AI Powered MIDI Generation Plugin

The latest launch of instaComposer.
I finished watching the video.
I have a hunch.
SCALER will do better.

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I had an earlier version but as soon as Scaler came out I never used it again. I’m curious what’s in the new one but I’m sure they haven’t caught up to Scaler.
ADDENDUM: I had Instachord. Totally different product. I downloaded the demo to Instacomposer and not sold on it so far. It doesn’t start playback when you push the DAW play button so that kills it right there for me.

It must be better! It has AI in it!!!
:laughing: :crazy_face: :rofl:

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AI =Approximate Intelligence. (In their case) :grin:

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They missed off ‘ML’ when they thought up the name …‘AI/ML Powered’ would have upped the acronym count :grinning:

A plugin can have the highest QI in the world, but if they use that “sound” (actually noise :cold_face:) for the demo, they will never sell it to me

P.S: I bought Scaler before watching the videos :crazy_face: :grin: :rofl:

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I was going to make fun around CHI, but then I found this here, which @yorkeman might appreciate :grin:

I haven’t watched this show very much (in fact I hardly watch any television), but it’s quintessentially ‘English’ in its gentle ‘humour’ - smiles rather than belly laughs. Stephen Fry, the main host, is what he might have described himself as ‘an agreeable chap’.

It ran on BBC America for a couple of years, but having watched US TV in my hotel rooms on my frequent trips to the USA, I suspect that the audiences would be more bemused than amused.

I wouldn’t call it the latest launch. It’s a new product with Instascale and Instachord being two completely separate products in the same product line. I picked it up because I got it fairly cheap using saved up discounts from Audio Plugin Deal.

I think trying to make it some kind of competition is silly. I have almost all the various music theory helper/cheat tools. Some are better than others. But they all do something in a unique way that makes them useful for certain applications. (Captain Chords, Orb Producer Suite, Instascale, Instachord and Instacomposer) Having said that, I use Scaler most often by far.

I haven’t really had Instacomposer long enough to say much about it obviously. Will it be for everyone? No of course not, but neither is Scaler. Maybe hold off judgement until you actually have some time using it? If any community should hold off being overly judgmental I would expect that to be the Scaler community, because there are plenty of windbags out there judging us for making use of Scaler. :slight_smile:

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It is odd in how you start it. You have to play a key on your MIDI keyboard to trigger it’s playback. It doesn’t lock it’s transport to the transport of your DAW.

And that’s why it is kind of useless to me. I keep hitting the space bar expecting it to start. Seems so crazy to me in this day and age.

I agree that functionality is not the most intuitive. But I rarely use Scaler in that manner either. I prefer to drag and drop the MIDI out to tracks and work on it after having created an idea with the various tools.

When I’m ready to finalize or move on to another element, I will drop the MIDI into the DAW as well. But for working out ideas I need to have it start in sync to the DAW.

I used trial version, but really nothing special. In my case, this sw does not help. Maybe it’s my workflow, because i have ideas for melody first, then search for chords to put below, so Scaler is very important part for me. Random progressions, not my cup of tea

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Thanks for the comment thread here. I’d been thinking about trying instacomposer in part just because I find these generative things fun and surprisingly useful for ideas. I hadn’t seen much in the way of comments or reviews though on the web beyond a handful of videos, so appreciate the comments from those who have tried. I’ll probably try it out at some point anyway :wink:

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I bought Instacomposer and it seems original to me.
At first I was disappointed precisely because I had to start from within or by pressing a key on the MIDI keyboard, but I have continued to investigate …
Now I have it receive the MIDI from Scaler. I copy Scaler’s chord progression with their durations in Instacomposer, and generate the tracks there. From Instacomposer I send each channel to an instrument (I use Opus by EW preferably, assigning Violins I to the melody track, Violins II to rhythm or ostinato, Bass to Double basses and other bass …; the sequence of chords to a group of strings and other times to Opus orchestrator). The result is very interesting. Too bad at Ableton and Reason it’s so hard to do this if you don’t buy Patchwork. Fortunately, my friend Rabbit Composer (greetings Claudio) gave me Reaper, and there you can do all this, adding tracks and channels as you want.
I will continue to investigate and try to make a video, although it is difficult, since Opus needs ASIO and my video editing program also; so I make videos that don’t sound, hehehe

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I like your take! My own thoughts and experience are pretty similar.

As a kind of disclaimer: my use of all these MIDI tools (the “music theory plugins”) has to do with my longterm (entirely self-funded and very slow) ethnographic field research in #MusicTech. I tend to buy those plugins and play with them to explore what forms of music “theory” is behind them.

I’m also trying to find (or eventually contribute to building) the optimal MIDI tool for my musicking. So far, Scaler has been among my favourites. Some of the others are on iPadOS.

So, “W.A Production” Instacomposer…

I’ve almost never used WA’s two other Insta- plugins, partly because they’re too “pianocentric”. I could probably adapt them to the Launchpad 8x8 grid but that’d require more work than the value I derive from them. When I heard about -composer, I thought it could fit in my musicking.
And it does. It’s very different from -chord and -scale. Which might have to do with WA’s purchase of MIDIQ and such.
In some ways, IC’s similar to Audiomodern plugins. What IC produces satisfies me much less readily than it does Joshua, in that video. Still, it’s helped me build some harmonic/melodic patterns that I probably wouldn’t have created on my own. With some tweaking, those patterns could be the basis of something useful.

And all of these tools can work together, which is the beauty of MIDI.

In fact, it gave me some ideas for use of AI tools by Alphabet’s Google Research. On their own, those tools are hyped way out of proportion. Yet I could imagine running some patterns from Instacomposer in one of the Magenta tools to expand on them into something longer.

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no more :rabbit2: but Happy Composer now…
:wink: :grin:

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You should always try something for yourself. Your experience could vary widely for others.

Yes. I also like the Magenta tools. You can take many variations of the same track and choose the ones that suit you best.
Instacomposer bases its AI on the number of patterns in harmonic progressions, melodies, ostinatos, etc. I guess the more patterns are added, the more options there will be. In each track you can choose several things that make the result vary

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