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

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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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