With so many gig-playing musicians here, I though this might be of interest. It’s an AI-powered tool that can chew up a recorded synthesizer sound and spit out a preset that resembles it for the free synthesizer Vital. I could see a keyboard player running a song they need to cover through a stem-separating tool to isolate the keyboard part and then putting the part through this to give them a starting place for a synth patch they can play live.
Interesting, but will it be better thna a good pair of ears and a knowledge of synthesis?
I have always managed to recreate most sounds. The ones I have sometimes struggled with are Prophet 5 sounds where Polymod is in use
Some sounds are also hard when they are drenched in effects, but I have ways of getting past that.
But I am sure this would be of interest to some.
I’d say that depends on your “better”. If you want to actually know what you are doing, or you want to know how to make subtle changes to the patch to taste, then it’s probably not “better”. If all you need to do is get a synth sound set up so you can play Prince’s “1999” at a gig tomorrow, then maybe letting the software do the lifting is better. There’s a lot of gray area there, too - maybe you use it to get you in the ballpark, then like the kid in the video, you tweak until you get what you want. Or you use it to learn more about how Vital works - maybe by comparing the settings on the multiple presets to see if you can figure out what they’re doing.
Another thing that this can’t do (because it’s not designed to) is recreate some effect that you control using a continuous controller like the mod wheel. If you need that kind of control of the sound, you’re going to have to figure out how to do some of it yourself.
I fed it some wav samples I extracted from a YouTube video of the Behringer Solina. It didn’t replicate the Solina but the patches it came up with are interesting.