Very nice series. And I love his channel in general.
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A list of the ten “melody assistants” Benn reviews on Part II, arranged with links, least expensive to most.
Chordz Free
MidiBot $5
Cthulu $39
Scaler $49
Sugar Bytes Thesys $99
Synleor Harmony Improvisator $120
Liquid Notes $149
Rapidcomposer $199
Orb Composer 399€
Cognitone Synfire $760
ADDED:
The two systems Benn reviewed/demonstrated in Part III of his videos are:
Nodal Generative Music Software – $30
Sonic Pi – FREE
ADDED:
While putting this list together Google was watching (they are always watching – creepy), and they shared with me one of their advertisers that well could be on this list.
Captain Chords Plugin $79 – they also make Odesi
and what Benn said about Captain Chords and Odesi ...
in comments to his video: I’m familiar with it. They essentially quit updating Odesi and split it into multiple products for each feature (some of which aren’t even ported to Windows yet). My previous experience playing with Odesi was pretty awful, so with the level of marketing behind Captain stuff, I just assumed it’d be more of the same.
Also remember the software that probably established (and nearly destroyed?) this category years ago.
Band-in-a-Box $129 - $669
It’s still around.
And a better choice than Liquid Notes is Liquid Music from WaveDNA. $99.
Sundog Song Studio $65. It seems to me more directed towards Pop and EDM, though it also seems adaptable. No personal experience with it, but definitely worth a look, especially at that price.
Midi Madness 3 Algorithmic melody generator, with randomness controls. ÂŁ59. Lot of nice videos there under the media tab.
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That synfire thing looks insane. Like the auto-harmony from Casio keyboards on crack. I guess it was only a matter of time until something like this emerged, but I’m still sceptical that it’s just a lazy substitute to putting in the work.
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The “Deep Learning” part three should be interesting.
A preview:
Believe me using Synfire is not lazy!
Cognitone’s Harmony Navigator is a nice tool as well.
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Also using chord assistants in maschine, cubase, etc isn’t lazy too.
You could still mess up the melody
Part 3
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Melody Sauce from Evabeats/Isotonik Studios – $26
it’s a Max 4 Live device so you need Ableton Live Studio for this. It’s for generating Pop and EDM style music and is based on analysis done on current musical hits.
There are a couple of videos at the site above.
Plus hears an demo of it in action:
Probability Pack for Ableton Live 10 Suite – FREE
This NEW pack is a combination of five elements that allows you to do generative music based on the probabilities involving those five aspects. The following description is from the link at Ableton for the Probability Pack:
Melodic Probability – A monophonic step sequencer made for melodies. Set the probability of the event, pitch and octave of each step.
Rhythmic Probability – A polyphonic sequencer made for rhythms. Set the probability of the velocity, length, and event of each step.
Step Divider – A polyphonic sequencer where each step can be divided into any number of smaller subdivisions for glitchy and chaotic results.
Dr. Chaos – A neural network that strings together notes and generates melodies in unpredictable ways.
Probability Arp – An arpeggiator with a built-in chord generator. Set the probability for rate, note direction (style), length and octave.
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Cool
Ableton/m4live rules
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this thread made me think of spiral in reaktor. unique little sequencer that probably gets overlooked. its a bit of a one trick pony but you can get all sorts of sounds out of it when you start running it through different software or gear then chopping up/looping bits of the audio it puts out
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Kullita – created by Donya Quick
Kullita is a software framework written in Haskell (a computer programming language) that assists composers with the creation of music. The user writes software that uses the framework to generate music in various styles. It derives abstract patterns from existing music that the user gives it. It uses generative grammars to create abstract musical structure, which is then progressively refined using mathematical models of harmony here called “chord spaces.” Finally, style-specific foreground algorithms turn those harmonies into a particular type of music. It is open source. There is also a Python version under development.
The colored boxes above are where computer action takes place.
The non-colored boxes are places of human interaction.
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Introduction to Generative Music on Modulars – Video from Mylar Melodies
First off he addresses the general question of whether this is cheating, or taking the easy way out. Then he goes through various modular elements that can be combined to let you form modular generative music. The elements presented here are: VCAs 2:40, LFOs 8:37, Random Voltage Generators 11:00, Pitch Quantizers 12:20, Clock Dividers 14:17, Sequential Switches 19:50, Logic Modules 23:30. Somewhere in the middle of this he talks about the relative merits of a single clock source, and multiple floating clock sources.
I may come back and add the detail of what specific modules he is using here, but to some extent that’s not the point, there are lots of different options for each, all good, each a different path up the same mountain.
This all can also be used with a software modular system, like VCVRack or others, which might provide some economic benefits, and allow you to store and retrieve specific generative patches more easily.
ADDED: A really great example of generative modular music, was just put up on youtube by CO5MA, known around these parts as @Astrolab.
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I watched Benn Jordan’s videos. He covers a lot of territory and does make the disclaimer that he’s only skimming the surface of the music-making apps he considers. Even so, his evaluations do make a very good guide, and I very much agree with him that RapidComposer and Sonic Pi are about the best things going. RapidComposer’s got a serious learning curve (and price tag), but Sonic Pi is both easy and deep—and guilt-inducingly cheap. It’s extremely well polished, with its conveniently accessed onboard help and reference, plus the ease of development: just copy and paste or live-code and reload to hear immediate effects, all with keystrokes so that you’re working muscle memory rather than using the mouse. The mouse’s non-muscle memory is the biggest impediment to feeling in a musical state of mind when operating a computer, but that’s another discussion. As a touch-typist, operating the keyboard gives me the same tactile satisfaction as Polyend’s Tracker. In any case, he hardly gets into what all Sonic Pi can do, correctly intuiting from its surface features, which I can attest hold throughout the app.
Interestingly, Benn gets smitten by Wotja, which I don’t see as appealing at all to people who make and play music in a serious way. It is kind of a cool way for very inexperienced people to be able to say “I made that,” but who has ever listened to any significant portion of the seven-hour album Wotja will generate for you—per tweak. It does, though, produce endless streams of pleasant and engaging ambient that aren’t all identical to each other, and would make great background music for a workplace or the store where you buy your crystals and candles. Its text manipulations are also simple and fun.
Benn seems to miss the boat on Synfire, though it seems to be a boat a whole lot of people are happy to miss at that price. He apologizes, insisting he simply couldn’t understand it or make it work, but that’s just too hard to believe. I have the demo, which I’ll get around to trying out someday as one of the few apps that will let me use a full suite of user scales (and perhaps microtunings). For tonal music, though, it looks from the demos like Synfire’s about the most flexible and expressive thing out there for fully voiced harmonies and multi-instrumentation, so it’s weird that Benn wasn’t inspired by the demos, which demonstrate enough to command the respect to put more time in learning to work its basics. I wonder what went wrong for him.
Synfire’s use of an iLok dongle is a big, big turnoff. Can’t they make something where you only need to insert the iLok like once a month so that you don’t have to carry the thing around with you and live in fear of losing or damaging it? I mean, if Cognitone gets a month “stolen” from them every here and there, that still keeps their overall revenue stream secure from the decimation of infinite pirated copies.
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