Procedurally generated djent

[Inflames626]

Oh, joy.

https://youtu.be/CqvmUnG25dA

Supposedly procedurally generated by AI, but it's 2 years old prior to ChatGPT being a thing in November of 2022.

So boring and soulless.

Description: "10 Hours (More!) of Djent/Progressive Metal made with procedural generation is here! Djent/Progressive metal is one of my favorite genres, with Periphery, TesseracT, Animals As Leaders being in my top. Some time ago, I uploaded a video of a project I've been working on for some time that composes Djent/Progressive Metal music akin to Periphery/TesseracT/Animals As Leaders with procedural generation. An explanation of how this works was posted in the first video, and since then I have added lots of improvements to the algorithm, with much more variation being a big focus! Essentially I started with sampling all the guitar notes on my Ibanez RGIF7 in Drop E tuning, and exporting each note (and variation of that note) into separate audio files. Then I did the same with drums (which I use GGD Modern and Massive for), bass (which I use Submission Audio Djinnbass for) and various synths, so everything exists in separate audio files. I then load that into my program and piece together each song, sample by sample, and that's what you hear in this video! Hope you like it!"

Or you could just write the ideas yourself and play them on guitar for a faster compositional process.

Again, the future of music will be assembled with samples and tweaked with plugins and not performed with actual instruments in real physical environments.

Under this scheme one wouldn't even be able to go back and perform one's own songs (that one didn't even write or perform on the recording in the first place) without having to learn them after they were made. It's sad.

[Seashore]

You had me right up until the end. I think that physical performances and other things that tech currently can't accomplish will remain important. Maybe the economy around them collapses a bit, maybe they'll be relegated to hobby/novelty status for a while, but people actually like doing things, and people like watching other people do things they're good at. I mean even YouTube, one of the stalwart online capitals of brain rot, is full of people trying to impress each other with recordings of their physical prowess as (say) guitarists.

I could also see a collaborative role for AI in live/improvised music once the technology has developed enough - maybe a much better version of those backing-band-in-a-box gadgets, or a responsive drum program, or... fill in the blank. I'm sure there will be lots of experimentation. I won't use AI in my visual art because it takes the place of something I really value and like doing myself, but a tweakable AI drum track for recording that could save me from doing my hit-by-hit programming at the rate of an hour per minute of music? Yes please. And having said that, I would still absolutely prefer to play music with other humans. I don't think it's all going away.

[Inflames626]

You had me right up until the end. I think that physical performances and other things that tech currently can't accomplish will remain important. Maybe the economy around them collapses a bit, maybe they'll be relegated to hobby/novelty status for a while, but people actually like doing things, and people like watching other people do things they're good at. I mean even YouTube, one of the stalwart online capitals of brain rot, is full of people trying to impress each other with recordings of their physical prowess as (say) guitarists.

I could also see a collaborative role for AI in live/improvised music once the technology has developed enough - maybe a much better version of those backing-band-in-a-box gadgets, or a responsive drum program, or... fill in the blank. I'm sure there will be lots of experimentation. I won't use AI in my visual art because it takes the place of something I really value and like doing myself, but a tweakable AI drum track for recording that could save me from doing my hit-by-hit programming at the rate of an hour per minute of music? Yes please. And having said that, I would still absolutely prefer to play music with other humans. I don't think it's all going away.

Probably the biggest threat to music was recorded music in the early 20th century. And yet it didn't kill live performances.

A much closer comparison, I think, is how motion pictures killed plays except for play enthusiasts. I think what we're seeing now is live music being relegated to plays while people remain interested in "motion pictures," that is AI generated music, usually tied to something else, usually a subscription model. The value of the content has gone down to the point that it takes thousands of artists from decades ago to equal what used to be the value of a new artist (about $10-20 for one CD/cassette).

Also people trying to impress each other with videos of their playing has more to say about the need of musicians to be recognized than it does about demand from the audience to be impressed.

Had these advanced compositional tools existed in, say, the 80s and 90s, it would have been very impressive. Had we remain restricted to a physical method of music distribution, artists would have been empowered but the publication of music would not have been so fast that people became sick of something not long after they heard it because they had heard it somewhere else before with slight variances.

I can't argue with the fact that these AI tools speed up the compositional process. But that need to make everything fit a genre (along with that genre's compositional tools) to speed up production as well as the need to tie that genre to an optimized search algorithm makes everything generic. "What are the traits of X genre? Search based on A B C traits in X genre with Y Z chord progression." It commodifies the music because it becomes difficult to break out of restrictive barriers that make the art more efficient to classify and locate.

Would I use some tools? Perhaps. But I also have a cut and paste feature. Would I feel as solidly confident behind my music knowing I made it with a musical version of pancake mix instead of doing it from scratch? Not really. I'd feel like a hack.

