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Experiments with Ableton-MCP

jhurliman.org

21–22 of 22 posts

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#21

Excited to try batch renaming clips and batch warping in very large sets. Haven’t been able to figure out ways to automate these tedious tasks.

I set up my own Ableton MCP rig last year to do this. It works extremely well. I have had Claude organize, rename, colour, and prepare 100+ track songs for mixing. Unlike the OP I have not used it for any kind of creative use, although I did experiment with giving it access to my vst library and trying commands like "put a vocal compressor on the lead vox, with a high ratio and a fast attack", with absolutely terrible results.

The organizational and assistive ability though was/is outstanding, and using it in my own projects honestly made me sad that we're seeing AI integration everywhere that automates the creative work and leaves you with the tedious work. I don't expect we'll see AI updates to DAWs from vendors anytime soon with features like "speak into your mic and tell your DAW to group all the snares, color code them different shades of red, and rename them", but that's the part of the process I wish we were trying to get AI to tackle.

Re: Experiments with Ableton-MCP

#22
This is awesome! I started experimenting with LLMs and Ableton over the break too. I used a few off the shelf VST templates to create a VST that leverages an LLM that can create LilyPond format music. This creates multi track VST output (MIDI) from the parsed LilyPond. I have a system prompt that explains LilyPond to the LLM (it already knows anyhow), and then I give it a prompt like "Megaman, 64 bars, ice man level", and it pumps out 4-5 tracks of MIDI that is just what I asked for. I get nice sheet music on top of that.

I like this because I'm really in the creative process still, it feels like a tool like "Scaler" (nice tool btw) where you're picking origin notes, but really putting the song together yourself. It can suggest "Synth Bass" but I'm the one assigning it from one of my other VSTs sounds, mixing, picking, etc.. And if all goes well playing some lead on the guitar or seaboard and then deleting it all and starting over.

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