AI Music Revolution

Poppycock: A Former Musician on AI, MCP, and Creative Joy

• Josh • Episode 18

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Roy Brennan trained as a classical bass-baritone at the Royal Northern College of Music. He played keyboards in bands. He owned a DX7, a Jupiter, a Juno-06, an Akai S900 sampler. He's heard every version of "that's not a real instrument" that exists — and he's not impressed by any of it.

Now he's doing some of the most sophisticated AI music production work we've seen in this space.

In this episode, Roy walks us through the journey from his first Suno session (which he describes, accurately, as crack cocaine) to a fully-connected production ecosystem built across Claude Projects, NotebookLM, and MCP — where AI handles context, continuity, and creative discipline so he doesn't have to.

We cover:

— Why Suno felt hollow until Fader gave it structure and purpose
— How connecting Claude to NotebookLM via MCP solved the context problem that was killing his workflow
— His narrative arc method: stripping novels like Altered Carbon for musical scenes and feeding them through a compositional AI chain
— The musicology protocols he built to translate producer aesthetics (Tony Visconti, Trevor Horn) into actual Suno tag language
— Why "it's given me back some creative joy" is the whole point
— His take on AI music stigma — and why someone who owned a DX7 in the 80s isn't losing sleep over it

Roy is a Red Lab Access member based in the UK, and this conversation is a masterclass in what intentional, structured AI music production actually looks like. If you give these tools a generic input with no intention, you get generic output. Roy is proof of what happens when you don't.

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SPEAKER_00

Hello and welcome to the AI Music Revolution. I am your host, Josh Gillaland, the founder of JGB's Lab. Today is a Red Lab Conversations episode. And my guest today trained as a classical bass baritone at the Royal Northern College of Music. He played keyboards and bands. He owned a DX7, a Jupiter, a Juno 06, all kinds of different samplers. He's heard every version of that's not real music that exists. And now he's doing some of the most sophisticated AI music production work that I have seen anywhere in the space. Roy Brennan is a Red Lab Access member based in the UK. And this conversation generally surprised me. We cover his entry into Suno, which he describes accurately as crack cocaine. The moment Fader changed everything for him and the remarkable workflow he's built connecting Cloud Projects to Notebook LM via MCP to create what is essentially a living context-aware production system. We also get into his musicology protocols, a method he's built for translating producer aesthetics like Tony Visconti into actual Suno tag language. That section alone is worth a listen. But what I keep coming back to from this conversation is something he said near the end. It's given me back some creative joy. That is not a small thing. That is the whole point. Here is Roy Brennan. Roy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us. And let's start pretty simple, straightforward. What is your background leading to this moment where you've been experimenting with AI music? Do you have a musical background, musical history, or what does that actually look like in your world?

SPEAKER_01

No, no, it was a vanilla sort of music background at first, but obviously that's going back, you know, back in the midst of time, so to speak. Um I grew uh as a young teenager playing instruments through to playing in bands in my late teens, um, doing keyboards and some singing. Um when the band thing sort of uh ran dry of fuel, um I trained, I did the eight classical grades on the piano and went to train as a classical bass baritone at the Royal Northern College of Music. But um that didn't end up lasting. I mean, I was training, I have got a trained voice, but it's like so long ago. Um, and a a sort of mishap or chance meeting with somebody in a choir led me to to stop doing it and do foreign languages instead, but that's another story. Um but yeah, so I've always tinkered, I've always had a guitar that I used to strum, but since my children were babies, that kind of kind of died down a bit. Really do that much after that.

SPEAKER_00

You know, a lot of people in this community they seem to have a similar story where when they were younger, they were exposed to music in some way, shape, or form, learning music, performing music. And then as they as they grew, as they got older and life changed, they used that seed of of inspiration or knowledge or experience from their childhood to then sprout their AI music creation journey.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, right. I at one point, I felt I don't know if it's more of a maturity issue. You have this whole um I'm a musician sort of mentality, don't you know when you're younger, it's almost like a bat job. Um now I I found that trying to create was it was just impossible, you know, with uh band members with egos, with um I guess I I I I matured quickly once I had a family, and just like, you know, I'd rather not call myself a a musician but somebody who is passionate about music because I had no longer had the compulsion to play.

SPEAKER_00

Without a doubt, there is a lot that goes into the creation of music that is above and beyond the actual you know creation of music. Let's let's shift into Suno now. What was your entry point or exposure to Suno? What did that look like for you?

