[stillpointlab]

I really hope we move on from these boil-the-ocean models. I want something more collaborative and even iterative.

I was having a conversation with a former bandmate. He was talking about a bunch of songs he is working on. He can play guitar, a bit of bass and can sing. That leaves drums. He wants a model where he can upload a demo and it either returns a stem for a drum track or just combines his demo with some drums.

Right now these models are more like slot machines than tools. If you have the money and the time/patience, perhaps you can do something with it. But I am looking forward to when we start getting collaborative, interactive and iterative models.

[krat0sprakhar]

Very well said. I'm in the same boat. I'd love AI to write down a drum groove or a drum fill based on my guitar riff.

Currently, all these AI tools generate the whole song which I'm not at all interested in given songwriting is so much fun

[viccis]

RIP session musicians if that ever comes to pass, which is one of the main ways to make money if you are a good drummer.

[nartho]

Most VST drum sequencers have pretty powerful groove libraries nowadays. It's not a model or anything like that but just mix-matching and modifying the patterns some give extremely good results

[betterhealth12]

do you have a point of view of this type of collaborative approach applied to other areas, for example, collective understanding for groups of people? We are working on something in that space.

[stillpointlab]

The amount I have to say on this topic would be inappropriate for a Hacker News comment. But some brief and unstructured thoughts I can offer.

For collaboration I believe that _lineage_ is important. Not just a one-shot output artifact but a series of outputs connected in some kind of connected graph. It is the difference between a single intervention/change vs. a _process_. This provides a record which can act as an audit trail. In this "lineage" as I would call it, there are conversations with LLMs (prompts + context) and there are outputs.

Let's imagine the original topic, audio, with the understanding that the abstract idea could apply to anything (including mental health). I have a conversation with an LLM about some melodic ideas and the output is a score. I take the score and add it as context to a new conversation with an LLM and the output is a demo. I take the demo and the score then add it to a new conversation with an LLM and the output is a rhythm section. etc.

What we are describing here is an evolving _process_ of collaboration. We change our view from "I did this one thing, here is the result" to "I am _doing_ this set of things over time".

The output of that "doing" is literally a graph. You have multiple inputs to each node (conversation/context) which can be traced back to initial "seed" elements.

From a collaborative perspective, each node in this graph is somewhat independent. One person can create the score. Another person can take the score and create a demo. etc.

[amohn9]

Suno can already do that

[pacifika]

I’d recommend GarageBand for this.

[stillpointlab]

I haven't used the virtual drummer feature of GarageBand recently, but my experience with it was pretty disappointing. The output sounds very midi or like the most basic loops.

I believe there is massive room for improvement over what is currently available.

However, my larger point isn't "I want to do this one particular thing" and rather: I wish the music model companies would divert some attention away from "prompt a complete song in one shot" and towards "provide tools to iteratively improve songs in collaboration with a musician/producer".