Is it time for SUPER plugin?

[Raksha]

WTF... So... In a few years, I should just quit writing songs, playing my guitar, keys, bass, even singing? Just push a few buttons? (Can I write my own lyrics??)
No plugin can ever recreate the magic from Manic Depression, Come Together, Riders on The Storm, Waterloo Sunset, just to name a few, not ANY aspect of it. Or for that matter, just about any recording ever done by human beeings. Humans PLAY. Machines (plugins) DON'T. It WILL sound fake, however intelligent the software is. For some electronic genres, maybe you could have acceptable results, but never even close to things like Boards of Canada.
I am a bedroom hobbyist producer and muscician. I do mostly rock, but also sometimes experimental electronic music. I do use prefab midi with EZdrummer for the rock stuff, because I can't have a drumkit in my 8 m2 bedroom. But that midi is actually originaly played by by a real drummer. The rest, I play myself. And even when I make electronic music, with synths and drum machines that are programmed, not played, there are still so many human factors: Writing, arranging, producing, mixing, and mastering.
This, or these, "super" plugins can never replace humans, not even close. And IF they do (in a hundred years)? I would never listen to that kind of music, just my old playlists. And I would make music just for myself. Nobody would ever hear it, but I would still love doing it...
So, to every wannabe that doesn't have the patience or skill to learn an instrument or how to write songs: Find something else to do! Music from such "super" plugins will be like taking a pill instead of eating a real Boeuf Bourguignon, or whatever proper meal an even moderately good chef could come up with.

[Etienne1973]

And I would make music just for myself. Nobody would ever hear it, but I would still love doing it...

[DJErmac]

And, talking about electronic music, it’s also based heavily on feelings. What you feel at this very moment is what counts.
- try this kick with this bass, it makes you wanna jump...
- try to louder a bit more this sound at this very millisecond, your transition becomes epic...
- try to add a very surprising sound at anytime, everybody remembers your song for this...
- try to add this very sound in the break, people start to imagine they’re in that special place...
Any AI would fail at anticipating what works or not. You have to try and listen. You have to listen and try.
This is all simply not serious. AIs can s¥ck bisons while I’m making music.

[thecontrolcentre]

Any AI would fail at anticipating what works or not. You have to try and listen.

[Etienne1973]

At the end of the day I had a need for things to do to fill the time frame between my birth and death. Super plugin is not the right tool for that job.

[Leo1999]

WTF... So... In a few years, I should just quit writing songs, playing my guitar, keys, bass, even singing? Just push a few buttons? (Can I write my own lyrics??)
No plugin can ever recreate the magic from Manic Depression, Come Together, Riders on The Storm, Waterloo Sunset, just to name a few, not ANY aspect of it. Or for that matter, just about any recording ever done by human beeings. Humans PLAY. Machines (plugins) DON'T. It WILL sound fake, however intelligent the software is. For some electronic genres, maybe you could have acceptable results, but never even close to things like Boards of Canada.
I am a bedroom hobbyist producer and muscician. I do mostly rock, but also sometimes experimental electronic music. I do use prefab midi with EZdrummer for the rock stuff, because I can't have a drumkit in my 8 m2 bedroom. But that midi is actually originaly played by by a real drummer. The rest, I play myself. And even when I make electronic music, with synths and drum machines that are programmed, not played, there are still so many human factors: Writing, arranging, producing, mixing, and mastering.
This, or these, "super" plugins can never replace humans, not even close. And IF they do (in a hundred years)? I would never listen to that kind of music, just my old playlists. And I would make music just for myself. Nobody would ever hear it, but I would still love doing it...
So, to every wannabe that doesn't have the patience or skill to learn an instrument or how to write songs: Find something else to do! Music from such "super" plugins will be like taking a pill instead of eating a real Boeuf Bourguignon, or whatever proper meal an even moderately good chef could come up with.

