Phil O'Keefe

Do you have a DAW program? If so, see if you can load the sysex data into your DAW, then use MIDI to transfer the sysex data into your MMT8. 

There are also sysex apps available for the Mac, but whether or not they'll work for you will probably depend on which version of OS X you're running. 

https://www.snoize.com/SysExLibrarian/

https://www.geosynths.com/tools

You might also find this article helpful:

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/how-do-i-send-and-receive-sysex-on-pc-or-mac/

"Little Deuce Coupe" - The Beach Boys

"Goodbye" - Mary Hopkin

"Hang On Sloopy" - The McCoys

This one?

Or maybe this one? 

2 minutes ago, erok123 said:

You could always use apple loops, they are royalty free.

Let them sue apple.

Great point!  

If it's true that s/he with the biggest pockets tends to win these things, Apple's probably in pretty good shape and has little to worry about. They have the money to litigate just about anyone into an out of court settlement. 

29 minutes ago, arcadesonfire said:

Maybe instead of medical law, I should be looking into musical intellectual property. Hmmmmm

I am not sure if I'd do that in your shoes - there's bound to be more money in medicine than in music. Then again, you should do whatever it is that you're most passionate about... there's a lot to be said for that - money is important, but it isn't everything in life. Unless of course money is your passion...   

47 minutes ago, Vito Corleone said:

Yeah, but a "groove" can apparently now be copyrighted, all bets are off it seems. 

Which is just absurd IMHO.  

I should file a copyright claim for a basic four on the floor backbeat, then hire a lawyer and clean up!   

2 hours ago, ohmygod said:

Billy Preston's song "Will it go round in circles" may have been about all the copyright issues back in the day

I got a song that ain't no melody, I'm gonna sing it to my friends 
I got a song that ain't no melody, I'm gonna sing it to my friends 
Will it go round in circles, will it fly high like a bird up in the sky 
Will it go round in circles, will it

I never thought about it that way... It's possible, I suppose.  

Hooky song - I always liked that tune.  

2 hours ago, arcadesonfire said:

Didn’t Radiohead split the copyright of “Creep” because it had the same I III IV iv progression as a Hollies tune?

I'm pretty certain it wasn't over the chord progression, it was the melody. Take a listen to both one after another, and I'm sure you'll hear the similarities.

And as the guy noted in his TEDx talk, if it's similar enough that you very well may lose the case, even if it was unintentional or subconscious, you're often better off settling than trying to fight it in court. If you fight it, you'll rack up a bunch of legal bills, and you still have no guarantee you'll win - and if you lose, you not only have the legal bills, but also have to pay the settlement and give them part of the royalties going forward too. Giving in and agreeing to a settlement when challenged on a copyright infringement case is often less painful and less risky in the long run. 

1 hour ago, erok123 said:

I'll just keep my four chords.

You’re welcome to them... but of course you know, you can’t copyright a chord progression. Think of how many songs you know that use a I  IV  V progression...

5 hours ago, onelife said:

I think of someone dropping off a stack of poems and then sitting down at the piano and turning them into timeless musical masterpieces

And for me, that's always been the hardest approach to songwriting - taking pre-written lyrics and putting music to them. I much prefer working the opposite direction; writing the music first, then molding the lyrics to fit the melody, or even writing the two simultaneously. It's a much bigger challenge (at least for me) to do it the way Elton did - writing music to go with Bernie's pre-written lyrics. YMMV. 

34 minutes ago, onelife said:

... and, not taking anything away from Bernie, it's Elton's genius that brought their wonderful collaborations to the world.

Elton's a good piano player, a great showman and a fantastic singer IMHO, but from a songwriting perspective, I really think it's hard to give one more credit than the other. Both were essential to the quality of the final results IMO. 

9 minutes ago, norina said:

hi. i have a cort 335 copy. i cant find a serial number anywhere on it.. any ideas??

If it's a genuine Cort Source (their most recent 335 style semi-hollowbody that I'm aware of) the serial number is usually on the back of the headstock. If it's an earlier model, I'm not sure where you might find it if it's not located there - maybe there's a label inside one of the f-holes? That's where the serial number is located on my 2001 Epiphone Casino. It's also possible Cort did something similar, but the label may have come off at some point in time. I really don't know for certain. You might want to use the link Daddymack posted earlier in the thread and contact Cort and see if they can provide you any additional info. 

By the way, welcome to Harmony Central. 

6 minutes ago, SteinbergerHack said:

100% true.  I am a named inventor on a number of patents, yet they are owned by the companies I was working for at the time they were filed.  I got a nice bonus for each of them, but the company that owned the lab space owns the work product that comes from it.

Exactly - I know this myself from first-hand experience when I was working at a research lab. 

19 minutes ago, roughtrade said:

Maybe I don't really understand the concept, but it seems to me that if we mechanically create all possible music and put it out in the public domain doesn't that mean that that's the end of music as an art?

Not necessarily, but IMO it is probably going to de-incentivize the creation of new songs if it passes legal muster because songwriters are not going to get any financial rewards for their work. The people behind this say that they will from their lyric copyrights, but again, that leaves out composers who write instrumental music, those who write only the music (in conjunction with a lyricist), etc. 

10 hours ago, arcadesonfire said:

Well then the whole system is totally blursted up! We need a Bernie Sanders to ride in there on a wrecking ball....

