By Jean-Marc Liotier
Mon Jan 15, 2024 2:14 pm
"Make something with a guitar+voice bedroom demo" challenge...
https://soundcloud.com/youshouldbeworki ... hoisit-pas
In early 2022, my friend Noks sent me a demo track with her voice & guitar, recorded in her room in Dakar on an old Android phone's onboard microphone. I tried chopping it and adding a beat, but only got the guitar riff: I failed to chop the voice mingled with the guitar. I let the project rest for almost two years and now in January 2024 I'm back at it.
What unlocked progress is Alexandre Défossez's Demucs (forked from Facebook Research since he left Meta), through the Stemroller front-end, whose stem extraction let me get separate guitar and voice tracks... Easy voice chopping into a drum program on the Akai MPC One, where I added the other ingredients:
- Kick drum & high hat from the MPC's Drumsynth's Wild Night preset
- Senegalese drum sampled from Dembe, by Boubacar Diagne (unauthorized)
- "Clean+funky" preset from the MPC's Air Organ's "Funk+reggae" collection
- "Rhodes tremolo" preset from the MPC's Air Stage EP
Effects (all are Akai Air):
- Guitar: Maximizer ("Clip catcher"), Enhancer ("More transparency"), Stereo Width ("Add width to mono signal")
- Voice: Limiter ("My input is too quiet"), Diff delay ("Room echo"), Compressor ("Peak grabber")
Typical MPC workflow (main loop buildup, then copy and substract instruments) with the voice then added to each section. The three-bar sequence length felt quite odd to me !
Also, I had no idea what scale Noks was playing in, so I fed ai-midi.com the guitar to find it's notes and deduce the scale I would play in... I believe it is A major and, even if it is not, that is what you have.
Stem separation and audio-to-MIDI - truly an AI-enabled production !
https://soundcloud.com/youshouldbeworki ... hoisit-pas
In early 2022, my friend Noks sent me a demo track with her voice & guitar, recorded in her room in Dakar on an old Android phone's onboard microphone. I tried chopping it and adding a beat, but only got the guitar riff: I failed to chop the voice mingled with the guitar. I let the project rest for almost two years and now in January 2024 I'm back at it.
What unlocked progress is Alexandre Défossez's Demucs (forked from Facebook Research since he left Meta), through the Stemroller front-end, whose stem extraction let me get separate guitar and voice tracks... Easy voice chopping into a drum program on the Akai MPC One, where I added the other ingredients:
- Kick drum & high hat from the MPC's Drumsynth's Wild Night preset
- Senegalese drum sampled from Dembe, by Boubacar Diagne (unauthorized)
- "Clean+funky" preset from the MPC's Air Organ's "Funk+reggae" collection
- "Rhodes tremolo" preset from the MPC's Air Stage EP
Effects (all are Akai Air):
- Guitar: Maximizer ("Clip catcher"), Enhancer ("More transparency"), Stereo Width ("Add width to mono signal")
- Voice: Limiter ("My input is too quiet"), Diff delay ("Room echo"), Compressor ("Peak grabber")
Typical MPC workflow (main loop buildup, then copy and substract instruments) with the voice then added to each section. The three-bar sequence length felt quite odd to me !
Also, I had no idea what scale Noks was playing in, so I fed ai-midi.com the guitar to find it's notes and deduce the scale I would play in... I believe it is A major and, even if it is not, that is what you have.
Stem separation and audio-to-MIDI - truly an AI-enabled production !