SPEAKER_01

I was um exposed to sort of the chat box first and um spent a short while um building what I'd call um augmented role um project in in uh Claude and Chat GPT. That is to say, how can uh how can a machine or an AI tool not replace you but create like an augmented version, a more organized version, a more rounded thinking uh to the way that you uh approach your role. So it's to augment the efficiency of a job role. I discovered Suno just because somebody said you've got to hear this, it was one of those it's wild, what the type of prompting and a song comes out kind of I I wasn't sort of so taken with it at first that that I jumped straight in and and and subscribe or anything like that. But it wasn't long before I did try it for a bit, and it's it's it's like crack cocaine. We everybody knows that, right? But it's hollow without any sense of purpose or meaningful direction and structure. There's only so much, so many tunes that you can actually do and sit there waiting to think does somebody like it or not like it. Um that this is the key thing with Vader. It that it was a little bit like a sidewind and missile that that woke me up to something I kind of must have known at some point, but and that's the structure. Um a song is meaningless if it's got no purpose and intent. It it's it you need and have to have something to say. You know, the moment I used Vader, that was the moment that I just got obsessed with Suno, but only within the context of doing it the way that I've decided to pursue it.

SPEAKER_00

Thrilled to hear that that was your experience with Fader. That there's definitely the vision that I had behind it, and it's why I put a lot of horsepower into what I'm doing with Fader. And speaking of horsepower, I know you are also putting in a tremendous amount of horsepower behind the work you are doing to evolve this space.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, well, obviously, I wanted, always wanted to have a partner project to to sort of help. Um I I use notebooks, I've used them for a while, but more as like a deep live, deep dive kind of interactive manual. For example, I'll give you an example. If I want wanted to use a new music tool and I knew nothing about it, I'd I'd stack the notebook with the manual, with uh YouTube sources, with books, whatever I could find, and do a master persona from inside of the notebook so that it would it would advise me as I was trying to learn to use the instrument. Yeah. Having built projects and not got as far as I would have liked to in Chat GPT, uh, a friend suggested trying Claude, so I did and tried to build the same thing, but I'd build projects, but there was the they weren't they weren't linked together in any way. I built a project to do puno prompting or I book uh teach me uh to better prompt. I'd also have one help me deal with get ideas out and do lyrics and stuff, but they weren't actually linked together. And one of the main you mentioned in your email about MCP. Well, MCP is just like uh um a telephone wire from the Google Notebook LM, so that the other AI can take information across the pipe and use that information live. I was struggling very much to to keep context in sessions because it was a manual we you first of all you had to ask the AI to give you a session export or the contents of the chat in a downloadable file, then you'd download it, and by the time you download it, you even if you're only dealing with one project, you've got to upload it to start the next project. And and over weeks and months, you could have a download folder, and if you've only got one project, it's very, very complicated. But if you've got three or four different projects, you don't know which is which context. So on the one side, I I already knew about notebook um LM, and I was very much deep diving, creating a music, uh an AI music project inside of Claude that had a couple of different projects involved in it, and it was just reading an article one day because I'm I although I I did say I'm a I was a techie, but it not in recent years. So um the technology, you know, it moves on very fast. But I read an article that was explaining how a user had linked Claude and MCP with Notebook LM and said it's like a God, it's an information on knowledge God. So after reading the article, I braved it and in and installed the MCP inside of Claude. And that was really like served as a catalyst for a lot of things that have come since because Claude, the Claude project can now, if I've got a a notebook with a hundred Suno sources in it, all different manner of different things from prompting, uh it's but it's rammed to the rafters with with knowledge, and the SUNO the Claude project has also got knowledge. Well, the Claude talks to the notebook and can access the the knowledge in in the stack in the notebook real time. And also the problem I discussed a few moments ago about context is gone. Now, at this point, with with it hooked up to all the projects, it's got instructions that say at the end of every session, push a set session export to an export's notebook. How cool is it when you can be in the middle of actually doing a song and talking to the AI, but you the the the management of uh the discipline of managing the human evidence stack or picking up where you left off with exactly the same vibe is kind of is kind of just baked in. I start off every session with load the session notebook, load the export, and it knows everything that I was doing and what we're going what we've planned to do. That has been like a quantum leap, but just one very tiny addendum after it. It's only since the ecosystem post working with Fader, the everything in all of those projects have been had Fader wrapped around the entire Fader's philosophy wrapped around the entire ecosystem. And so other projects have been built to make sure that I can get more structural discipline and more purpose in how I because I I've loved having worked with Fader. So, you know, I've developed it now where I'm a scatter brain, but the AI is definitely not. The AI is the program to keep pushing me in the right way, to keep pressing me in the right direction, uh, to make sure it complies with that it would be defensible if if anything ever came of uh anybody wanted to use it. But I think the most important thing for me, I have to say this straight up, is that it's giving me back some creative joy because there's a structure to it. And say I don't know if you if you if you looked at the the the map I sent you, I mean that doesn't even explain it properly, but uh narrative arcs, for example, the first node, and uh I can I put um a text version of a book, let's say um altered carbon, Richard Morgan. I'll put that in a in a blank notebook, in notebook LM. My first AI in the chain will actually strip that book of all narratives and narrative scenes that are applicable to a musical art. That's my stage one. That's what because I don't I I've realized that my songs have got so much more meaning since I've been doing it that way.

