Developer James Skripchuk has created a new site, This Patch Does Not Exist, that uses AI to generate banks of patches for Synth1.
Here’s what he has to say about it:
“Synth1 was one of the first plugins I downloaded when starting to make music. Its versatility lies in its simplicity – and a massive collection of user generated presets. So as a CS person who’s interested in the fusion of machine learning and music, who could ask for a better dataset?
This project was heavily inspired by Nintorac’s This DX7 Cartridge Does Not Exist. Make sure to check that out also!
I used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which is essentially making two neural networks fight against each other for our own benefit.
The AI is made up of two parts, a generator and a discriminator. The discriminator learns to detect whether a given preset is fake or not, while the generator learns how to fool the discriminator. Over time, the discriminator gets better at detecting fakes, while the generator gets better at generating fakes. At the end, the generator ends up producing pretty convincing fakes, which are then sent to you!
The names are generated from a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based off of the synth parameters. There’s a lot of duplicates however, further training and model finagling is needed.”
You can preview examples of the AI-generated patches below:
See the site for details.
Interesting sound example! James did a great job here. Random patch generators are one of the best tools around for acquiring better sounds. It makes a huge difference if you know the synth well enough to massage them into better shape, but many of the raw results are playable as-is. Its sci-fi easy to build a huge softsynth rig from just freeware now.
Next we need advanced AI to update Synth1 to be compatible with the latest MacOS
Wait, what? Yeah, that should be a thing. When will it be a thing?
If only AI were able to finally come up with a nicer GUI for Synth1…. 😉
There was a really sweet Photoshop mockup floating around a couple of years ago, but alas, sadly it was just that – an awesome mockup, far from an actual skin.
I could not agree more. I’ve been using Synth1 since 2003 I think. And yep–it is perhaps the ugliest gui ever created. It’s also one of the greatest synths ever. How can we fix this? Does it have to come from Daichi himself?
He was a member at KVR at one point IRC. Coincidentally that’s also were I saw said beautiful Photoshop mockup for the first time.
So… Yes!
Amazing! I downloaded just one zip file of an AI bank and I am truly impressed. 95% of the patches are instantly playable and actually useful. They are even named somewhat properly and grouped into similar instruments. I am impressed.
Re. The GUI…
If someone with the tools / skills could mock-up something in either ctrlr or MIDIControler, that would be nice.
How can I load the banks in synth1? It says always cant read the zip file…