[Inflames626]

Put another way, a lot of people can paint the Mona Lisa if it's done with a paint by numbers template.

Copying the painting that way not only diminishes the value of the original painting (it becomes "easy"), it also devalues the artists doing the copying (they become hacks).

The solution for this has become a sort of groupthink paywall--generate content as quickly as possible, sometimes daily, tied to some business model, usually CPI or CPC ads, all tied to a trending topic.

The music doesn't become the main thing that's being sold as a unique, valuable work of art. It becomes a side hustle to obscure the selling of something else.

At the same time, people don't take joy in live shows like they used to. They take joy in being recognized by their peers on social media as having been at said show, which is a different thing than enjoying the show. It shifts recognition from the artist to the person posting to social media, which is what it has always been about--sharing trending topics, earning likes, creating traction as an influencer, and generating passive income through that influence.

Any sense of authenticity has long since been lost to brain rot--as you so perfectly put it.

[DankStar]

I liked #41, weak ghosts. whatever works to express one's self I suppose.

I personally like playing riffs when recording, it's fun for me. I like the nuances that happen and the little flubs here and there.

I just asked chat gpt to bust out some lyrics for a tune I'm working on and I gotta admit, they are pretty sick. I could see using a line or two

[Rex_Rocker]

Sounds as insipid as regular Djent to me, LOL.

I love Meshuggah, but the whole "Djent" thing is a joke nowadays, IMO. It's been like that ever since Periphery took over and wanted to do to Meshuggah what KSE did to ATG (BTW, I love Meshuggah, KSE, and ATG, just not Periphery).

That whole band (and genre, for the most part) always came off to me as a bunch of bedroom warriors with rich parents who could afford to buy them fancy toys to keep them motivated with their pastimes.

I don't mean to overgeneralize, but they alway came off as these random 16 yr olds who all of a sudden came up with a thread on a forum nitpicking their 6,000 dollar Blackmachines.

[Inflames626]

Sounds as insipid as regular Djent to me, LOL.

I love Meshuggah, but the whole "Djent" thing is a joke nowadays, IMO. It's been like that ever since Periphery took over and wanted to do to Meshuggah what KSE did to ATG (BTW, I love Meshuggah, KSE, and ATG, just not Periphery).

That whole band (and genre, for the most part) always came off to me as a bunch of bedroom warriors with rich parents who could afford to buy them fancy toys to keep them motivated with their pastimes.

I don't mean to overgeneralize, but they alway came off as these random 16 yr olds who all of a sudden came up with a thread on a forum nitpicking their 6,000 dollar Blackmachines.

That's probably what irritates me most about the scene. It comes across as people born in 2000 and after who are part of the new music industry who primarily see themselves as influencers and producers first and musicians second to the point they don't even care how many albums or tickets they sell as long as they are trending.

They will see something like the link I posted as empowering--another tool for them to use--as opposed to robbing music of its uniqueness, individuality, and humanity, thus defeating why we make music in the first place--to be ourselves.

[Rex_Rocker]

I find the whole AI thing interested. I wouldn't listen to a whole AI-made album, but at the same time, people didn't think Electronic Music was actual music when it came out. It's kinda the same thing.

That being said, it's not my thing. I don't like it, much as I don't like Electronic Music. The AI thing that caused the actors' and writers' strike nearly left me unemployed and made a bunch of my friends be laid off, so I'm particularly in good terms with the concept of AI myself.

[Inflames626]

I find the whole AI thing interested. I wouldn't listen to a whole AI-made album, but at the same time, people didn't think Electronic Music was actual music when it came out. It's kinda the same thing.

That being said, it's not my thing. I don't like it, much as I don't like Electronic Music. The AI thing that caused the actors' and writers' strike nearly left me unemployed and made a bunch of my friends be laid off, so I'm particularly in good terms with the concept of AI myself.

About the only good thing I can see about AI creating things is if it gives you original ideas you would not have had if you had not used it.

I admit drum loops in a lot of my VST instrument plugins help me think of riffs. That said, I don't try and just drag and drop them in.

Then again, can you copyright all the variations of 16th note groupings? No. But when you start just dropping stuff in from something like Drum Monkey suddenly it diminishes the creative process because the artist is doing a lot less thinking to come up with stuff.

I remember when EZMix came out I was annoyed enough because it seemed to rob the creator of so much knowledge and agency for the sake of speeding up the process. Now it's even worse.

I like electronic music (especially 80s synthwave) as a way to pad out guitars so everything isn't just distorted guitars all the time.

I like AI as something to consult, like a thesaurus, but not something to do the whole creative process.

An example would be Scaler, a plugin I am a big proponent of, because it helps you write some theoretically difficult chord progressions like jazz reharmonizations that I would need to work on paper to figure out. Samples are nice, as are humanizers that can create complex, subtle pocket shifts and make the velocity randomization process quicker.