Completely ot. This thread has too many pages now and you have not seen or read the main thing.
No, SUPER plugin will not perform for you, just make your performance closer to a certain style of a certain artist.
Even Stevie Wonder, a musical genius, used a Fairchild cmi! By using samples Fairchild could steal the sound of original units, of recordings or whatever, it was never the real thing, it was just copying something.
No plugin could ever.... are you sure, don't be surprised if technology or software will soon be able to bring things way further to higher levels you can not even imagine.
In 2002 I saw producers producing techno or house, they drew the the midi notes manually with a pencil on computer screenl. I remember one, he had everything you can imagine, DX7, D50, TR909... but he could not even play one chord progression, sometimes he would press just one key and record it and then add huge reverb or delay. His genre was called minimal house, he was a DJ and got pretty successful and rich, he was booked all around the world, Tokyo, Mallorca, France, Italy....
I didn't like the music at all, but who cares, he was successful without real musical skills.
Only the result is important, no matter how you achieve it!
Music is not a holy thing, it's just sound and rhythm.

[Leo1999]

Some reactions so ridiculous, it reminds me of Catholic church long ago,
when the church accused Galileo of heresy.
Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office (haha holy, just the opposite, it was the devil's house) to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church.
Ridiculous and silly!
Do you really believe music is something that can be defined by rules?
No, everything is possible and allowed.
And you won't stop the times from changing.
Maybe you should also blame those who developed the first daws,
it changed music production drastically, everyone can make music and
upload it to the internet with skills or with no skills.
Blame the internet or world wide web.
There is one guy who could be blamed a very lot.
He and his company changed the world a very lot,
why don't you blame Steve Jobs?!
Today the centrer of life and the world or universe
neither is the sun nor planet earth,
it's a pretty small screen on a smartphone!
Go outside and walk with eyes opened and watch people
at bus stops, in busses, cafes, in parks or even when they walk,
a world ruled by small screens.
There could be no bigger punishment than taking away
someone's smartphone,
someone's life immediately would get senseless, empty
and boring. True and sad at the same time,
but it is what it is, times are changing,
you can't compare people of 1970s or 1980s to people of today,
completely different habits, mindset and life.
It's the same with music.
Now it's the era of innovation and technology,
so a lot of things wait to be developed and released.

[jules99]

OP is too much of a rambler to have a fruitful discussion with. But s/he does have a point.

However, many of KVR's core members on the other hand seem to be of the boomer/ANALOUGE/tapemachine/ATARI-type that's more scared than excited about new developments in music tech. Which is a shame. But given that forums are an ancient way of communicating that's hardly a surprise. Make no mistake, I'm one of the older farts as well, but I have real trouble understanding all of the AI angst around here.

Having a piece of software that could give me the ability to sound like Chris Cornell or adapt the playing style of Jimi Hendrix or Elton John or Danny Carey would be a dream come true for music production. How many times do we think about a part in terms of the style of a musician? Play it a bit like Hendrix on this song, sing it like Cornell did in this bridge... nothing would be taken away from anyone. Just like tools to help with music theory struggles, with loops, with auto tune like software, it would simply enable a much bigger audience to enjoy making music. What's with the gate keeping?

Technology for vocal timbre replacement does exist, but it's still in its infancy:
https://twitter.com/hollyherndon/status ... ycEAusl9vQ

[licasto2]

A plugin that will play songs you didn’t write in the style of someone else?

Isn’t that called Spotify?

No you for instance play a guitar and plugin will transform it to the playing style and sound of a certain guitarist. You still have to play something, the plugin will refer to what you give him.

why?

If you can play well enough that applying someone else's 'sound and style' wont still sound like utter shite, what's the actual point of applying it?

And if you cant play well enough that applying someone else's 'sound and style' wont still sound like utter shite, what's the actual point of applying that sound and style?

I mean if this magical fairywand plugin is going to have to change any of the music you played, not just its sound and style, so that its actually decent guitar playing in that sound and style, then it might as well do it from scratch, the playing itself is pointless.

