If you have already made up your mind that AI music-making assistants are A Bad Thing then you might want to look away now, because LANDR has just announced two more of them.
Known as Blueprints and Layers, these are designed to assist at the ideas stage of music creation and to help you to develop those ideas into complete productions. How much heavy lifting you hand over to the AI is, of course, entirely up to you.
Both Blueprints and Layers incorporate multiple specialist AI models and were developed within what LANDR calls its “Fair Trade AI framework”. What this means, it says, is that “all models are trained on ethically sourced data from artists who opt in and are compensated for their contributions.”
As its name suggests, Blueprints is the songwriting assistant. This can generate multitrack song starters based on selectable musical parameters, such as genre, vocal style and instrumentation. As the creator, you can also provide lyrics and reference audio, and you can rework or replace any elements you’re not happy with. Once you’re satisfied, stems can be exported for use in any DAW.
There’s another option, though, which is to give your Blueprint project to Layers. Co-developed with Aiode, this can ‘listen’ to it (or, indeed, any other musical content) and augment it with any other parts you might want.
LANDR describes it as like having a roster of session musicians to call on whenever you need them, with different models covering guitar, bass, synths, horns, drums and more.
Layers can also take any sample or recording and turn it into a full stem that we’re told will work with any arrangement. “Any sample can now fit any song,” apparently.
With both apps having DAW-like interfaces and plenty of editing features, users will likely be able to convince themselves that they remain very much in charge when using Blueprints and Layers, but the jury’s out on how much satisfaction you’re going to get from ‘producing’ a song if you let them do the majority of the legwork.
Whether there’s a more creative middle ground, in which the AI is employed more sparingly, remains to be seen.
Blueprints is currently in closed beta, with wider access coming in February, and Layers is in public beta now. Both tools will eventually be included with a LANDR Studio subscription.