SPEAKER_00

There are so many things that I want to do inside of my own workspace and my own business based on you know just hearing about what all it is that you're doing in your world. Uh it's really amazing work, and I'm always kind of looking for ways to keep my own internal world of agents updated, you know, striving to be as close to real time as possible.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, sure, an agent could could do that. I've not I've dare I haven't dared venture into agents because it's taken enough time to get to the point where I'm I've got the Eureka moment, I know what it needs to do. And I mean, when I say it it strips it of narrative, one book could give me 13 narrative scenes, but the the second AI in the chain is what I call a comp it's set up to be a um a compositional assistant, you know, with knowledge about film scores and songs and and heuristics. So those scenes or those narratives don't stay as they are, they're not just being ripped from the book to be used for lyrics. Yeah, they they go to the second node, which will then suggest um a model composer and a model producer that can actually nail those moods in that type of a vibe. And then that's when it's it starts to lead towards kicking off um a lyric writing process because since about a year ago I was developing a set of musicology protocols which research any name. If I said, okay, Tony Visconti, David Bowie's producer, that's the name I give it. It brings me everything back about um at Tony Visconti is his studio methods, his preferred way of working, but everything about him at the end of the pipeline of that protocol, it squeezes it out in JSON files that in Suno language. Does that make sense? It does, yeah. Language that language that it's translating the individual's um musical special elements into tags in in a simple way of putting it, it or potential tags, and and that is the first stage of it. So by the time the the that um notebook, um the compositional one gives a brief back, it's suggested a composer, it's suggested a producer, and it's also probably suggested a reference track for each. That's the bare bones of the track, though, Josh. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, it's it's a tag stack with no lyrics in it, and a style box.

SPEAKER_00

Roy, you are ahead of most in your thought leadership in this space. And I love how you share your lessons and your ideas, you know, especially inside of the Red Lab Access community, which you're I love you being an active part of. I think that's extremely important to share. So we all continue to continue to grow in this space.

SPEAKER_01

Me too. Me too. I I don't ever have a ceiling. I don't, I'm not that kind of a person. And uh to be honest, it doesn't matter to me. I I think I put it in one of my posts. If something it really works and really I'm I'm it's not my style to to not share it, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_00

No, it makes total sense. Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_01

I'm not doing it for any other reason than the love of doing it. So like I I told you about the the Beat Labs notebook, if it does a really good job, which I suspect it actually can right now, then if people want to use it, you know, knock yourself out. If they don't, then that that's all right too.

SPEAKER_00

If if you give these tools like Suno a generic input with no intention, you will most often get generic output, right? And but if you go into these sessions with real intention, real intent, and that's how you that's how you move beyond the middle ground, the the generic world of of AI slop.

SPEAKER_01

It's got the best of everything because it's got the fader, it's wrapped, it's smothered in in in fader. You know what I'm saying? Uh fader produces muse, you know, it's the co-producer, and so you could to get to the point where you've got something worth working with the tool is another question, but it marries up the best of um the the beat lab thing with the uh musicological protocols that I mentioned that are like a translation layer that will take I could say to me, I want I want to do I want to do a track, but I want the production element of the track to be like Tony Visconti or um Trevor Horn or whoever, doesn't really matter. Um that eventually will squeeze out the juice that can be used as tags to to tag a song with and hopefully, or at least to some extent, give it a Tony Visconti style uh production aesthetic, even if it's not the exact same thing, it's not designed to be, but it's a disciplined way of working with and learning about the music.

SPEAKER_00

As you look towards the future, how do you see all of this evolving? Where do you where do you hope this evolution leads to?

SPEAKER_01

I think it's it's a difficult question, a good question. I think it's the good there'll be more evolution in the space of AI living in the actual equipment as well, to be honest with you. You know, I I I wouldn't like the the the the textural um you know the timbre of the music or the choices, creative choices. I wouldn't like them to be restricted by any kind of paywall model, you know. You know, it it's fine, I agree. I don't ever want to sound like someone else, and I don't want people to lose money through other people making AI music, but the I I'd say if you I had to give you a simple answer, there needs to be more soon, more parallel development on the same level.

SPEAKER_00

I agree, and I would love to have a dozen of these tools at my disposal so that you know I could just use them and experiment in different ways.