What I don't like is AI spitting out Shakespeare like it's Madlibs and some content creator getting credit just because he stuck in one out of every five words that were autogenerated by an algorithm.

Even algorithm programmers themselves won't be able to take full credit once the software becomes self-learning and pulls from a variety of sources to the cloud.

The way I see ChatGPT now is pretty much a magic 8 ball meets Wikipedia. It spits out walls of text at you but doesn't do anything truly earth shattering like make a practical plan for world peace or solve global hunger or make a utopian society because it just isn't smart enough to do so even with access to all that data and supercomputers.

Edit: I predict in another 10-20 years you'll see creative people resorting to AI in the same way athletes resort to steroids and performance enhancing drugs.

They make excuses for using PEDs and never call them out as wrong unless they're threatened with punishment for using them.

It's always, "The drugs don't do the work for you/they help you reach peak human performance/it's all about pushing the envelope," blah blah.

Just excuses to increase stats when sheer unaided talent alone can't get you there.

[Inflames626]

Also, I could probably use AI to generate pentatonic licks for solo improvisation.

In music school we were encouraged to keep a lick book for such purposes. This is a lot easier now in the world of Guitar Pro.

[GuitarStv]

Also, I could probably use AI to generate pentatonic licks for solo improvisation.

I thought that's what blues was for! :P

[El Dunco]

This just doesn’t seem at all like a threat to the “band” experience. It doesn’t compare to the sound of a band really playing together, the drag/swing/push-pull, the chemistry, intensity not to mention the unique, one-off sound from one recording session to another.

Very many metal fans are getting very sick and tired of “bedroom guitarist metal,” which for better or worse they see as lame/nerdy/poser/not real metal bands. They don’t follow the popular format of sub-3 minute songs released piecemeal and very much still enjoy the longplay format. I’ve seen this for myself. We did smaller and smaller runs of physical copies of our newer releases, but when we would play in different states to promote the release, we would sell the lot, barely having enough on hand for the last show haha.

The thing is, with how good digital amp simulations and drum replacement samples are now (though it’s simply my stylistic choice to favour analog and acoustic methods,) there is no excuse for so many modern heavy bands to sound so completely interchangeable. It’s very much like how people erroneously blame the CD and digital music formats for the loudness war when the format itself actually allows for greater dynamic range and a much quieter noise-floor than was ever possible with tape and it just hasn’t been used that way.

The problem very much came from radio’s normalisation/comp/limiting rigs (that sound that made songs from the 90s sound so fat when they aired on MTV) and artists wanting that “on the radio sound” already on the disc, the d!ck measuring of trying to beat each other with volume. I could go on and on but do yourself a favour and read “Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.” Fascinating read.

If the production on your songs both serves the song (the best production doesn’t even sound like “production” so much as the strengths of the song just come through how it was envisioned, with the methods being as invisible as possible) and also stands out by being very distinct from your contemporaries, you have your work cut out for you if you can market yourself. Steve Thompson had the right idea when he says he listens to what is out there and makes it his goal to blow them away.

Besides thinking “okay, neat” for a few seconds, this auto-djent didn’t really blow me away or set any kind of new standard for heavy music. If you play stuff like this and do feel worried, kick its a$$ with superior writing, arrangements, dynamics and much less more lively, idiosyncratic sounds!

To nitpick, there isn’t enough variation of samples of the same notes to avoid the “MIDI” sound. I’ve made stuff like this in kontakt and you need 7 of each note minimum. By the time I’ve assembled a realistic enough library of any instrument for the kontakt player, I could have played it myself many times over.

[Inflames626]

This just doesn’t seem at all like a threat to the “band” experience. It doesn’t compare to the sound of a band really playing together, the drag/swing/push-pull, the chemistry, intensity not to mention the unique, one-off sound from one recording session to another.

Very many metal fans are getting very sick and tired of “bedroom guitarist metal,” which for better or worse they see as lame/nerdy/poser/not real metal bands. They don’t follow the popular format of sub-3 minute songs released piecemeal and very much still enjoy the longplay format. I’ve seen this for myself. We did smaller and smaller runs of physical copies of our newer releases, but when we would play in different states to promote the release, we would sell the lot, barely having enough on hand for the last show haha.

The thing is, with how good digital amp simulations and drum replacement samples are now (though it’s simply my stylistic choice to favour analog and acoustic methods,) there is no excuse for so many modern heavy bands to sound so completely interchangeable. It’s very much like how people erroneously blame the CD and digital music formats for the loudness war when the format itself actually allows for greater dynamic range and a much quieter noise-floor than was ever possible with tape and it just hasn’t been used that way.

The problem very much came from radio’s normalisation/comp/limiting rigs (that sound that made songs from the 90s sound so fat when they aired on MTV) and artists wanting that “on the radio sound” already on the disc, the d!ck measuring of trying to beat each other with volume. I could go on and on but do yourself a favour and read “Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.” Fascinating read.

