tool per se, because the way I'm using it, I have yet to do a song where I'm just typing in prompts, okay? I'm taking existing songs that were human-driven by excellent songwriters, and I'm getting a$10,000 master quality demo in two minutes, right? So I feel bad for someone who's running their little home demo studio on their laptop and charging Kirky Pop song. Like I used to do, I did that for years in LA. I do demos for people, you know. Uh it'd take me a whole day. I'd lay down some bass and punch in a drum beat and and do the vote, you know, and then here's my hundred dollars and there's your demo, and you're never gonna get a record deal because no one's gonna listen to your cassette, you know. Yes, exactly. But but now, you know, with all the platforms that are out there, and so I think anyone that's listening to this, if they're either using it already or considering it, it it's a fantastic tool. You know, um it's it's and we're training it how to how to get better, you know. There's dealing our content and using that to even improve the quality of of the AI machines.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

People who are taking artistic visions and feeding that into the tool, to me, that's superpower. You know, the thought that these tools, tools like Suno, are simply prompts and easy buttons and royalty checks. I mean, that's just not the reality of how we are using the tool.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Let me uh let me jump in and comment, comment on that if I may. I I've only had it for five, six, seven weeks, whatever it's been, not even that, whatever. I have yet to scratch the surface. I I the sliders and the this and the I haven't even touched that stuff. Yeah. Here's something I did that was kind of cool. You know how typically in music or mixing or mastering or whatever, we always A-B, right? We just we listen, we compare the two, blah, blah. So here's what I did, and it kind of pissed off my my partner on this project I'm doing right now, because he's kind of prolific. He he's got his phone, he's got a keyboard and his voice, and he'll sit down and he'll have written his lyrics, you know. So he'll he'll have written a new song, and not one from 30 years ago, just boom, here's a new song. And he'll sing it, and his singing's decent, but it's certainly not in tune, and the phone's laying on top of the piano, and you can hear the cars driving by, the neighbor's dog is barking, right? And so you feed it in, and it comes out sounding like uh Queen's album, you know. And so here's what I've done on a couple songs, and he said, You gotta you can't show this to anybody, and which I haven't as a courtesy to him, but I will load his original demo, his MP3 from his voice recording off his phone. I'll I'll put that into my garage band, and then I'll also put in the the final Suno uh uh version, and I'll af I'll let him go for the first intro and the going into the first course, and then I'll morph it crossfade, right? Uh for a few measures, whatever, as it now, you know, goes from black and white to color kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

And so it's like one-stop shopping of the comparison of you know, yeah, the you know, as it you know, morphs into this, you know, version. And uh I I think it's really cool just to sh, you know, if nothing else, to show what what what you get.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

What do you think the biggest mindset shift was that you had to make coming into the world of AI music from the world of traditional music?

SPEAKER_00 14:27

I'm not sure I completely understand and embrace what's coming down the road. I'm I'm concerned about that more so than playing around with music right now. It look, if I were 18, 19, 20, 20, back in my LA days, I'd have old, but I I'm I'm an old man, so uh I kind of fear a little bit for future generations, not only for the music component, um which I you know we still have to be creative, okay? So it's not destroying creativity. That was my main concern. Uh I I don't think I've fully experienced experienced the power of what it can do and what it's going to do. But I think as far as society, and I don't even know if I'm answering your question, you know, uh job-wise, uh, and again, this has nothing to do with with your field and my experience with with uh Suno and AI and all that, but um, it is a rabbit hole, and sometimes rabbit holes uh you know, there could be a snake in one. That is a bad analogy, but you know, yeah. I don't know. I I did read recently see the article about this guy that had uh like 2,000 Suno songs uh completely based on prompts, and then he posted them and had robots uh go on Spotify and and stream them. Yeah, he made like eight million dollars, and now he's in prison because uh abusing the privilege, if it were. And is this a privilege for well, in a way it is, um, you know, to be able to have something that I couldn't have imagined. I was talking with someone last night about this. She goes, you know, 20 years ago, I couldn't have imagined having because she did some, I got her into the Suno thing. I probably led three or four people into the dark side, just so you know. So uh, you know, that's my bad. But uh I said, 20 years, I couldn't imagine being able to do this three years ago. What are you talking about? 20 years, you kidding? No, this is it's so exponential, yeah. I think, you know, and that that that's always something to fear because uh it gets ahead of the curve. And then even right now, to be honest, your your your books and guides are great. I I've pretty much read everything on the in the Red Lab and I gotta go back and review. But I'm not gonna lie to you, there's times where I'm overwhelmed, like, oh geez, now I gotta learn how to use this you know, mastering VU meter, and not that I don't know what those do, but okay, what what's the how many loofs or loofs or whatever those are? I know. Do I go minus 11.3, or now I'm the red line's going off over here, and ah, yeah, yeah. And that's and that's when I go lay down and take a nap.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

There's a big gap that needs to be filled in the mastering space of really teaching people how to correctly master these tracks, especially AI generated tracks. It's something that I really feel we need to keep filling and and illuminating best practices and and how-tos and and training and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 17:48