SPEAKER_01

I think I think you it obviously it doesn't appear to be a zenith or a stop point in in what it could potentially create. Maybe it'd be nice to see a version of it that could do something a little bit like allow you to apply the tag in a more knowledgeable way and actually get out what you put in. If you ask for a dry room, if you ask for a dead drum, uh kick drum, it gives it to you. You know what I'm saying? Yes, it gives you the dynamic you prompt for a dynamic, it gives it to you. We're not looking to sound exactly the same as somebody else. These are production mentalities, aren't they? I'm sure if you record yourself drumming, you'll say, I don't want the snare to have that ring, I want it to be tight, I don't want the bass drum to to have the that level of rev resonance it needs to marry up with the bass and be a bit more muffled.

SPEAKER_00

Now give me clean MIDI files, game changer.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, add that, throw that one in. And I mean, drum individual drum channels. I mean, the I wouldn't go as far as to say the drums are completely rubbish and say no, but I'm sure you as a drummer will admit that there's a they've got a distance to go before they do you you can get, you know, if the MIDI's not good enough, then you can't do the logical next step. For me, that logical next step would be I mean, everything happens on one machine, but it would be taking it into scalar and map and mapping it to BFD. But if it doesn't, if it the MIDI is no not a good quality, then that's just going to be a bit of a headache. So yeah, improved MIDI would be a top top feature.

SPEAKER_00

Right. This has been a very educational conversation, and I thank you for your time. I learn so much every time that I interact with you, and I'm glad that you're sharing this with the audience as well. So let's we can move towards Closing this up now. And so just kind of take a moment and any closing thoughts, any any thoughts around you know the stigma of AI music creation or any direction you want to take it, the the microphone, the floor is yours.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no, I I um I don't take any notice of what people say about. I mean, I've written uh uh I'll occasionally put post an article, and if that makes it as far as the the main page, then that usually contains what my views on it are. I mean, I think it's absolute um, as they would say in London, poppycock. It's it's nonsense. Uh as a former owner of a whole line from the DX7 to the D80 to the Jupyter uh to the Juno 6 to an ACI S900 sampler, uh, MPC sequences, all kinds of stuff. They all went through the same sort of stages of people saying you're not a proper musician, it's not an instrument, it's not this, it's not. For me, the the AI meeting up with uh proper intentional creativity is is is a revolution. Like the book says, its possibilities just blown blow me away. I don't see any negative to it. It's just it's just I mean, the reason when I mentioned about the narrative scenes isn't because I can't come up with an idea for it for lyrics, it's so that I've got templates ready to go, ready to go, ready to go. As soon as I've done a tune, the next narrative scene will have lyrics written for it and ready to go, I'll go and hunt a golden seed for that. It keep it's keeping me focused and disciplined, and it and it's also driving me to do it in a way that makes the song sound more meaningful. And you know, that means happy roy. I love it. When the song's done, when the song's done, it's done. I'll I'll have a novelty listen, maybe a couple of hours time, have a couple of listens, but that is it. I'll just go straight back and do the next scene because I'm wanting to hunt more personas and learn more about the two of the tunes themselves, and not really something that I'm that bothered about.

SPEAKER_00

I love it. I love what you're doing, Roy. And I want to thank you for making us all better at the craft of AI music creation.

SPEAKER_01

I'd like to thank you, Josh, seriously, because uh call it serendipity, but you know, the first book and subsequent use of Fader, you can probably see from how I'm talking about it, it's just filtered down into everything. Yeah. I'm not claiming that any of the the tools or the devices or what yeah, but it's it's getting better, it's getting to the point where you can think this is kicking out something really good, and and that has come as a result of the development with Fader, taking all the tunes down. I don't post anything now, all of those have come down, no band lap, no sudo, and I just focus on this and the community, and it's a happy place.

SPEAKER_00

That was Roy Brennan. And I want to sit with that closing thought for just a second. The idea that every tool shift in music history went through the same gauntlet: the synthesizer, sampling, digital production, and now AI. Each one dismissed by the people who mastered the previous tool. Each one eventually becoming the new standard. Roy's been on both sides of that line, which is exactly why his perspective carries weight. If you want to follow Roy's work, he is active inside the Red Lab Access community. Sharing his experiments, his workflow diagrams, his findings. That's what this community is here for. People like Roy who don't have a ceiling and aren't shy about sharing what works. If you want to be in that room, the link is in the show notes. JGBslab.com slash red-labhen access. New episodes of Red Lab Conversations drop on Tuesdays when we have someone worth hearing from. Next up we have Doug Arrowwood, a former law enforcement officer from Louisiana, with no musical background whatsoever. Six weeks and a Suno, and a perspective on this technology that I think is going to surprise you. Until then, stop generating. Start directing.