Obviously I have little understanding of all this stuff. Maybe that’s a reason I was eager to take a record deal years ago but my band mate rejected it. 

When a recording is done by an engineer, it is typically treated as a "work for hire" type arrangement. The copyright technically goes to the person who does the job (records the music) but like studio musicians, the recording engineer typically signs the paperwork (a work for hire agreement), does the job, hopefully is paid for their services (sometimes a flat fee, sometimes per hour, and sometimes with "points" on the record's future sales, or a combination of two of these three), and the copyright ownership goes to the person / company who pays them. The band doesn't own the sound recording copyright, the engineer doesn't own it - the person who pays for it owns it - that means the producer (if they have the band signed to a contract and are paying the recording costs), the band (if they're self-funded), or the record company, if it's a label-funded project. 

The same thing is typically true for things like inventions and patents that a person develops as part of their normal work. For example, if you work for a company that does research into new forms of energy and in the course of your research work you make a discovery that results in a breakthrough in fusion, the patent for that may include your name on it, but the company that was paying you for your research work is probably going to reap the greatest financial rewards from your breakthrough, not you.  

2 minutes ago, arcadesonfire said:

Elton’s got the recording. 

Technically the record company owns the recording, not the artists, and not even the guys like me and Anton who actually make the recordings. 

2 minutes ago, arcadesonfire said:

Right. That’s the downfall of my 21st-century, rock-o-centric line of thinking. Though... I imagine those songwriters are all writing lyrics with their melodies, so they shouldn’t be threatened by the “infinite open source melodies” in the OP, nor should they be threatened by rhythm/melody lawsuits like those that get big headlines. 

So basically Bernie Taupin is going to profit as a lyricist, but Elton John won’t since he only writes the music? How is that fair when both contribute significantly to the final song?  

2 hours ago, arcadesonfire said:

 

Oh crud - I used that exact same line in my review of the EHX Blurst!  

It was unconscious plagiarism your Honor, I swear!!!

Seriously, while it's technically possible I saw that episode of The Simpsons and have forgotten all about it, I don't recall ever seeing it before now (I missed a lot of episodes), and I was actually thinking of Dickens and punning off of the name of the EHX pedal (and the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities) when I wrote that.

I guess we must really be living in the age of wisdom, and the age of foolishness after all...   I better shut up now and invoke my Fifth Amendment rights before they haul me off to the brig...  

8 minutes ago, NOS68 said:

Isn't it fairly commonplace in county music for songwriters to wri6for nobody imparticular?

I think it's just as common for them to write with a specific artist in mind; in my experience, both approaches are pretty common for non-artist songwriters. Publishers will also sometimes do multiple demo versions of a single song in order to try to demo the song in a style that is similar to the particular artist(s) they're trying to pitch the song to. 

4 minutes ago, arcadesonfire said:

I suppose that if there are songwriters who are writing but aren’t connected to a specific recording of their work, then my proposition is troublesome

Depends on how you define "recording" - under copyright law (as the guy points out in his TEDx talk) you're automatically granted copyright as soon as something is permanently affixed to a medium. That means recorded to tape / HDD / SSD, written down on score paper, carved as musical notes into a rock - whatever. Registering your copyright with the LOC only proves that your creation existed as of a particular date, which provides some independent proof of your copyright, as well as certain legal rights that you may otherwise lose without registration.

You can't copyright an idea in your head, no matter how fully formed that idea may be - you have to write it down / affix it in some manner, and that includes audio recordings of the composition. 

1 hour ago, Opposite Day said:

Man, their monkey budget is going to be astronomical!

I'm going to invest big into banana futures while I still can... 😉 

6 minutes ago, NOS68 said:

What about songwriters?

Good question IMO. 

22 minutes ago, arcadesonfire said:

Although my thought here wouldn't apply to composed-but-not-recorded music, here's what I've been thinking about the pop music lawsuit business forever:

Ever since we began recording music that's for sale, every recorded production imbued the music with more than just a collection of notes and rhythms. Each recording has a specific sound to it. For rock music, pop, hip hop, etc. etc., I think the "intellectual property" should relate to the recording. If a copyright pertained to a recording (and/or to the author connected to a specific recording) then these algorithmic* melodies would be meaningless. 

Connecting copyright to specific recordings instead of writing would cut down on any revenue made from going to bust people who are profiting off performing your music, but 1) if you're famous, people aren't going to pay to see a cover band and be just as happy as if they had seen you perform the music, and 2) is anybody really going around and policing covers anyway?

*One could also add to legislation that no music arrived at by automation can be copyrighted.... Though I guess that would open up a can of worms too for those setting their auto-arpeggiators to random.

What you're discussing does apply, at least to some degree. Sound recordings can be / are covered by copyright (Form SR), and that, along with the arrangement (if new) are the only things that apply under copyright laws to recordings of works in the public domain. 

Even if you tried to recreate a recording "note for note" and sonically as precisely as possible (something I think is a fun and sometimes frustrating hobby and a great learning tool) the distinct vibrations that are picked up and etched into wax (or whatever) are going to differ in some ways, so I do acknowledge there are differences in one recorded version of a song from another - even if done by the same people in the same room, one take right after the other. At least until you go out far enough in the universe and the compression and rarefaction of the air molecules and the mic positioning HAS to repeat precisely due to the limited amounts of ways that atoms / matter can be configured... 😉