I magine the scene: you’re opening your DAW, and you’ve got a clear idea of the track you’d like to make. Firstly, you want to recreate the drum sounds you’ve heard in a classic Aphex Twin tune, but can’t find the right samples anywhere. You’re hoping to pair those with a pad sound that you can’t quite manage to design, but you can imagine vividly in your head. Finally, you have a set of bassline loops that you’re keen on, but you want to explore some new variations on their timbre and style.
Now imagine that you open up a plugin and type in a prompt, like “16 drum samples that sound like the drums in Aphex Twin’s and it instantly generates a set of samples that share a resemblance with the song that inspired you. Next, you simply type into the plugin window a description of the pad that you’ve imagined. “Pad sound, atmospheric and ethereal, with shimmering high frequencies and a long reverb tail, slightly detuned”: voilà, it’s generated a multisample that matches your specifications and is ready to be loaded into a sampler. Finally, you drag and drop those bass samples you liked into the plugin, and it spits out a selection of alternative loops that share the sonic DNA of the original sound. In just a few minutes’ time, with a few brief