I give you an extreme example.
Let's say I have a latin style mix and would like
to add a guitar like Paco de Lucia.
Who can play like him? You will hardly find someone.
So I play a guitar on keyboard chords and some melodies or
solo, maybe it will sound flamenco-like, but still too far to sound good.
Super Plugin makes it sound good, simple as that.
When you know the story behind some musicians, you
will know they had to practice a lot.
There is not much time available for young people any more,
they also need to spend quite a lot of time on posting to
tik tok, insta or whatever. Times have changed.
Who would spend 6 hours a day on practicing today,
only a very few exceptions and they, too, will have to adapt
to day's production standards.

SUPER plugin will save a lot of time

Some of the funniest shit I've read in awhile..... That the excuse of an absolute and complete wanna-be. If you are an ACTUAL musician you don't make excuses to to NOT practice. You do it because that's WHAT you do... You need to get a Donda and "make some beats".

[licasto2]

Since we are are in fantasy land then why not have super plugin wash my car, lend me money and gimme a handy? I can write my own tunes.

[adammonroe]

AI technology isn't there yet - perhaps in 20 years. AI generated art, although impressive, is really just
good at certain specific things; right now, mainly one-off, stylized portraits. Currently, it's poor if you need consistency, a series of work, highly tuned+detailed concept art, ect. Presumably, it will be the same for music; pretty sounding one-off tracks that are shiny and attractive to people without deep training or knowledge, but which quickly become tiring and repetitive to the rest of us. Of course it will improve over time, but I'd argue that truly innovative work isn't going to come from AI in any field. At best, it will be a tool that helps people save time when implementing their artistic vision. When it comes to certain things - scoring a film for example - to be able to analyze a film, understand the context of what's happening, and then write a proper underscore...it will be many, many years for AI to accomplish that, although in the interim it might be "good enough" for some people. Or take a song; to be able to write melody+lyrics+music that truly resonates with people is a rare accomplishment - even for people who dedicate their lives to doing so - and so this seems like a much harder problem for the AI to solve. I foresee something like prompting an AI to "write a piano waltz in the style of Bach and Debussy" being possible soon, but music production is more complicated than mathematics and style; you also have to generate the sounds/performance, mix them, and do proper production work: this is another layer of complexity that makes music and sound production a much more complicated problem than generating images, and, at the end of the day, if you already have the skills, it could end up being easier to just play the damn thing than it will be to tweak your way through 100 iterations of something an AI generates. You will however see the further devaluation of music and art as the market gets flooded with surface-level AI-generated content that's pretty at first glance, but lacks the deep sophistication, subtlety, and technique of what a truly skilled human can accomplish...at least until the year 2046 when SkyNet decides humans are no longer necessary and detonates the world's entire nuclear stockpile

[Leo1999]

A plugin that will play songs you didn’t write in the style of someone else?

Isn’t that called Spotify?

No you for instance play a guitar and plugin will transform it to the playing style and sound of a certain guitarist. You still have to play something, the plugin will refer to what you give him.

why?

If you can play well enough that applying someone else's 'sound and style' wont still sound like utter shite, what's the actual point of applying it?

And if you cant play well enough that applying someone else's 'sound and style' wont still sound like utter shite, what's the actual point of applying that sound and style?

I mean if this magical fairywand plugin is going to have to change any of the music you played, not just its sound and style, so that its actually decent guitar playing in that sound and style, then it might as well do it from scratch, the playing itself is pointless.

I give you an extreme example.
Let's say I have a latin style mix and would like
to add a guitar like Paco de Lucia.
Who can play like him? You will hardly find someone.
So I play a guitar on keyboard chords and some melodies or
solo, maybe it will sound flamenco-like, but still too far to sound good.
Super Plugin makes it sound good, simple as that.
When you know the story behind some musicians, you
will know they had to practice a lot.
There is not much time available for young people any more,
they also need to spend quite a lot of time on posting to
tik tok, insta or whatever. Times have changed.
Who would spend 6 hours a day on practicing today,
only a very few exceptions and they, too, will have to adapt
to day's production standards.

