Harness the power of artificial intelligence to supercharge your music production skills with these smart tools.
Artificial intelligence is on the march, and starting to become more prevalent in our day to day lives. Here at Plugin Boutique, we stock a variety of plugins with AI power, as music production has a breadth of applications for this type of technology.
Mixing is an obvious area where AI can be helpful, particularly for beginner producers, as smart compressors, EQs and reverbs reduce guesswork and provide strong starting points from which further tweaks can be made. However, AI can also be applied in creative ways, and innovative developers are using it to build tape saturators, sample platforms and MIDI generators.
In this article we’ll take you through some of the most interesting, innovative and just plain cool AI plugins available on Plugin Boutique. We’ll be covering tools from the likes of Izotope, BABY Audio, Mastering The Mix and more.
Sonible smart:comp 2
Sonible are one of the leading developers in the artificial intelligence plugin realm. Their lineup of plugins all feature AI in their architecture and they have all received high praise for their unique design and functionality. Of particular note are the plugins included in the smart:bundle, a powerful quartet of mixing devices that perform very impressively and can be used as regular mixing plugins without AI if desired.
smart:comp 2 is Sonible’s most recent offering and it truly redefines what producers can expect from a modern digital compressor. smart:comp 2 has been trained on thousands of “well compressed” samples and as a result gives a very clear compression sound. In addition smart:comp 2 boasts spectral compression which gives it hundreds of compression bands for even more clarity.
BABY Audio TAIP
Tape plugins are nothing new, but tape plugins with AI baked in? That’s something that we hadn’t seen before BABY Audio delivered TAIP in 2021. The New York-based developer have become particularly known for their very attractive looking creative effects such as Super VHS and Spaced Out, as well as their Oeksound Soothe competitor Smooth Operator.
TAIP was trained on dry audio and audio processed through tape machines to decipher the differing characteristics, which enables TAIP to then apply its learnings to audio in your DAW. It’s a unique marriage of cutting edge digital and old-school analogue technology which yields excellent results, and displays one of the more unique uses of artificial intelligence in the Plugin Boutique marketplace.
EVAbeat Melody Sauce 2
So far we’ve discussed plugins that use AI to make audio-related decisions. Melody Sauce from evaBeat takes a different approach, using artificial intelligence to create MIDI melodies for you based on the existing elements in the project you’re working on.
To ensure it pens the correct type of melodies for your music, Melody Sauce allows users to specify the genre they’re working in, be it hip hop, trap, EDM, house, techno, reggaeton, or R&B. Once the plugin has written a melody for you you can add a human touch with the advanced editor and make as many tweaks to it as you like.
Melody Sauce is a powerful composition tool that’s capable of writing millions of unique melodies, making it a constant source of inspiration. If you love to produce but aren’t too musically savvy then evaBeat will be a great addition to your plugin folder.
Loopcloud DRUM and PLAY
Loopcloud has long been regarded as one of the best sample subscription services out there, and comes with an innovative plugin suite, featuring the beatmaking and melodic tools DRUM and PLAY. Last year, with the launch of Loopcloud 6, AI technology came to the fore in the application’s sample searching abilities, courtesy of the AI wizards over at Jamahook.
The Jamahook technology embedded in Loopcloud selects complimentary samples based on several characteristics: mood, tempo, key, genre, and instrumentation. If you come across a sample that you like within Loopcloud’s extensive sound library, you can instruct the software to find similar sounds. The AI technology will then analyse your selected sample and find a selection of sounds that work well with it.
Seeing as PLAY and DRUM are integrated with the wider Loopcloud sample universe, this enhances their status as uniquely creative tools that benefit from access to a large sound library.
Audiomodern Random Generators Bundle
The Random Generators Bundle from Audiomodern is an AI-assisted powerhouse. Containing seven tools – Loopmix, Chordjam, Playbeat, Riffer, Filterstep, Gatelab and Panflow – each plugin in the bundle utilises AI in a different context, showing just how impactful the technology can be on music production.
Loopmix mangles and remixes your stems into an infinite number of reconfigurations; Chordjam builds chord progressions using user-guided randomisation; Playbeat is a smart beat pattern generator; Riffer uses AI to create melody patterns; Filterstep creates random filter patterns; Gateflow is a gate pattern generator; and Panflow is a stereo rhythm generator.
All in all, it’s an intriguing mix of MIDI generators, audio editors and effects sequence generators that provides a wide range of use cases for AI in plugins.
iZotope Neutron 4
Up next is a powerful mixing suite that comes with eight modules (which can also be used as standalone plugins) and a relay and tonal balance plugins. iZotope utilised AI power in previous iterations of Neutron 4, via the Mix Assistant feature, but Neutron 4 goes one step further with the new Assistant View.
With Assistant View, users can teach Neutron 4 the spectral profile of their track or particular element that they would like to achieve. For example, if there is a particular kick sound from a well known track that you would like to emulate, you can load that kick into Neutron 4. The plugin achieves the desired spectral balance using tried and tested technology from its Sculptor module.
Assistant View can also add punch, distortion and width to your sound automatically, and with the assistance of the AI you don’t have to be a mixing expert to get there. Of course, you can still wield control over what the plugin does by altering Neutron’s AI suggested parameter settings in Detailed View.
Mastering The Mix MIXROOM
Mastering The Mix have a much loved selection of mix focused AI powered plugins, but perhaps their most popular is MIXROOM. MIXROOM is an intelligent EQ which analyzes your audio and indicates where changes can be made to maximise clarity and richness. It works wonders on both individual channels, and on the master bus.
Taking tips from Mastering The Mix's very popular referencing plugin Reference 2, users can import reference tracks to match the tonal quality of professionally mixed and mastered audio song files. MIXROOM also has full mid/side functionality and comes with plenty of presets for both individual instrument channels and for mixing and mastering.
Zynaptiq ADAPTIVERB
Utilising an AI technique “similar to the technology that enables self-driving cars to avoid collisions” Zynaptiq ADAPTIVERB provides reflectionless reverberation which serves to not mask the source material at all or perceptually set it back in the mix. Instead, ADAPTIVERB focuses on creating lush harmonic tails and harmonic richness – its primary purpose is to boost musicality rather than to create a sense of space.
The AI engine under ADAPTIVERB’s hood synthesizes a reverb tail using hundreds of oscillators. The oscillators recreate only the harmonic parts of the source sound meaning that transients and unpitched sounds are not included in the reverb tails at all. This gives a uniquely musical reverb tail that is very well suited for sound design purposes – your ambient soundscapes will never be the same.
Izotope RX 10
The second iZotope offering on our list, no AI-inspired plugin roundup would be complete without giving RX 10 a mention. Though RX 10 has an extensive list of features – perhaps most notably its stem separation abilities – one of the most interesting AI-focused features that was introduced in version 10 is the Repair Assistant Plugin.
The new Repair Assistant Plugin uses machine learning to identify audio issues in your source audio and intelligently create a chain of audio repair tools to deal with the issue. The parameters of the modules in the chain can then be altered to get the precise sound you want. For a task like audio repair, which can often be laborious and time consuming, being able to rely on the AI to carry out the legwork is a huge benefit.
