i dont like the idea that curated things and limits will be gone essentially, but i do like the idea of not having to beg and wait and hope and purchase things to try and approximate a goal you are seeking
we have literal magic at our fingertips, and the playing field for programming and creating anything you want has been equalized
about 2 weeks ago now, i was thinking i wanted a nebulae v2. but i dont want to invest in eurorack and have no desire to go that route. so i built a perfect working nebulae in guitar pedal form. it sounds identical, then i added a bpf, a freq shifter, internal lfos for 4 core knobs, made the punch-in looping and overdubbing tighter, made it better for rhythmic evolving textures and loop re-arranging.
and that was possible because ai helped me learn to properly solder, i didnt have to sift through half baked smug answers on guitar forums and beg people to help me without talking down to me, it helped me put together shopping carts for components, and packing lists, it helped me anytime i hit a snag by answering my specific question based on my specific variables, it helped me learn how to do acid etching for the pedal art, then later how to make perfect waterslide decal artwork that looks like a fully manufactured pedal, using ideas i had, but placing the graphics around the drill templates with full text labels and everything. then it helped me take the script and edit it to fit my use case. it suggests alternatives, pushes back when you try to overload things, runs iterative tests before handing you a non-working output, and explains what its doing and why, where things went wrong, and how we can mitigate those things moving forward
i’ve built a granular sampler tool that runs in chrome and has all of my favorite sound sculpting fx like weird ultra specific vocoding and comb filtering and freq shifting. yesterday i realized whimsical io started charging per diagram object, so i built my own WAY BETTER version of that to make my hardware audio setup diagrams so i can keep track of how everything is routed.
I wrote a massive concept pitch for a 3d textural album visualizer for a heavily textural concrète album i made a few years ago so i could approximate what the sound of that album looks like in my head when i listen to it on headphones. claude helped me bounce ideas back and forth based on my vision, and codex made 3d models in blender, rendered them over about 6 days without any input from me, then made them audio reactive based on multiband input analyzers in touchdesigner. I understand the aversion to artistic output here and i am very against using ai for actual audio generation. but im not a visual artist. no one is listening to this album on youtube, this is just for me, i dont have the time to learn blender. i have learned a little TD in the past, but i would rather spend my time building physical objects or making music. so for me, this is still my vision, i formulated and approved and chiseled away at this visual output for days until it was something i wanted. i dont get how thats any worse than people using pre-bought sample packs and loop packs that someone else made and just stacking them in a daw like legos. or taking an 80s funk track and slowing down with some reverb and calling it vaporwave. in fact, i believe the ai workflow is more original
Im currently working on adding the clip launching/live sequencing functionality to the blackbox that ive wanted since pre 3.0 days and making it much better than the early functionality ever was. thats getting close to finished within 2 days
we are at a point now where we can make anything we want. that should be the most exciting thing in the world.
i want creators and companies that i love like elektron to keep building and selling things. i think they are the best at it. and i think they will remain successful, but i also think this will help push things forward.
So im not advocating for putting every feature in one thing. or making your sp404 an mpc. but we now have to power to ask claude to teach us how to build our own machines with standoffs and CAD designed enclosures and hardware from tayda with custom pcbs and custom tutorials made in blender.
so i see this as a tool. I was always of the mind that having to learn some man-made esoteric language in order to make something work felt so gross and arbitrary, like playing videogames that are predetermined sandboxes. and now thats eliminated. i think there is value in learning the fundamentals, which i have. understanding functions, conditions, loops, logic. but reading assembly? why would anyone want to exert their energy which could be spent creating something beautiful on learning some Klingon that some other dude made just to be able to make a computer do what you want it to do? whats really wrong with that?
i agree that we need to use our taste to discern between ugly output and something visually and artistically appealing. but again, this is a tool. the user can push and influence the output. the user can curate. the tool just helps realize the vision
now creatives can use their ideas to build powerful new tools, without having to waste time learning where to put a tilde and hunting for a missing semicolon or knowing what a template literal or a hook is. i think thats beautiful
