- TemPolor Melo-D guitar promises to create entire songs by singing or playing a melody, using AI
- Auto-generated backing tracks and guitar tabs too
- $349 for early birds on Kickstarter
Have you ever wished you could use AI to help you play guitar and compose songs? Melo-D promises to do just that. It claims to be the “world’s first generative AI guitar” and can turn your musical ideas into complete tracks. He will even do the singing for you.
The Melo-D looks like a Guitar Hero controller and works in much the same way as many MIDI guitars. It has a neck modeled after real guitars with colored LEDs on the top to show you where to put your fingers if you’re learning to play, and there are six string-shaped paddles so you can play with your fingers or strum. There’s a flip screen to control it and a companion app for your phone.
You can use this app to generate songs, for example by singing a melody and asking the app to turn it into notes, which it will then show you on the Melo-D so you can play what you sang. And it can generate backing tracks, turn your notes into piano chords, or even add AI vocals.
Melo-D also uses generative AI to create tablature – the little grids that show players where to place their fingers for each chord; upload a song and the AI will transform it into tablature that you can then play on your guitar. This makes it really useful for beginners, and that’s bad news for guitar tab websites.
This is all very clever and with an early bird price of $379, it’s not too expensive either.
But the big question about any AI music generation tool is whether it is ethical…
Is generative AI good for musicians?
There’s a huge debate in music about generative AI, and not just because of the lack of AI in streaming services. As with other art forms, many musicians have had their music used without consent or payment to train AI datasets for companies who then profit from their work. So if you care about musicians besides making music, it’s important to know Or the AI draws its musical knowledge.
I asked TemPolor, the creator of Melo-D as well as the Tunee AI service, and he told me that the guitar uses its own TemPolor platform, based on royalty-free music. Royalty-free music refers to music such as public domain, Creative Commons-licensed music, and library music that you can use without paying for a license. The music you make with the Melo-D is therefore royalty-free.
However, this doesn’t appear to be the only dataset here. TemPolor’s Melo-D FAQ states that “we optimize our AI music features using a combination of our own models and selecting the best third-party AI models, chosen based on the creative scenario to ensure the highest output quality.” »
The same company’s Tunee service is a multi-agent platform featuring models who have already been sued by artists alleging copyright infringement.
It’s enough to make me think. As much as I want everyone to experience the joy of making music, I also want my favorite musicians to be able to pay the rent, and there’s enough ambiguity in TemPolar’s fine print that I’m not sure I feel ethically free and clear using its AI.
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