Auto accompaniment

Im looking for gear with auto accompaniment
Besides arranger keyboards.
Or for our beloved elektron
To add this

The Roland Jupiter X/XM and Juno X have it in the form of the I-Arpeggio feature.

Have a look what Korg/Karma can do to get an idea, what is possible beside arranger keyboards:

Korg Kronos synths have Karma built-in. Pretty convenient as a luxury arpeggiator, even works with drumkits. And it can indeed generate multi-instrumental arrangements that can be transposed at key press. It is a generator of ideas, which draws deterministically or randomly from a fixed library of patterns based on user choices. It certainly provides a sneak peak at what AI should already be able to do on a synth today.

Unfortunately, it never got really big and the Nautilus no longer features Karma. Must have been a licensing issue between Korg and the owner of the Karma IP.

Thank you all.

Could wavestate or modwave
Be a type of auto accompaniment ?

The compute requirements for LLMs is great enough that I wouldn’t expect AI hardware in mainstream synths for 5-10 years. Software today, boutique hardware in a few years.

Also, you don’t want your synth export controlled for fear that it could fall into the wrong hands. :cold_sweat:

Sure, you could use a Wavestate for a type of auto accompaniment.

Auto accompaniment on arranger keyboards will let you change the accompaniment to a variation by pressing a variation button. This type of keyboard also tends to be set up with Intro and Outro buttons for triggering intros and outros whenever you feel like it. Some of them also have Fill buttons. They also let you choose between a bunch of musical styles like rock, blues, country, soukous, highlife, choro, samba, dance styles, etc.

It is not impossible to reproduce those features on a Wavestate but it will take a lot of work.

Karma on the Kronos I used to have was kind of neat to use. It was more creative than just an arpeggiator, being good at smoothly increasing and decreasing the density of a texture in inspiringly rhythmic ways. I had to stay within a key and use triads, or else it would produce confused sonorities that might sometimes be desirable on their own, but mostly not. For example, as I recall (from more than 10 years ago), if you added a 7th to a chord, it could confuse the key. And if you added,a blue note that was technically out of key, Karma just made a mess. There was no way to smoothly go from major to minor, etc.

I wonder if I’d studied Karma more to nail down and stay within its limitations, then I might have gotten more use out of it. It was impressive, though, neat to jam with as far as it went if no one else was listening. Much better (more entertainingly and flexibly musical) than the I-Arp on my Jupiter XM.

1 Like

Thinking further about it, Retrokits Rk008 ‘s performance mode can transpose a sequence via a note triggered from a keyboard.

LLM is not what I’d want on a synth, absent a “keyboard” interface. For example, random functions on a synth’s arp are usually pretty dumb. A model predicting (not learning) and choosing the next note(s) or chord within context would be of great added value. And you’re right, we won’t see any dedicated GPU chips wasted in synths, so it will have to run on an ARM platform.

It is indeed the UI that’s a bit convoluted. For example, there many different kinds of preset patterns, by style and/or instrument - quite difficult to choose from. By pattern, you can select from numbers 1 to 128 (!), variations increasing in complexity - can’t remember if that particular parameter can be modulated. Many other parameters to choose from in an uninspiring screen interface but it can be remote-controlled.

Still, it is usable as it is as a spontaneous arranger, at least for single instruments or drum sets and within the limitations that you have described. Not to forget that Karma outputs MIDI, making it a luxurious controller for other synths.

Nevertheless, it does indeed not do everything that a dedicated wedding arranger keyboard can do, e.g interpreting chords correctly.

You can probably get 90% there with Markov chains, which are computationally very cheap. Just graphs with probability weighted edges.

1 Like

Yes, once calculated, such prediction, which is based either on more “traditional” machine learning or just on Bayesian inference, is pretty fast - unlike chatty LLMs where free text predictions require live processing of the embeddings.

1 Like

Just to add to the topic again: for auto accompaniment, on the iPad you have iRealPro as well as MTH (Mapping Tonal Harmony) Pro, which accompany based on chord progressions provided. Not as specialised as an arranger keyboard but depending on the use case it is more than enough and not too expensive.

My issue is i sold 2 arranger keyboards
Cuz i hate them.
Programing them is hell
And i cant be creative live.
No knobs 2 tweak
Every change kills my zest 2 live
I love elektron
I wish they cud make even 1 track that
Can chord change to the chord im playing

In the arranger wedding world
They all have genos or pa4x 5x
Or tyros 5
Expensive
Plus they’ve paid a programming
Geek alot of $
to put on stuff that just becomes boring

Could a modwave also accompany me.
Or can a lane be a backing
For my melody.

I wish elektron cud enable
Just to lay down ONE bass or
melodic rythem track
And have it follow what im playing

Do you improvise live on chords/parts which are not decided before the performance?

If not, why not resort to clip launching instead of bothering with changing chords and/or MIDI?

If yes, then a MIDI sequencer with this functionality (real-time transpose on key press), such as rk008, could work. The latter can also change scales for sequences on the fly.

I don’t know. I don’t have a Modwave