So you could you can just say, well, here's what you need to do. Great. Now, now how do I do it? You know, and that's that's the part that I think is daunting and overwhelming because it could be done differently for different applications or different styles, genre, on and on and on. Yeah, mastering is pretty much the a certain way. But if you don't have the the knowledge of the the workstation you're working with and some other things and plugins you got to get and how to chain them and and on and on, and what EQ settings, and because they're different, you know, that's daunting. And and and for me, all that kind of stuff takes away from the creative process, which you know in music, I the only thing I I'm a bass player, that's my main thing. But you know, I I do that. But the point is, is when I listen to a song and learning a new song, I never listen to the bass part first. I listen to the song, yeah, and it's melody, and I I get a feel for the chord strike. You know, I cannot walk down the street or have the radio or the well, radio. By the way, do you still own a radio?

SPEAKER_01 18:51

What is this thing you speak of?

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Yes, exactly. What do you say? Good one. Uh I I cannot turn my brain off. I instantly write a chord chart in my head of anything I'm listening to. I can I can't stop it. And so I'm analyzing, but that's over 40, 50 years of experience doing that. And yeah, so I can transcribe in real time. And now that doesn't mean I'll learn the bass line in real time, but I'm learning, I'm absorbing the song. And that's what going back to the Elliott Wolf uh content, uh, which is kind of on hold right now, but the guy was a great songsmith, and that's what it's all about more than anything. And that's the thing that I'm not sure uh AI or Suno is they're not at that point yet, you know. Uh I could I could be wrong, but I agree, you know, and and and and that's what touches people. Um yeah, we ever, you know, everyone you you see those polls uh coming through your feet, greatest guitarists of all time, and there's someone there that you go, wait a minute, she can only play three chords and a two-chord song. Um wait a minute, what do you do? It's so it's so uh subjective, and um you can't quantify that, but you can quantify great songs. You know, uh I went to a Billy Joel show a couple years ago, three hours long, and he hadn't done his encore yet. He left the stage, and I said to my friend, I said, he better do an encore. And she goes, Why is that? I go, Well, he hasn't played we didn't start the fire, he's still rock and roll together. His biggest hits he hadn't even played yet. That's so funny. And he had done three hours of great material, yeah. And and that's why he's Billy Joel, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

And you touched on this earlier, and that's the creativity. I think as a species, if we were to allow AI tools to drain us of creativity, that would be an awful outcome. And I don't think that will happen here. And I think that those of us who are establishing methodologies for using these tools to actually amplify our human creativity, I think, I think we're the ones that win the future.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

You know, uh I couldn't agree more. My only concern is the human condition, and man is inherently uh greedy and selfish. Not not I'm painting with a broad brush, I but you know, if there's a shortcut to riches and fame, and I mean, look at the TikTok videos and and people influencers and they're billionaires, and I'm thinking, well, I I they haven't influenced me, I don't even know what they're talking about, or singing, or dancing, or or what again. I sound like I sound like that guy, get off my lawn, you kids, you know, Clint Eastwood in that movie, Grant Trino, get off, you know, that I know that but it's kind of true, you know. If we have pure intentions, then all is good in the world. And and then we got the guy there that had uh bots uh you know streaming his songs and now he's in prison. Well, yeah, that's also good that he's in prison now because that's gonna mess it up for the ones that are genuinely trying to, you know, you like I said, I use it as a tool for initial creativity as opposed to here, uh create this for me so I can upload it and make some money. I have no interest in it.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Bob, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I know we just touched the surface here, uh, and I know especially of your backstory, I know that there's a lot of other great stories back there, so we will definitely have to have you back on at some point in the future. But I'll pause here and I'll kind of give you a moment to provide any type of closing thoughts that you may have or closing words of wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

It's just something I need to uh follow my own advice, and that is this be fearless, just be fearless, just go for it, whatever, whatever, whatever you want to do, and enjoy the process uh because that makes it more fun.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

That was Bob Slaus, trumpet player who grew up listening to his dad play accordion in the living room, a bass player by necessity, and a tuba player at Magic Mountain by sheer confidence. And now he's a fully converted AI music creator, bringing decades of real musical knowledge to these tools. You know what I loved most about Bobby. Bob's story is that he didn't come to this easily. He was kicking and scratching against AI for years. And then he actually tried it. He actually used it. He actually brought his musical knowledge to it. And the output spoke for itself. And that's the whole argument in one person's journey. Bob, thank you for your time, your honesty, and for being the first guest on Red Lab Conversations. We will absolutely have you back. I know that there is a sting story in there somewhere, and I intend to get it out. If today's conversation resonated with you, if you're at the moment Bob described, where you're curious but maybe overwhelmed, where you know there's something here, but you just don't know where to start, Red Lab Access is where that changes. Everything Bob mentioned, the books, the guides, the research, the community, one price, lifetime access, everything included now and into the future. jgbeatslab.com slash red hyphen laben access. Links in the show notes. Red Lab Conversations drop every Tuesday when we have a great conversation we're sharing. AI Music Revolution drops every Friday. Subscribe so you don't miss either one. And Bob, be fearless.