SUPER plugin will save a lot of time

Some of the funniest shit I've read in awhile..... That the excuse of an absolute and complete wanna-be. If you are an ACTUAL musician you don't make excuses to to NOT practice. You do it because that's WHAT you do... You need to get a Donda and "make some beats".

Why haven't you marked "exceptions"!?
Just keep on watching the world with closed eyes just not to see the reality.
It refers to the majority and with about 40000 new uploads to Spotify e-v-e-r-y day, even
music producers have become a majority, because everyone can produce music
today.
Throw a stone into a crowd and you will for sure hit a music producer!
In the 90ies people said, throw a stone into a crowd and you will
for sure hit a DJ.
Times are changing!

[CinningBao]

Jeesh, this is unbearable..

AI can be trained. It gets trained on patterns. It doesn't know why the patterns exist, or why <this thing> happened before or after <that thing>, but it can see the patterns. And it's very good at seeing patterns! MIDI, audio, images.. all consist of patterns these brains can be trained to replicate/emulate.

We train ourselves. We spend time listening to a lifetime's worth of music, across various genres or only one or two, it's the person's choice. The 'data' we get from listening to that music is sooooo different from what a digital brain's data looks like.. that's obvious, right? On top of the raw data (this note here, that note that) there is a lorry-load of other details which these brains cannot evaluate or know why it was chosen; subtleties of pitch choices and bending, rhythmic choices (how the drum components are working with each other, the subtle irregular-flamming a real drummer performs), whether the instruments are pulling or pushing against that beat, how much energy the singer gives certain prominent words/notes, where abouts in the breath cycle they were when they chose that note... this stuff is completely out of sight of the magical wondrous AI.

It can 'hear' it, sure, but it has no idea why the choices were made, and what difference the choices make to the end result. None whatsoever.

We aren't going to change this guy's mind when he has been led to believe the choices musicians and writers make are like a dog playing the piano. Does he play anything? Does he understand why he hit that note? Is he just thinking about food and running around in the garden? The answers are no, no and probably yes.

The conflict which exists, for him, is that one second he says that the old musicianship he wants to 'request into his music' is gone, gone gone. Nobody cares about playing anymore, they just want to be able to request a magical program to plonk out some pretty noises for him.

So we (as a civilisation) should just stop playing real instruments and have the last remaining material we are training the brains with (or perhaps he doesn't understand the techy sh!t behind it all) at Sam Smith or Ariana Grande?

Maybe? I'm kind of bored of talking about this guy's misunderstanding of art.

Ah, I'll rephrase that.

I'm kind of bored of talking about this guy's misunderstanding of human expression. Machines can't do human expression. Capiche?

HOWEVER, the point he's making is already happening. We can already, as folks have described, use 'real drummer data' to generate MIDI sequences. But I don't think we can go much beyond that. "A triads sequence in the style of Martin Garrix, a house beat in the style of Derrick May, an 808 like Soulja Boy" - these aren't unreasonable requests to an automaton.

But asking a brain to make music with any intelligence or emotion about it is a dead end.

You will aaalllwwaayyss need a human to curate the generated output. The tool the OP wants will be used in the miserable world of marketting and advertising, if our civilisation hasn't already completed its demise.

Have a more positive day than the tone at the end of this post!

[donkey tugger]

Here it is;

viewtopic.php?t=204964

[CinningBao]

Why haven't you marked "exceptions"!?
Just keep on watching the world with closed eyes just not to see the reality.
It refers to the majority and with about 40000 new uploads to Spotify e-v-e-r-y day, even
music producers have become a majority, because everyone can produce music
today.
Throw a stone into a crowd and you will for sure hit a music producer!
In the 90ies people said, throw a stone into a crowd and you will
for sure hit a DJ.
Times are changing!

40,000 uploads a day does not mean there are 40,000 worthy peices of human expression being added to the mass of human output.

People who plonk purchased loops in line and put autotune on the vocal are not music producers. I know plenty of people who do this, and call them selves that. I can promise you they are most definitely not music producers.

Quoting Dylan does make true any of your words.