For producers at the top of their game, the unique sound that that they can gift to a track is their most valuable attribute, a precious commodity that artists will pay thousands – if not millions – to acquire.
In the age of AI music-making, however, you may not need to bring a producer into the studio to get their stamp on your music.
We're rapidly approaching a world where successful producers, engineers, musicians and even vocalists distil their talents into binary code by training AI models on their work, licensing these models to any old amateur that wants to inject a track with a little of their magic.
This is the concept behind generative music platform Lemonaide's latest AI model, which the company says captures the spirit of pioneering trap producer Lex Luger's musical style.
Known for his work with Kanye West, Jay-Z, Drake and Travis Scott, among others, Lex Luger is co-founder of the influential 808 Mafia production team and an architect of the Atlanta trap sound.
Once loaded into Lemonaide's Seeds app, Luger's model can generate melodies (as both MIDI and audio files) that recreate the Grammy-nominated producer's sound, right down to "the flow of his melody and chord choices" and "the bounce in his phrasing", which music-makers can then incorporate into their tracks.
Available as both a standalone app and VST/AU plugin, Seeds generates both chord sequences and melodies in a chosen key, outputting a choice of 4- and 8-bar MIDI and audio clips that can then be dropped into your DAW.
Alongside the basic model – which Lemonaide maintains was ethically trained on licensed material – Seeds users can make use of several additional Collab Club models for an additional fee, including models trained on the work of KXVI, DJ Pain 1, Mantra, Kato On the Track, and Lex Luger. BeatStars is selling Luger's model at a discounted launch price of $49.99.
Lemonaide says that the Collab Club models were trained on "thousands of different melody ideas" from each producer's catalogue and fine-tuned during a "robust feedback cycle" to ensure that the algorithm lands on a style that "truly captures the essence of their musical decisions".
All material generated by Seeds is royalty-free, but there's a catch. Once a track featuring any Lemonaide-generated MIDI or audio surpasses 1m streams or receives a "major placement", it'll be subject to additional licensing terms that aren't detailed on the company's website.
In a video shared to Lemonaide's YouTube channel, Luger surprisingly admitted that he was "afraid" of AI's potential. "I honestly love it, but a part of me is a little afraid of it," he said.
"I know that it's a human trait to be fearful of something that you don't have the most knowledge in. I need to educate myself on this. The more I educated myself on it, the more that I learned that this is a tool that can elevate me so much higher than I already am."
The idea behind Lemonaide's Collab Club is an intriguing one, but we're not convinced the technology's advanced enough to genuinely capture Luger's sound: the examples in the demo video are a little disappointing, to say the least.
Call us old-fashioned, but if you're hoping to emulate the sound of a specific producer or artist, you'd be better off using a sample pack, or better yet, studying their music closely and taking influence from their style in your own music-making.
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