If the production on your songs both serves the song (the best production doesn’t even sound like “production” so much as the strengths of the song just come through how it was envisioned, with the methods being as invisible as possible) and also stands out by being very distinct from your contemporaries, you have your work cut out for you if you can market yourself. Steve Thompson had the right idea when he says he listens to what is out there and makes it his goal to blow them away.

Besides thinking “okay, neat” for a few seconds, this auto-djent didn’t really blow me away or set any kind of new standard for heavy music. If you play stuff like this and do feel worried, kick its a$$ with superior writing, arrangements, dynamics and much less more lively, idiosyncratic sounds!

To nitpick, there isn’t enough variation of samples of the same notes to avoid the “MIDI” sound. I’ve made stuff like this in kontakt and you need 7 of each note minimum. By the time I’ve assembled a realistic enough library of any instrument for the kontakt player, I could have played it myself many times over.

The last sentence was exactly my feeling.

If younger listeners (those born in 2000 and after) have only heard stuff like this and expect this and have been trained to want this style and sound and only reward this style and sound, that is where I think the problem is. They want it to sound like it's on a grid. They want it to sound tight, sterile, mechanical, and lifeless. They want to impress people with their workflow, process, and craft, and not the actual playing.

The thing is for the guy who made it is he didn't have any of the insightfulness you do about the end product. He just thought it was neat he could do it and use the tools in the way he did. There's no real drive to innovate or sound different. Only "Can I sound like...?"

It's an extension of GAS, really. How many people spend more time collecting gear than actually playing? Probably quite a few. How many people spend more time watching plugin and mixing tutorials than actually recording? Probably quite a few.

It's an age thing. I wish more younger people had the insight you do about the art and craft, but I feel like the less people remember the 80s and 90s, the less inclined they are to see things the way you and I do. All they know is phones, software, and the cloud.

[Inflames626]

People seem to enjoy being content curators and mashing up stuff in new ways as opposed to out and out creating new stuff. This is because it's hard to be original, especially when the speed of publication is instantaneous and an online audience is fickle, either getting over something interesting in a few months or constantly rehashing things they think are cool as memes for years even long after the sheen has worn off. Yes, we know winter is coming. That meme has been cycling for 12 years now.

Edit: look up how quickly influencers and content creators experience burnout. People just don't want to admit that in a sea of limitless global information they can't come up with new ideas because every interesting permutation has been done.

This kind of naivete Gen Z has and how simultaneously easy and difficult they are to please are the things I condemn and exactly why this old man is yelling at a cloud. Stop being so impressionable.

To them I say: stop thinking things that aren't cool are cool. Stop rehashing old ideas to bandwagon on a nostalgia trend that you never experienced in the first place and thus have no right to relive vicariously through people older than you. Stop being a sponge receptive to influence and start being a fountainhead of originality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/style/creator-burnout-social-media.html

[El Dunco]

It really helps ground myself as a producer that as well as having professional training/certification and as well as winning an award signed by the mayor for contributions to the community with my involvement in music in my town, of the releases I have produced, 2 have stayed in the top 10 in my state’s de facto alternative music station after their release, one of them staying at #1 for a while (beating out the likes of Mazzy Star and Sigur Ros,) the latest clients album being “album of the week.” These have ranged from unique post punk to a teenage metal band to an Aussie pub rock band.

People tend to not repeatedly request songs they don’t like the sound of and the way I captured these artists was so much more than turning knobs and hitting record. I helped with arrangements, I got the best performances out of the musicians and even coached them when they were having a hard time and that means so much more to me than numbers on a page. There is no AI or algorithm that can do what I did to get those results short of being a full on android producer.

Realizing that. I’m more excited than ever to get right back into full time music, no matter what technological gimmicks have come out in the meantime or what very young children click on the most. I seriously don’t imagine kids today being all that different from when I was a kid. Sabbath and early Metallica were never not “modern” sounding enough for me and spoke to me a lot more than most of the newer bands that came around that time. Those kids still exist and they keep the true spirit of what makes a real rocking band alive.

A band made of real people, really playing their hearts out with something to say beats bedroom, laptop-nerd metal and day of the week because they just can’t keep from sounding completely alike and what do you really have to say in heavy music when you’re a sheltered suburban kid who’s loving, supportive parents bought them everything they needed to get started?

The best music comes from people who have been driven a little mad. I would know . I’m going to be creating content but it will be all about my work, something I’m genuinely passionate about. Scoping out the competition, mot many of them have produced anything that was #1 on anything. Even my own band, as niche as proggy industrial thrash is had somewhat of a breakout by having our last single reach #4 on a popular online rock/poo chart and got us a worldwide distro deal. It’s about time I put myself out there more. I’m pretty sure I deserve to.