Magenta Studio

Magenta Studio is a MIDI plugin for Ableton Live containing 5 tools: Continue, Groove, Generate, Drumify, and Interpolate, which let users apply Magenta models on MIDI clips from the Session View. Requirements: Ableton Live 10.1 Suite or greater (previous versions require a non-bundled version of Max 8). Installation: Drag the downloaded Magenta Studio amxd file into any available MIDI track within Live. General Usage: All plugins work by choosing one or more clips from Ableton's Session View. Users must choose a track before selecting a clip, and only MIDI tracks will show up as options. All plugins have a temperature slider, a parameter used for sampling in the last layer of the neural network to control randomness: higher values produce more variation and sometimes even chaos, while lower values are more conservative in their predictions. Limitations: Melody input is limited to monophonic melodies (one note at a time), and drums input uses a specific MIDI mapping (Bass drum/Snare drum 36/38, Closed/Open hi-hat 42/46, Low/Mid/High tom 45/48/50, Crash/Ride cymbal 49/51). Notes outside this range will be mapped to these 9 instruments.

Detailed Tool Descriptions:

1. Continue: Uses the predictive power of recurrent neural networks (RNN) to generate notes that are likely to follow the drum beat or melody. Give it an input clip and it can extend it by up to 32 measures. Helpful for adding variation to a drum beat or creating new material for a melodic track. It typically picks up on things like durations, key signatures and timing. More random outputs can be produced by increasing the temperature. How to use: Select a clip to extend, then click Generate. The output clips will be added to the clip slots after the selected clip.
2. Generate: Generates a 4 bar phrase with no input necessary. Choose where you'd like the output to go, the number of variations, temperature, and click Generate. Helpful for breaking a creative block or as a source of inspiration for an original sample. Under the hood, it uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) trained on millions of melodies and rhythms to learn a summarized representation of musical qualities. Generate chooses a random combination of these summarized qualities and decodes it back to MIDI to produce a new musical clip. How to use: Does not require input files; clip selection determines where the output clips go.
3. Interpolate: Takes two drum beats or two melodies as inputs and generates up to 16 clips which combine the qualities of these two clips. Useful for merging musical ideas or creating a smooth morphing between them. Also uses a VAE similar to Generate. Each input pattern is represented by a position on a compressed map, and Interpolate draws a line between these positions and returns clips along this line. The number of returned clips is set by the "steps" slider. How to use: Requires two inputs on the same track. The outputs are inserted after the second clip. The clips should be the same length and less than 4 measures.
4. Groove: Adjusts the timing and velocity of an input drum clip to produce the "feel" of a drummer's performance. Similar to a "humanize" plugin but achieved differently. Trained a neural network using 15 hours of real drummers performing on MIDI drum kits to predict the unquantized beats as the output from quantized inputs. How to use: Takes one clip as input and places the output clip one slot below the input.
5. Drumify: Creates grooves based on the rhythm of any input. Can be used to generate a drum accompaniment to a bassline or melody, or to create a drum track from a tapped rhythm. Works best with performed inputs but can also handle quantized clips. Used the same dataset as Groove, but maps from rhythms to performances instead of quantized drum patterns to performances. It extracts a rhythm from the input by removing pitches and velocities while keeping precise timing details, and the model turns it into a groove. How to use: Takes one clip as input and places the output clip one slot below the input.