Make music with an AI assistant

I make tracks by talking. I say “a beat at 90 BPM, kubyz on top, dark”, and the assistant opens a REAPER session, creates the tracks, loads the instruments, writes the notes and sets the mix. Then I listen, say what is wrong, and it changes it. My hands stay on the ideas.

Nothing here needs you to write code. You type sentences; the assistant runs the tools.

What it can do for you

• Build a session: tracks, instruments, effects, tempo, markers, a full arrangement.
• Play instruments: a wavetable synth, drums, a pad, a sampler and a Bashkir kubyz (jaw harp), all free and open source.
• Take notes off a recording: hum or play a line, get MIDI back, play it with any instrument.
• Split a song into stems: vocals, drums, bass, the rest. For remixes, mashups, karaoke.
• Mix by numbers: loudness (LUFS), peaks, the spectrum compared with a reference track. Not by the assistant’s ear, which it does not have.
• Take a reference apart: tempo, sections, sound layers of a track you like, then rebuild it.

What you need

• A Mac with Apple Silicon (Windows works for the plugins, not for everything else).
• REAPER: full trial, cheap licence.
• Claude Code: the assistant, with a Claude subscription.
• My plugins: SuperDuper DSP, 30 instruments and effects. Free, open source.

Setup, about 20 minutes

1. Plugins. Download the macOS zip from the latest release. Put the .clap files into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/CLAP/. In REAPER: Preferences → Plug-ins → Re-scan.
2. The kit. Download my music kit: the assistant’s instructions (“skills”) for REAPER, the plugins, stems, notes and mixing, plus everything I learned the hard way. The README inside walks through each step.
3. Connect the assistant to REAPER. The kit’s README has the commands. You run them once; after that REAPER shows “MCP Bridge started” and the assistant can drive it.

If a step fails, paste the error to the assistant and ask it to fix the setup. That works more often than you would expect.

How to talk to it

Plain sentences. The assistant picks the right skill on its own.

• “Make a 90 BPM beat in REAPER with our drums and a reese bass.”
• “Run my vocal through a chain and tell me how loud it is.”
• “Take the notes off this recording and play them on the pad.”
• “Cut the acapella out of this song.”
• “Put the vocal from track A on the beat from track B.”
• “Compare my mix with this reference: what is too loud?”

Ask it to explain what it did. Ask it to make it worse on purpose so you can hear the difference.

What it sounds like live

My own techno set on a rooftop in Chicago.

What I learned

• Check by numbers and by ear, never by the assistant’s word. It cannot hear. It can measure.
• Big arrangements go faster as a project file the assistant writes, than as hundreds of clicks it makes inside REAPER.
• When a rebuilt plugin does not change, restart REAPER. It keeps the old one loaded.
• Save often. The assistant can undo, but a crashed session is still a crashed session.

The technical side of all this is in project-superduper-dsp. The kubyz started as a phone app, project-kubizbeat. For the picture side, see creative-video-with-claude. Every skill, music and video, in one list: creative-skills.