I just read about this last night and was very interested to see how it performed, so I grabbed the paid Beta of it this morning and tried it out in Ableton. So far I really like it. It’s fast to work in and, thus far, stable enough.
I’ve wanted something similar to Logic’s “Drummer” functionality in Ableton and this gets me in the ballpark of that sort of easy workflow very quickly.
The plugin doesn’t generate any sound, so you just point it at a drum rack or any other drum plugin or external drum machine you want to use as your sound source. I tossed a 606 Drum rack up and it instantly worked. I’m a big fan of human sounding grooves with electronic sound sources, so this is a playground for me.
This is the first in a line of AI-driven plugins from the company, so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.
Edited to add: I’ve messaged the company to get some sense of the expected pricing. I certainly bristle at the idea of a paid Beta, but my hope is it gets me grandfathered into a better price at release. My read on their expected audience is film composition/canned music folks, so it’s possible they shoot for a high price point. I’m hopeful that’s not the case, but who knows. Regardless, it’s the sort of tool I’ve wanted in Ableton for ages, so I’m excited it exists.
I just picked that up also and am testing it out with Logic and a host of drum machine plugins. I may have bought a product that has capability that I already have covered with some other plugins, but it looks refreshingly simple to use so will report back with views.
What sort of input is it looking at to generate the midi? I know ezdrummer has had similar features for a while, it can generate accompaniment based on an audio reference track.
The device doesn’t process any incoming midi. It generates Midi patterns and then adds AI-driven variance. It’s setup like a normal step sequencer but with more AI-driven variation that can happen based on how you set up the “variance” knob, per drum.
So your kick could stay locked to a preset pattern, but the snare might move around more based on your “variance” and “complexity” settings. Same idea for all other drums and fills as well. Same with velocity. You sort of manually setup how much variance you want to see and then let it do it’s thing as it plays back. So it’s, in theory, not repeating itself as it plays back.
At the moment it’s got a finite amount of preset patterns in it and no way to import existing midi patterns from outside of itself. I imagine that sort of thing could/might be implemented at some point.