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> Recently I was listening to music and doing some late night vibe coding when I had an idea. I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever. So I wondered, maybe Claude Code does?

Do I need to read further? Seriously, everyone has talent. If you're not reaady to create things, just don't do it at all. Claude will not help you here. Be prepared to spend >400 hrs on just fiddling around, and be prepared to fail a lot. There is no shortcut.

_Neon Dreams_ is ELO × Daft Punk.

Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python.

It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.

I’ll take this opportunity to plug a couple of experiments I’ve not progressed any further but thought were fun:

- Using Claude as a “pair producer” in Ableton by giving it access to the Ableton remote script API so it can create patterns - this was 1 year ago so I’d be interested to see how newer models can do https://youtu.be/2WxSB75U6vg

- A Claude Code skill which teaches it how to arrange Ableton loops into songs (by modifying the XML as there isn’t an API for this): https://youtu.be/P6Zw6f6CEbI and https://youtu.be/tVZigxFceUE

Making music with AI is a new hobby of mine.

My journey started after my wife found a Ukulele on the side of the road near where I lived a few years ago and took it home. Then often when I had a short break, I started just tugging at strings, trying to fully internalize the sound of each note and how they relate... After a few months, I learned about Suno and I started uploading short tunes and made full songs out of them. I basically produced a couple of new songs each week and my Ukulele playing got a lot better and I can now do custom chords. I'm all self taught so I literally don't know any of the formal rules of music. I shun all the theory about chords and composition like chorus, bridge, outro... I just give the AI the full text and so long as the main tune is repeated enough times with appropriate variations, I'm fine with it.

TBH, as a software engineer, I was a bit surprised at how rigid music is. Isn't it supposed to be creative? Rules stand in the way of that. I try to focus purely on what sounds good. For me, even the lyrics are just about the sound of the voice, I don't really care what they say, so long as it makes a vague general statement (with multiple interpretations) and not cheesy in any way.

I'm not okay with AI taking the place of human creativity

As a musician, I find there are a lot of obsessions one can succumb to that can lead to mastery. There are those who are obsessed with the body and it’s perfect positioning and movement those who indulge in extensive experimentation (trying everything), those who listen to absolutely everything, those who meditatively repeat and repeat (sometimes at glacial tempi), and then there are those who collect every musical idea they can and gift listeners with only the best treasures they encounter. AI musicianship, if it is something that can be mastered, probably would rely on some combination of the above. It’s going to suck for a while, certainly, as there hasn’t been time for someone to put in their 10000 hours

>I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever.

Then go pay someone to teach you to play <instrument>, and you'll get a life skill that will be satisfying to watch grow, instead of whatever this soulless crap is.

edit: Oh god after listening to those samples, send Claude to the same music teacher you choose...

Failed Sample Attempt! It hasn't failed yet, it just hasn't found its audience. It's so good. It needs to be paired with video so its abrupt transitions are more legible. There's a whole world in there. Given some exploration and iteration Claude could do some really strange, interesting things.

I like how the author shared the prompt + conversation transcripts. I wish OAI / Anthropic would do that when they share content demos.

I feel that people forget that even amateur (Imho) level apps like dance ejay etc exist for 20+ years.

Imho electronic music creation is for a long time not a hard solution, the problem is making something to sound good :) (and good is ofc based on everyone's taste)

No, I definitely see why people hate on AI music. I appreciate that you had fun, but these songs suuuuuck.

Claude is excellent at a few things, decent at quite a few more. Art and music are not one of these things.

Ar they good as tools to aid in the creative process if you know how to use them and have some restraint? Oh absolutely. As replacements for actual art? Oh absolutely not.

Same goes for the entire genre of tools.

I can't believe AI music hasn't hit the mainstream yet. It's the most amazing thing I've seen since my original ChatGPT 3.5 wtf experience. https://suno.com/playlist/fe6b642c-f4a8-4402-b775-806348640e...

This song was generated from my 2-sentence prompt about a botched trash pickup: https://suno.com/s/Bdo9jzngQ4rvQko9

We alrrady had Cursor Composer last year, so it sounds like a step back.

Oh man I love this so much. The prompts made me laugh so hard. Great experiment.

Very interesting experiment! I tried something related half a year ago (LLMs writing midi files, musical notation or guitar tabs), but directly creating audio with Python and sine waves is a pretty original approach.

Related: ChatGPT Canvas apps can send/receive MIDI in desktop Chrome. A little easter egg. You can use it to quickly whip up an app that controls GarageBand or Ableton or your op-1 or whatever.

It can also just make sounds with tone.js directly.

While the author explicitly wanted Claude to be in the creative lead here, I recently also thought about how LLMs could mirror their coding abilities in music production workflows, leaving the human as the composer and the LLM as the tool-caller.

Especially with Ableton and something like ableton-mcp-extended[1] this can go quite far. After adapting it a bit to use less tokens for tool call outputs I could get decent performance on a local model to tell me what the current device settings on a given track were. Imagine this with a more powerful machine and things like "make the lead less harsh" or "make the bass bounce" set off a chain of automatically added devices with new and interesting parameter combinations to adjust to your taste.

In a way this becomes a bit like the inspiration-inducing setting of listening to a song which is playing in another room with closed doors: by being muffled, certain aspects of the track get highlighted which normally wouldn’t be perceived as prominently.

[1]: https://github.com/uisato/ableton-mcp-extended