Chord Genie AI Chord Generator by Unison

[Hyperbole]

I received an email the other day from Unison, the producers of various MIDI "chord packs," about their new AI chord generator, "Chord Genie." In general, I view such products as symptomatic of everything wrong with modern music. But a while back, I purchased one of Unison's sets of MIDI files containing various chord progressions, just out of curiosity.

I should probably mention that if there is one thing I don't need, it's preset chord progressions. Although I am a trained musician, probably the only thing I do really well musically (and most enjoy) is coming up with interesting chord progressions that feature "perfect" voice leading. But I was curious to learn what kinds of chords are included in a product like this.

OMG, what a mistake. After buying one of their chord packs (from which I didn't use anything,) I was spammed by Unison like you can't believe. I'm talking emails almost every freaking day breathlessly pitching one sale after another. And of course, there was no way to unsubscribe or manage your email preferences on the Unison site. Even after I emailed Unison and requested to be removed from their marketing emails, I still received email after email. God, it's annoying.

And so, I received another ridiculously over-the-top announcement from Unison the other day about their new AI chord generator, "Chord Genie." I was genuinely curious to hear what AI could come up with, as I'm not an AI hater/doomer.

But, boy, does this thing have a long way to go to generate interesting chord progressions. All of the demo progressions on the site were generic and lame. But I'm curious if anyone else has used Chord Genie and whether they are getting anything decent out of it. I follow developments in AI pretty closely and wonder what the state of the art is for a product like this.

In the future, I could envision having an AI "studio copilot" generate a guitar (or any other instrument) part for one of my songs. In my mind, this wouldn't be all that different from having someone come over to play, as I don't play guitar (beyond a few bar chords and Blues licks). In either case, I would be "producing the session," giving the guitarist or AI ideas to try (maybe even playing example melodies and riffs on the keyboard) and providing feedback on what I liked and didn't like.

To me, AI chord generators are baby steps along this path to having my own personal, multi-instrumentalist session musician. Whether people think that will never happen, or if it does, it will be a dystopian hellscape, I'm pretty sure something like this is coming.

[Hyperbole]

Here's a link to the Chord Genie page:

https://unison.audio/chord-genie-1

And a YouTube video on the product:



Man, those progressions in the video are really uninteresting/uninspiring, IMO. The bad Hip Hop production is not helping.

[kraster]

Just get scaler or captain chords or anything that isn't Unison.

[hordriss]

The issue with Unison is their predatory marketing. Selling the chord pack, when if you need something like that to get you started there are plenty of free packs available with a quick Google search.

Also, their plugins do actually look quite interesting, but are way overpriced for what they are. The fact that you have to scroll through pages of absolute nonsense before even seeing what the price is, is a bit of a red flag.

If they sold their plugins at $30 a pop, or somewhere close to that, they'd probably be worth it. As it is, you can get plugins which do the same thing, often doing it better (at least based on what I can see, having never actually bought or used one of the Unison plugins) for less money than they're charging.

But they get buys because their advertising is everywhere and they namedrop big named producers they claim use and love their products.

[jamcat]

The issue with Unison is it’s for idiots by idiots. They cater exclusively to know-nothing wannabe producahz who are dumb enough to pay money for chords.

Their YouTube ads are straight out of Idiocracy.